Everyone is able to wear a mask!
Here is Marvel's Spider-Man 2 seeing the light after waiting almost two years, we had the opportunity to get our hands on the most important exclusivity of the PS5 platform of this year. An experience that has won wide controversy based on expectations, including the aversion to repeating the same title, and there is certainly a new experience since the 2018 Part, which we loved with all its fun and surprises, passing through the events of “Miles Morales” youth until now... and today I have come to put my pen to see how much fun this experience has reached.
Developer: Insomniac Games publisher: Sony Game Rating: Action & Adventure, slaughter & slash (Hack N Slash) platforms: (PS5) release date: October 20-2023. Launch price:$69.99. Revision version: (PS5).
The team of spiders is flying at once!
New York City now has two famous spiders "Peter Parker” and "Miles Morales", a team that is engaged in providing everything that it can and in most cases, and this is what makes them compatible with being completely different in character formation, with different ideas and social intelligence.
The events begin with the duo accompanied by "Mary Jane” and "Janki" as information suppliers for both, but this time the city is waging all the expected and unexpected dangers that turn upside down.
With the appearance of the main villain “Kraven the Hunter”, we see the city as if in a mad cow state, an endless army of mercenary hunters with hidden hideouts in different parts of New York with a full focus on hunting all the monsters of the city, whether imprisoned or free to dispose of all the abilities or limbs and things like that, Spider-Men are not the main target in this suicidal operation of the army of “Kraven” but obstruct all their plans so getting rid of them is the perfect solution for “Kraven”.
With both “Peter” and ”Miles” trying to calm the situation every time he wants to implement his plan, Harry's friend reappears in the life of “Peter Parker” and “Mary Jane”, which is a big surprise, but as the situation develops, the clock turns to be the reason in one way or another for the appearance of the archenemy of Spider-Man ”Venom”.
The game has become more gloomy than the previous two parts, but it provided a lot of surprises that are waiting for Spider-Man fans and fans of superhero games, all I will say commenting on this point is “wait and see”. But to reassure everyone, the game is considered like the first part in the number of hours, unlike the title “Miles Morales", which was considered a story expansion.
Human relations.. An important point is firmly knitted!
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 not only focuses on the action aspect, but often pours its focus on the journey of finding oneself . whether for “Peter” or “Miles”, is “miles” confident in his abilities and is he able to face challenges? Also, the opposite is true for “Peter”, as he often plays the role of a mentor due to his seniority. Human relationships are something where the game focused on the heroes of the game in various ways and with different branches that I did not expect to be so intense this time.
Flying and swinging became fun stages
The Spider-Man 2018 game suffered from a big problem, which is swinging in the city, personally I do not deny the pleasure of swinging in this new suit, but with time it becomes more boring and because of the smallness of the city it becomes somewhat frustrating, and this is what the Spider-Man: Miles Morales game suffered on the same. The problem was addressed in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 with mesh wings with a more fun flight with new movements and a city that is about twice as big.
The net wings provided an immersive freedom of movement in the city, and with the presence of the most iconic places now and the ability to cross the sea and the most famous bridge in New York either by flying or swinging with nets, this made the game a completely different flavor and brought back the feeling of the old Spider-Man Ultimate Spider-Man game released in 2005 with swing mechanisms that may be the most realistic in terms of physics at that time.
In general, the new method of swinging and net Wings added a great variety to navigate the city and I didn't even turn at once to the quick map navigation feature unlike previous games, and although flying with net Wings seems strange at first, we didn't take more than a few minutes to get used to it.
Fighting style and skill tree
The fighting in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has greatly improved, with the abilities that every Spider-Man has now, Peter Parker now has 4 moves to choose from during the battle and four tools to help in the fight and similarly for “Miles Morales” with different abilities, of course, because “Miles” has electric charges capable of helping him in the fight greatly, these movements made the fights very enthusiastic and the game did not reduce their use, it may be a little repetitive due to the many waves of enemies and this drawback has bothered me in the fight to some extent.
Speaking of abilities and skills, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has a great skill tree that has focused on multiple aspects, and as for it being a game that offers a mainly anecdotal experience, the skill tree served the game well and fulfilled its purpose, the symbiote had a very elaborate addition in the skill tree that made it come to life.
If you are unfamiliar with this mechanism, it was amazingly presented in the Resident Evil 4 Remake game, which allows you to exceptionally repel attacks to eliminate enemies (such as Leon when he repels attacks with a knife), taking into account the balancing of the QTE system in the cinematic scenes, and I noticed that the QTE in the game is a little and not as much as in the first part, for example.
The symbiote suit, a dream come back again!
The symbiote suit appeared in the world of Spider-Man games for the first time fully in the Spider-Man Web of Shadows game, and since then we have not had another great experience with it, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has fulfilled this dream anew with an immersive experience of the symbiote suit and its unique abilities, and undoubtedly is the best symbiote suit experience ever.
The game introduced 4 unique abilities with a skill tree completely specific to the suit, which gave a great dynamic to the development of the suit and coexist with it as one of Peter's main suits, the style of the suit itself changed from the fighting style that became more violent and rough than the regular suit. The net wings become more rapid in the difficult times for "Peter", and far from the suit's style of fighting, it has transformed the character of Peter, of course, and created a new axis of events that has ignited it with all its might, this suit carries crazy surprises in Spider-Man 2 that I shouldn't spoil for you in the review.
Inspired by Marvel Comics
Most Spider-Man games do not dare to present plots from comics, and Ultimate Spider-Man is the most daring game to present characters and events completely inspired by comics, as this represents a great boldness from the developer because the audience in the gaming industry wants to feel the feelings of the protagonist of the cinematic movie always. The game Spiderman 2 has given a lot to fans of comics in a very distinctive style.
Introduced Villains, battles and even new teammates suddenly appear from the comics, and although Marvel did not mention these parts in its announcements, they created big surprises in the events of the story. The comics have particularly influenced the suits present in the game and the modding of the suits with dozens of them from within the comics, Motion Pictures and more.
If you ask me about the characters expected to appear in the game from comics, then, of course, like any part, the game has introduced unique characters, but it has become a little different because even with the most famous villains from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Insomniac studio has dared to present them in a more dark and more comic style, and this puts the game in different strengths, both for fans of the cinematic style of games, and for fans of comics, and of course Marvel fans in general, who will be very surprised.
Boss battles are brutal in every sense of the word
Studio Insomniac presented boss battles full of innovation, brutality, spectacular and familiar cinematic scenes from Sony games. As usual, the game opens the first stage with a boss showdown. The bosses also present a different drama on the level of movie scenes. And for a moment I feel like watching the movie “Spider-Man” from the magnificence of the execution of these scenes with brilliant visual direction.
Open world and side quests
As I mentioned above, Spiderman 2 was able to offer twice the size of the previous map. And this means completely new activities and new challenges such as shooting architecture and mysterious “Mysterio” missions around the world. The variety of side quests gave great value to the open world of the game and its quality was really good. The experience of side missions also differs between” Peter Parker “ and ”Miles Morales". These are some of the touches that give more value to a game that is largely story-driven.
The game has some iconic areas such as the amusement park and games area that masterfully mixed lighting and decorations. Which created feelings full of vitality and life, with absolutely dazzling details.
Photo Mode (Photo Mode)
As usual, the shooting mode or Photo Mode is considered the best among superhero games. Because of the great freedom it offers with a lot of filters and adjustments that can be added on the photo and make it come to life.
graphics and techniques
When I watched the first demo of the gameplay in the early summer of this year, I had as many concerns about the quality of the graphics in the game as many players. But in fact these fears represent absolutely nothing, because the game made a significant shift in graphics. You may not notice how heavy this graphic upgrade is, but when you go back to the past parts, you will notice the drastic drop in graphics.
The city itself has such areas as "Times Square" and the famous New York bridge, which is illuminated at night. The city of "Queens", which is located under the sunbed, makes the succession of day and night something that is expected for me as a player. Ray tracing made the reflections as realistic as possible and thanks to the PS5's method of balancing graphics and frames together, all the modes were good and no mode was missing the ray tracing feature.
The acoustics of Spiderman 2 deserve praise, the game definitely has different sound modes for the TV, for speakers or headphones. Each of them has a different experience in sound transmission and, as usual, Sony excels in providing the acoustics of its games in a way that surpasses the competition with three-dimensional and surround sounds. Although my experience was on TV, the acoustics were very rich with the dualsense controller speaker interference making it a creamy experience.
DualSense technologies were brilliantly supported and added a special flavor for lovers of technologies such as haptic feedback and Adaptive Triggers, I generally personally enjoyed this amazing technical experience.
I want to talk about a more subtle aspect of visuals, namely the Textures or texture that fills the image with a lot of details.. In the photo mode I could get closer to the Spiderman in the photo and immediately noticed the huge details in the designs of suits and shoes.
The game provided wonderful and very tired animation graphics, the details of the movement of lips and facial expressions were filled with real emotions.. Something that the PS5, as usual, excels at presenting in the best possible way. But at the level of the developer and the animation department at the Insomniac studio gave tremendous efforts. The strikes, the flying, the knockout moves and how all of this connected together was amazing.
Features of the SSD in Marvel's Spider-Man 2
The PS5 proves its superior ability to load screens with the game, and you won't be able to close your eyes for two seconds to move between loading screens, (if you notice them at all). Navigation in my experience was smooth and virtually instantaneous, and this affected the experience of fast navigation on the map.. The fast navigation feature has become aptly named.
Arabic language support and dubbing
Fortunately, Spider-Man 2 comes with full support for the Arabic language, for menus, scripts, dialogues and dubbing. The menus have been translated with classical Arabic words, unlike the dubbing, which comes in the Egyptian dialect entirely... unfortunately, the dubbing suffers from the same problem, where the performance of the characters with the voice performers was completely lukewarm. And the dubbing frustrated me greatly, although the attempt of the vocal performer of Peter Parker is sometimes good.. And he remains the best of all vocal performers.
The biggest problem is that the text translation of the dialogues, which comes with a full translation in the Egyptian accent or “dialect " تظل this accent remains a hindrance for non-Egyptian players. He would have preferred PlayStation to take the step of fully translating the Arabic story to take into account players from all Arab countries. In any case, if you are weak in English, the translation and dubbing are useful, but they were not the best because of the choice of the Egyptian dialect.
Personally, as an Egyptian player, I enjoyed having my Egyptian accent in the game. But taking into account all the players, I think it will annoy some, but it remains a personal preference because there are a lot of Arab players who prefer the presence of the Egyptian dialect because of its humor and getting used to it from Disney cartoons and the like. Therefore, it may be a big point of difference at the time of the launch of the game.
The game's support for the Arabic language in general indicates the great efforts exerted on the region and its consideration not to put any scenes that are contrary to our society. But if you decide to put the English dubbing at any time, you will enjoy a lot the wonderful performance of the characters, especially the villain Venom, who always broadcasts horror when he appears.
The last word
Spider-Man 2 is an amazing experience that makes it one of the best games of 2023 and the undisputed best exclusive for Sony this year, the game has proven to be able to offer new elements both in gameplay, combat, and even surprises in the events that await its fans on the hottest of coals it's the new generation, gentlemen, and Spider-Man 2 presents it on a plate.
The pluses:
- A story with events full of action and excitement.
- Side quests have seen wholesale improvements over the past parts.
- Support for the sensory technology of the DualSense has become better.
- The graphics are absolutely stunning.
- The possibility of seeing distant details or “Draw Distance” more clearly than the past parts.
- The power of the PlayStation is shown in that the amount of moving objects in front of you is much more than the past parts, both distant and even close.
- The technical performance of the game was very smooth and stable, and the ray tracing mode was great both in accuracy and performance mode.
- The symbiote suit provided an exceptional and significant addition to the gameplay style.
- Swinging is more fun than ever in New York.
- The addition of the flying wings feature to Spider-Man suits is one of the most important elements that improved navigation within the game world.
- The English voice dubbing I lift her hat and on top of them is Venom.
- Great support for placing images in the game.
- Significant improvements to the fighting style and the addition of the Parry system
- Full Arabic language support.
Cons:
- Some redundancy in the encounters of enemies and quests.
- Translation of dialogues in the Egyptian dialect is a negative point for a large category of players.
Conclusion
9.5
Epic masterpiece
Spider-Man 2 presented high-caliber surprises, made it an unforgettable experience, and booked it a place among the best entertainment experiences of all time. Without a doubt, it is one of the best PlayStation exclusives. And in conclusion Spider-Man 2 is a masterpiece that all fans of the Marvel Universe have long been waiting for.
