Insomniac’s hot streak continues – this is clearly a studio at the very top of its game, churning out top-quality titles at a volume that almost makes no sense.

Spider-Man 2, its latest, is a polished and impressive superhero fable that covers familiar ground but does so with such assurance and expertise that you’ll have a great time rolling with it.

An expanded city

Spider-Man 2 is the first time in this new series that we’ve been able to control both Peter Parker and Miles Morales at the same time, and it opens with the two Spider-Men in harmony.

They’re struggling to balance their social lives, but crime-fighting is going swimmingly. Their joint efforts are evident in a swirling opening sequence against a massive Sandman invading downtown Manhattan, as you swap between the two refreshing your memory for the game’s controls and combat.

Sandman quickly blitzes off to Brooklyn, though, to let the game show off its significantly expanded scope – some of that borough and Queens have both been added to give a whole bunch of new neighbourhoods to swing around this time out.

With new web wings making gliding around (and shooting through wind tunnels) a really efficient way to move, it’s impressive how this bigger playing field feels like just the right amount of map, just as Manhattan did in the last two games.

A new map is paired with new villains, of course – this time around the instigator is Kraven the Hunter, who’s travelled to New York hoping to hunt the greatest prey of his life, without yet deciding just who that is.

He’s after supervillains at first, flushing out a variety of baddies that the Spider-Men had safely sealed behind bars, but it’s not long before Peter and Miles attract his attention.

Throw in that all-important Venom symbiote messing with things, and you’ve got a cocktail that doesn’t take things into wildly unpredictable territory, but nonetheless offers up some brilliant set-pieces as different heroes and villains come crashing into contact.

Insomniac’s ability to build a bombastic story mission is in the very top class at this point, and you can see its expertise with the PS5’s SSD coming to bear, as it swaps locations and makes huge jumps at the drop of a hat.

It’s thrilling stuff, but there are also some nice slower missions that do a good job of building character rapport and showing that Peter and Miles’ unmasked lives are also worth caring about.

New threats

Those web wings and the extended map are two of the bigger changes as you move around New York in Spider-Man 2, but there are tweaks all over the shop.

Combat has some nice new moves to offer up, especially in the second half of the game as you get access to more powers for each hero.

You’ve now got quite a lot of upgrades to manage, between skills for each hero and a shared pool of options, gadgets to build and their respective upgrades, and a huge wardrobe of new suits to collect, too.

Stealth also has one huge upgrade, in the form of a new ability that lets you shoot walkable web strings all over the place to create your own perches and ambush spots. It’s absolutely awesome, although it does slightly trivialise the difficulty of sneakier encounters by letting you paint your own canvas to hide in.

These side challenges are pretty easy to work through as the game goes along, though, and there are plenty of side activities to distract you as you go. From stealthy Hunter Base takedowns that are really familiar to new drone and puzzle mini games, these vary slightly in how engaging they are.

That said, even when they’re not that thrilling they’re still compulsively completable, and with only a handful of each mission types on offer, there’s certainly not an overwhelming amount of content here.

In fact, the one type of mission that I’d have happily taken plenty more of comes from the in-game Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man app, which sees citizens reaching out for help.

These are more touching, personal and inventive than the other more cookie-cutter activities, but with only five to find I was sad to find them so rare.

With combat that has a few new tweaks but feels fundamentally super familiar to anyone who’s played either of the first two Spider-Man games, then, it’s fair to say that Spider-Man 2 takes a “more of the same” approach. As it happens, that means “more of the same extremely high-quality content,” but I would have loved to see it take a few more risks.

Amazing spectacle

Still, for all that its fighting and exploring are fairly familiar, the visual flair shown by Spider-Man 2 is almost out of this world – Insomniac has had time to practice with PS5 releases, and it knocks this one out of the park.

New York is a gorgeous playground full of detail but huge in scale, with skyscrapers, parks, schools, libraries, docks and warehouses all oozing a personal touch that’s hard to fully credit given how big it is.

There are a bunch of visual modes to choose from for the tinkerers – a quality mode that turns all the ray-tracing bells and whistles on sits at 30FPS, while a 60FPS performance mode strips most of them back, but with a fancy display you have more options.

If your display supports VRR you can turn that on to move the quality mode’s target to an uncapped 40FPS, with VRR smoothing out any jumps or lags, and it really feels like a true best of both worlds.

This brings really consistently smooth frame rates, but also the highest-quality lighting and shadows, in a game that very much takes advantage of the PS5’s power, during story missions in particular.

Whether it’s the lights of Coney Island reflecting in puddles, or the glow of an ambulance hitting your suit, or the flecks of sand in the air while fighting Sandman, the details all just hit so effectively.

Each and every optional suit also has a pretty crazy amount of attention paid to it, and the fact that the game’s cut-scenes are all in-engine means that its exemplary photo mode can also be accessed at any moment, even when you’re not controlling anyone.

This is a perfect game to make the point that console exclusives really can push developers to optimise for a single system perfectly, and the results in Spider-Man 2 speak for themselves.

Verdict

Spider-Man 2 does exactly what it says on the tin, giving us more of Insomniac’s polished and shiny Spider-Man action to enjoy, in a bigger New York full of new threats. That it doesn’t feel drastically new is perhaps the slightest of disappointments, but this is still a licensed game of the very highest calibre and one that fans of the last couple of entries will have a blast with.