It’s perhaps difficult to grasp — especially for younger fans — how vibrant the legacy of Spider-Man, the world’s favourite web-crawler, is in video games. Over the years, we’ve come to know Spider-Man from his many incarnations in animated TV shows, films, and comic books. Sam Raimi’s take on the character propelled it to new heights of popularity. More recently, Spider-Man films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Sony Pictures’ Miles Morales animated features have established their own identity. But the web-swinging, quippy superhero has a long and illustrious history in video games, too. Before Rocksteady’s Arkham games rewrote the superhero games playbook, an iconic lineup of Spider-Man games from Activision were some of the best that the genre had to offer.
The Spider-Man mantle now resides with Insomniac Games, a studio that has proven its merit with beloved PlayStation icons like Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank. Its two Spider-Man games — 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man and 2020’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales — reworked and refined elements from previous Spider-Man titles to deliver highly polished Spider-Man stories that were a blast to play through. The seamless web-swinging mechanics, flowy combat, and the vast New York City playground made the two games a worthy and rewarding return for the friendly neighbourhood superhero in video games. Now, Insomniac is getting ready to bring Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5, promising everything that was good in the preceding games and a lot more that’s supposed to surpass what came before.
For starters, this time, it’s Spider-Men. Spider-Man 2 lets you play as both Peter Parker and Miles Morales, charting their interweaving personal journeys as they take on new threats together. The world is bigger, too, with an expanded New York City, almost double the size of the map we saw in the previous two games. There are new additions to combat and traversal, bringing fresh and distinct ideas that try and push this sequel beyond what we’ve come to expect from an Insomniac Spider-Man game. Of course, there are technical advancements that elevate the experience — this is the first Spider-Man game that is releasing only on the PS5, taking full advantage of Sony’s current-gen console. All of these come together to tell a complex and personal Spider-Man story, building upon the narratives we saw in Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
Insomniac Games’ Mike Fitzgerald on Spider-Man 2, Collaborating With Marvel, and the Studio’s Ambitions
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