Spider-Man 2 is great. It improves a lot about the gameplay of the original game and its mini sequel while delivering a well-told story that uses familiar elements from the comic books while remixing them in unfamiliar ways.

Insomniac knows how to get the most out of the PlayStation 5 and New York looks great and swinging and gliding your way through the streets and parks never gets old. Realtime reflections, awesome facial animations, dynamic finishing cameras, Spider-Man is one of the most impressive looking games I have played.

This game plays like the first one with a few important improvements. Navigation is improved, with more varied swinging and traversal animations (that are different between Peter and Miles) and a new gliding mode that makes navigating the city more varied and fun than in the first game. It feels like the swinging cares more about having something above you to swing from, but it ends up making things feel more intentional rather than frustrating and encourages you to leverage the freedom the glider provides.
Fighting is much the same as before -- less reactive, Arkham-style combat with a streamlined interface for using special abilities. However, Peter and Miles both increase their suite of tools and abilities (which are unique to each of them) over the course of the game, leading to combat that feels more expressive and characters that gain noticeably in power as you play, matching their arcs in the narrative well. It is never very difficult except against bosses, with a couple of examples of patterns you have to learn and weaknesses for you to exploit that feel good to win against.

The narrative is straightforward Spider-Man storytelling, with a couple of simultaneous plots that spin together in a satisfying way. Kraven starts as the main villain, replaced by Venom, with Mister Negative playing a very minor role throughout. For the most part I also enjoyed the writing itself with only a few forced moments that felt like weird, out of place plot drivers (Norman Osborn in particular).
Kraven has always been kind of dumb and he isn't less dumb here. They try to make him have some depth but there just isn't much to work with when it is just a guy who likes to hunt things. It doesn't hurt things too much though, and by the end he kind of feels like an unimportant side character to the main attraction.
Mister Negative works well, serving as the driver of Miles' development through the first two thirds of the game. This small arc is handled well and I liked seeing Miles deal with some shit on his own.
Venom is probably my favorite comic character and this is a cool twist that I thought worked. The main characters are well established and the game leverages Venom's unique properties of amplifying someone's worst desires to explore the fears and secrets of characters that are usually faultless (or at least paragons of good). It works really well and gives most of the fights some emotional stakes that land solidly. I love that Insomniac is willing to take Venom in a different direction here and love that they had the skill to weave a lot of the touchpoints you expect into the story in interesting ways that were fun, dynamic, and surprising.

Spider-Man 2 is fantastic and worth checking out for any fan of open world action games in this style.