It’s an alright game, but man, it’s a huge step down from the original and even Miles Morales in every aspect (except traversal, web wings rule).

The biggest letdown has to be the story. The first game's story works because the characters are believable and the emotional moments hit. A bit less for MM, but still true. The characters in this game are so fucking BORING. They’re all perfect, normal people, with zero edge to them whatsoever. Peter and MJ feel like they have a history in the original. In this, Peter and Harry don’t feel like lifelong friends, they feel like they met in this game. Miles is really the only character that has an arc that doesn’t feel contrived and manufactured, but he’s basically relegated to side character in favor of the boring as shit peter/harry plotline. It doesn’t help that it’s impossible to get attached to these characters considering they change one every game. The character models in the 2018 original were pretty much perfect, and now, two games in, two of the main characters just look completely different. The two main villains feel so wasted as well: Kraven never even “hunts” either character (literally his namesake) and does most of his supervillain hunting offscreen. (Also why does he have a giant, high-tech army with robot dogs and birds? Ohh, right because we’re playing a video game!) Venom only appears towards the end of the game. The past villains are handled far better. Martin Li is the most interesting character in the whole game, and it’s cool to see old villains like Tombstone and Prowler not be villainous. Perhaps all of this is because of the faster pacing, but even then, the story is so straight forward. If you’ve played the first game and seen the marketing, you probably could’ve guessed about 90% of the plot. Zero twists, zero unexpected inclusions.

Combat suffers as well. It’s hugely dumbed down: enemy variety is almost non-existent. There are three different “factions” and they fight almost exactly the same. Enemies like gatling gun/jetpack goons that added some spice are gone. The biggest issue is that there are too many special moves. By the end of the game, each character has four abilities, four gadgets, an ultimate ability, and all of these build up a “finisher bar” which lets you OHKO enemies. All of these recharge so fast and so easily that I was clearing the last bits of side content using ONLY these, without having to use the actual melee attacks at all. This is side content that takes multiple minutes to complete, while playing on the hardest difficulty. On top of that, they added a parry. Cool idea, but it’s wildly overtuned, rewarding you heavily for hitting it (it's kind of hard not to, considering the red flashing light that tells you "hey pal, this is the exact moment to parry!"), and barely punishing you for missing it. The only time you shouldn’t use a parry is when the other bright flashing light, blue, appears. Every boss fight is reduced to this cycle of parrying, spamming abilities/gadgets, and dodging when you see the occasional blue light.

In a game that cuts a lot of the fat off of SM1, you'd think they would cut all those boring missions where you don't play as the Spider-Men. You'd be wrong. MJ missions are back, and potentially even worse. MJ/Miles missions in the first game weren’t good but they were at least very linear. The path forward was often so obvious that I found it hard to hate them. Here, they gave MJ some new moves which actually make the missions worse because they’re more open in terms of design rather than the obvious linearity of SM1. Also, she’s basically John Wick. She takes down entire groups of hunters with a taser. She one-shots symbiotes with a tiny sound gun. The dissonance of playing as MJ and straight up obliterating symbiotes and then switching to Peter or Miles and having to beat a single one relentlessly is hilarious.

Rapid fire complaints that don’t warrant a full paragraph: the game is buggy. Multiple times I had to restart because an enemy got stuck in a wall or the objective wouldn’t complete. So many features from the previous games are missing entirely, like the social media feed, character bios, podcast archives, new game plus, etc. Miles' final suit really is that bad, made even worse since it’s obvious advertising. The Danikast is annoying, pretentious, preachy garbage. She is so consistently right about things she should have no information on that it borders on omniscience.