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

3. Gadgets Have Been Changed For The Better

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Symbiote Gameplay
Sony Interactive Entertainment

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.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.