Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Review: 4 Ups & 2 Downs

3. Gadgets Have Been Changed For The Better

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 brings a bevy of new toys for players to spice up traversal, combat, and stealth this time around - along with two new boroughs to explore in Queens and Brooklyn - refining what worked in Insomniac's previous two Spider-Man games and excising the stuff that mostly didn't.

Gadgets, for instance, have been completely dialed back this time around. As opposed to the first game's Iron Man-esque weapons locker, players will instead have just several gadgets to deploy in combat. This lessens the overall amount of noise on-screen and also prevents gadget spam from overcoming each encounter.

Reducing the number of gadgets available also places greater emphasis on the new abilities section and on Peter and Miles' respective skill trees, with certain abilities adding fresh wrinkles to experiment with in certain combat scenarios. For instance, while you can still hold triangle to web throw a given target into a piece of scenery, you can also unlock abilities that enable you to swing your chosen enemy left or right or bring them up in the air to slam them back to the ground.

This might seem insignificant in isolation, but smaller changes like these are emblematic of the new approach to combat in Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which forces you to think more carefully about how you tackle given enemy types, rather than just brute-forcing your way through each battle with an army of Spider-Bots.