Review: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

The follow up to 2018’s critically acclaimed, Marvel’s Spider-Man, is a game that manages to elevate what has come before it but unfortunately still retains some of the rough edges of its predecessor.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 launch title that was released near the end of 2020, It stars the titular character Miles Morales as he settles into his role as the new Spider-Man while Peter Parker is away on vacation.

The game mirrors the story as it follows on the groundwork laid out by the previous game with a tighter single-player campaign that cuts out a lot of the repetitiveness and is able to let loose compared to the higher stakes first entry. This leads to a shorter game that clocks in around the early teens which is shortened further when playing on a PlayStation 5 as fast travel and load times are almost instantaneous.

But even with the brisk play-time, you still can’t help but feel that the developers have gone back to the well one too many times as we deal with in-game situations that aren’t too dissimilar to each other. So a long marathon session with this game will feel repetitive very quickly.

The campaign has a structure similar to Marvel’s Spider-Man, you complete main missions which are broken up from time to time with breaks where you have the option to do side activities or stop crimes. The side missions and crime activities repurpose gameplay that you’ve already seen in the previous game, slightly remixed and one new collectible type is added to the game.

Advertisement

Combat and stealth scenarios are spiced up with Miles’s new venom and camouflage abilities. They are visually interesting to see and use compared to Peter’s repertoire of tools that he had at his disposal. Stealth sections are still very much trial and error until you find better tools or abilities later in the game that speed up the process ever so slightly. Thankfully, you still have the option to go in guns blazing for most of them.

Unfortunately, these stealth sections highlight a couple of the rough edges that the game inherits from its predecessor such as clumsy and unresponsive movements when you need to make small, fine adjustments or things like trying to crawl around the corner of walls or buildings which freak the camera out and the player moving back and forth trying to adjust. You are thus forced to make larger, sweeping actions instead of minor adjustments to minimize your frustrations.

The payoff for all this is a story that is one of the better Spider-Man stories created outside of comic books. Miles and his cast are very likable and even succeeds in allowing Peter Parker, who was seen as someone who had to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders in the previous game, to take up the mentor role and have a little bit more fun creating training scenarios for Miles. Miles definitely carves out his own section of the world and I hope that future games allow the developers to tell stories from both Peter and Miles.

Nearing the end of this review, we have to talk about the elephant in the room. The cost of the game. Costing $50/Rm210 and the short length of the game might turn people off. The game looks really good as a PlayStation 5 launch title and performance-wise the games runs smooth and the developers added a Performance RT mode that combines 60fps with some low level Ray-Tracing. But you can’t help but compare it with the PlayStation 4 version as well, which looks really good albeit running at only 30fps which forces you to ask yourself if this game is worth it on the PlayStation 5.

As the game is a little pricey and the remaster of the previous game costing consumers an additional $20 instead of being free. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you compare it to other games that have added PlayStation 5 upgrades for free. As of writing, you can’t even buy the remaster without buying Miles Morales first. Therefore, it feels very anti-consumer of Insomniac Games.

Therefore, I recommend that consumers wait for a sale and buy the PlayStation 4 version. Doing so nets you both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 version. If you were to buy the PlayStation 5 physical version, get the Ultimate Edition that includes the remaster of the first game as it doesn’t go on sale very often digitally.