Spider-Man 2 Is A HUGE Disappointment

4. Side Content Is Largely Terrible

Speaking of the amount of things you could do in Spider-Man 1, one of the most enjoyable was combat hideouts to clear. Here only one faction - you guessed it, The Hunters - have them at all, and there are only a handful to track down.

No waves of enemies with an escalating threat, either - you just track down the location from smaller encounters, wipe everyone out and you're golden.

Outside of that, well... want to DJ in a club in something that feels like one of those weird Guitar Hero knockoffs from the late 2000s? How about walking around a construction site solving traversal puzzles, or spray-painting a design you can't see? Maybe opening a portion of a rooftop to grab an item ten-times over, or chasing down a flying drone in the same way, every single time?

Yeah, I thought it was a Spider-Man game too.

Spider-Man 2 does have a selection of properly "curated" side missions outside the copy n' paste open-world fare, but besides some fun eventual payoffs like who the leader of The Flame really is, or chasing down Mysterio, they're pedestrian to a fault. Sometimes the writing here still shines through, and shout out to helping an old man with his pigeons, or comforting another older gentleman who's wandered too far from his carer, but most of the time it's groan-worthy stuff.

Helping college students ask each other to prom, taking photographs from specific vantage points for an after-school club, or trying to track down some missing instruments for band practice - A Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man, sure, and that breadth of what two "Spider-Men" can accomplish should be felt, but factor in the repetition and discardable nature of the majority of tasks, and the bottom falls out of the whole thing.