When I reviewed Spider-Man back in 2018 when it slung its way onto PS4, I gave it a near-perfect score of 9.5 out of 10. It was just so close to a perfect video game, only held back by a few annoying things like forced stealth missions that were super tedious and had no business disrupting the flow of the good stuff.
Reviewing the sequel five years later on the PS5, my colleague Paul Tassi is slightly less generous, giving Spider-Man 2 a still very respectable 8.5/10 (though it’s the kind of score that makes fanboys very, very angry). Paul’s biggest complaint about the game is its open world, which is filled with mini-games and busy work.
He writes:
Early on, you will immediately get overloaded with “points of interest” and little minigames that the game has doubled down on from last time. There are “science” games that have you splicing genes and decoding molecules and using bee drones to shoot down bad bees in order to increase the good bee population. Miles solves very basic puzzles from his reformed Prowler uncle conveniently using PS5 pressure triggers. Miles, at one point, also has a rhythm matching beat segment. But otherwise, it’s pretty standard fare, similar crimes to last time, fighting arenas, minibase takeovers.
IGN docks another .5 off its score, for an 8/10, writing:
As a sequel in a spectacular series, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is both blessed and cursed. Its story of two Spider-Men is a great time and a Spidey fan’s dream to play through as comic book pages are brought to life, elegantly walking the tightrope between light humour and heavier themes. Meanwhile, Insomniac refines a successful formula of combat and web-swinging without revolutionising either in major ways, making them comfy and familiar with just enough new tweaks and abilities to elevate them to fun new heights. The part that feels like it actually needed a radical rethinking is the open world of New York City, which has been made bigger but not better, with an exhausting checklist of mostly repetitious side activities.
I added emphasis to that last part, because it’s pretty much the exact thing that Paul said about the game. And frankly, “an exhausting checklist of mostly repetitious side activities” sounds, well, exhausting!
This is a complaint I’ve seen echoed by many reviewers, in one form or another, and it’s something that I think is important. I loved the first game, but the last thing a sequel needed was more open-world stuff to do, more boxes to tick, more repetitive objectives to overcome.
I know that for many people, having more is always better. Ah, we have a 20-hour game, but if we add 20 more hours of filler content and add in more open-world to explore, it will be better! Think Starfield with its thousands of empty, barren planets. More! More! More!
No!
Stop it. Please.
The only thing we need more of is quality. We need denser, higher-value content. Yes, we still need some open-world activities and the fun base-takeovers and all that, but we don’t need more of them. We need compelling stories and missions, awesome boss fights, great dialogue and performances. And yes, it sounds like all of that is in Spider-Man 2 as well, which is great, but does it really need to be baked into such a thick crust of filler?
Again, I’m sure the game is awesome and I’m sure I’m going to have a blast playing it just like I did when I played the first one. The combat was great, the web-slinging traversal was absolutely fantastic and I had a blast with the story. But there were tedious moments and some goofy missions that irked me. And just in general, I think I’ve really burned out on boilerplate open worlds.
I like to see innovation in this space like we got with Elden Ring or Ghost Of Tsushima or the new Zelda games. A game like Spider-Man 2 doesn’t need a bigger NYC, it just needs Queens and it doesn’t need a ton of mini-games, it needs a good story and top-notch combat and traversal mechanics.
I’m a big champion of semi-open world / semi-linear game design, because I think it’s fun to have some freedom but also that narrative momentum that drives the action and story along with some, but not too many, distractions (which are, let’s face it, Peter Parker’s weakness). And because time is precious and we don’t all have time to do all this open-world busy work.
I’ll end by noting that this is definitely personal preference and if you like all that other stuff, cool. You win because by and large, the industry is all about more and rarely about better. You win, I lose. C’est la vie.
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