Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review for PC

I’ve mentioned it before, but on the whole at Gaming Age we’re pretty big fans of the Marvel Spider-Man games. The first Spider-Man game was our GOTY in 2018, its sequel got the honours in 2023, and even if Spider-Man: Miles Morales didn’t quite give the series the GOTY trifecta, we still gave both the console and PC versions pretty glowing reviews (albeit moreso for the PC version than for the console version).

With that kind of site-wide love, you might expect that I’d have nothing but good things to say about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 now that it’s finally arrived on PC. And you’d be correct — to a point.

From a gameplay perspective, of course, pretty much everything Dustin wrote about the PS5 version still applies. Swinging around New York City is an absolute blast, and the addition of web wings – as well as many conveniently placed wind tunnels and ultra-powerful building exhaust vents – means you get to soar over the city as if you’re flying. The combat is also still very solid; while it may not break any new ground, Peter and Miles have their own moves, and switching back and forth between them helps keep everything fresh.

On a related note, Spider-Man 2 also does an excellent job of balancing its two main characters. Not only can you play as either of them, the game also weaves together their respective stories in a way that doesn’t give short shrift to either Miles or Peter.

So why the above caveat? Why say that Spider-Man 2 on PC is only good to a point? The problem lies with its performance, which can only be described as frustrating.

On some level, this is no surprise. It feels like big-budget AAA games always struggle at first on PC as the developers figure out how to optimize their games, and even if Nixxes have done another fine port job, the fact is that Spider-Man 2 is pretty demanding if you try to run it on its highest settings. This has led to plenty of reports of crashes and buffering, and while there have been a couple of patches already, it’s clear that anyone who wants to put the game to the test will probably need to wait for a few more.

That, however, isn’t my complaint. I opted to play the game on a GPD Win Mini (and, later, a Legion Go), which meant that I immediately lowered the settings to ensure that my handheld PCs didn’t explode. I wouldn’t say the resulting visuals were anything spectacular, but they were at least sufficient enough that the game looked like it should (save for some pop-in on the Legion Go, where I had to lower the graphics settings as low as they would go).

Rather, my problems with the game stem from some game-breaking glitch. Case in point: during the game’s epic opening battle with Sandman, he threw a building at me, and I didn’t dodge it in time. Rather than just suffering a loss of health, however, I somehow slid through the walls of the building and got stuck behind a bunch of invisible walls. I could still see Sandman, and he was still throwing items at me, and the game kept on running, but I couldn’t get out of the building. If I titled the camera a little, I could see the skeleton of the building around me, but I was forced to restart from the previous checkpoint to get beyond that snafu.

I’d like to say that this was an isolated occurrence, but…it wasn’t. There were a few other times where I had to pick up items, only for the game to refuse to allow it. In fact, that’s why I switched from the Win Mini to the Legion Go – there was a point early on where I had to crack open a rock, and the game simply wouldn’t allow me to do it. The fact it worked on one platform but not the other is weird, but it suggests that everyone’s experience with the game will be different – and, indeed, looking at Steam reviews, it’s clear that what works for some (or even most) people won’t necessarily work for everyone.

Which makes it difficult to recommend Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 quite yet. It’s undeniably a great game when it works, and everything that made it our GOTY a few years ago still stands. I’m sure the PC version will get there eventually, and when that happens it’ll be a must-play for anyone who loves big, open-world superhero games…but for now, you’re better off holding off, and giving the game a little more time to iron out the kinks.

PlayStation Publishing provided us with a Spider-Man 2 PC code for review purposes.