MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2 - PC PORT
For: PC
From: Insomniac / Sony
Rating: ★★+
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL ROBERTSON
Continuing a long line of video games with chronologically confused numbering, Spider-Man 2 is actually the third in the Insomniac Spider-Man series, but fittingly is the second I’ve played on PC.
As is standard for modern PC ports, the game looks stunning, even on lower presets. Graphics settings are well varied and include several upscaling methods and frame generation for eking out those higher frame rates. Keyboard controls works just fine, but controller is definitely the better way here, especially with a DualSense controller from the PS5 bringing across the adaptive triggers and vibration.
That, sadly, was where my good experiences with this port ended.
I initially had some very jittery and laggy game-play, averaging around 20fps in the first mission. Disabling ray-tracing improved this to where I could run on the high preset at 60fps without performance issues for the rest of my time with this game.
I do have a computer that is well above the recommended settings; however there have been complaints about this from similarly specced computers, even on lower presets. I would advise caution if you are a few years behind the posted specs.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the performance that is having a rough time here. Often, characters will have a voiced line that just doesn’t play. Unfortunately, this happened during some rather more emotional moments in the story which, to put it lightly, wasn’t great. This has also happened with audio during combat. Nothing sucks more than a combat section with no combat noises.
Cutscenes are prone to freezing for a second or two, which unfortunately de-syncs the audio and causes the characters to also glitch out. This was not as insane as the last time, where I swear a character turned into a plant pot, but they do T-pose around, and it looks very funny. I’ve also come across several crashes - especially when finishing cutscenes - or in combat, where the game will freeze and then either crash or just remain frozen until you close it yourself in despondence.
There are definitely a lot of bugs to iron out here. Crashing is basically a dealbreaker, and the missing sounds effects and lines drag the entire experience down. Workarounds seem to exist for some common issues and patches seem to be coming out on a regular basis; however, my recommendation would be to hold off on this for now and have a look later when the Spider-Men are hopefully performing at their best.
