Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Miles Morales is somewhat of an odd choice to start with the Spiderman games, but it makes perfect sense for someone that is really burnout on ubisoft style open world games. Because as polished as the series is, it really boils down to a superhero game in a ubisoft open world. Being much shorter in lenght and focused in scope it was a much more appealing experience to me, and it was seemingly the right choice as I had a great time with this title.

The game features AAA quality animations and textures. It really manages to drive that fine line between photorealism, but also having very fluid and expressive combat animation to be expected out of a spiderman title. Audio design is also well done, even if there are some localization bugs (some language quips in combat are localized while others arent).

The story isnt really much to get surprised by, particularly if you already knew Miles Morales story. The shorter lenght allows it to have a much tigher pacing and focus on the main characters, and yet still develop side characters sufficiently. Miles is well characterized as a insecure teen coming into his own, and the dialogue and interactions with the others characters reflect that well enough.

The open world design is really what to be expected of ubisoft design by a non ubisoft company. There are way too many needless collectibles, repetitive side quests that arent fullfilling at all to complete. The best open world activities are the big enemy hideouts, that present themselves as the toughest challenges of the game. There are also a few well made sidequests that are worth pursuing, since they do add bits of flourishes to the characterization of the casts. You gain so much xp from the main quests that its really easy to avoid the side content if you arent interested. Even with fast travel available early on, its really fun transversing the open world through the use of web swings.

The combat for me was one of the strenghts of the title. It functions as a sort of combination between a DMC-like and a batman arkham game, taking the style grading, air combat and crowd combat from the former, with the generous autoaim, counter attack heavy and acessibility of the latter. In essence, there is some depth in here to discover for players interested in that aspect of the game, or you can just isolate enemies and counter everything. The game has a few action rpgs aspects that allow some builds to flourish according to playstyles. I will say that focusing on the venom powers makes the game feel broken once you unlock the nuclear power, which effectively kills everything in a large radius at the cost of all energy bars (that are very easy to fill up with the right build)

Overall this was a very fun title, with a concise story, great combat and decent side activities for its style of open world.

More of what made the original great, with a ton of cool additions to its already phenomenal combat. The story may not have been as ambitious or hard-hitting as the original game, but it is more than enough to make for a satisfying side adventure.

fantastic gameplay that improves upon the original in every way bogged down by some mid ass writing for miles unfortunately. still very fun and the bodega cat suit is forever legendary fr

I have two main criticisms of this game and though I have fairly in-depth thoughts on them, they don't take away from what is ultimately an extremely fun, heart-felt, compelling game with great combat, likeable and believable characters, stunning visuals, and a great soundtrack. I really, really enjoyed this thing - more than the first! Its much shorter than its predecessor but I liked that; the narrative had no fat.

The swinging isn't that good. It looks cool and its a better traversal tool than what a lot of other games have but its far from how good it could be. I think basically: its too easy to use, too forgiving. It looks like web swinging but it doesn't feel like web swinging and for a game that's so immersive from a character standpoint I think this is an issue. The gravity feels like you're on the moon so the swings have no weight, you can so easily change direction while both swinging and simply moving through the air, so shooting a web to swing on doesn't feel like any kind of commitment because wherever it lands you'll be able to go any direction. Again, it only looks like swinging. Also, it leans far too heavily into doing a big swing, leaping upwards, and then going into another swing. But I'd always got the impression from both Spider-Man comics and movies and also just common sense that the main way he swings is by shooting the next web before he's even done swinging on the current one, right? This is even how an AI intuits how web swinging works! Regardless of that specific technique, I feel there could be more variety to how Spider-Man goes about swinging, even if it were mostly visual. Though, the clumsiness behind Miles swinging does add a lot and is an improvement over Peter's swinging in the prior game. Also: tricks actually have a purpose now! Yippee!

The other problem, which isn't as serious as the other, is Phin. She's a great character, but doesn't make a great antagonist. Because, well, she's right and Miles is wrong - in my view: pretty unambiguously. You could argue that this is about Miles early days and he's naive and has an unrealistic sense of justice, and that is why its not as big a problem, because I'm playing as Miles not as me, so I can let it slide to an extent. But its such a big dissonance in viewpoint that it does take me out of the game a bit which feels to me to be pretty straightforwardly saying that Miles is doing the right thing. Phin's plan is to blow up a soon-to-be-but-not-currently public square with a toxic power source at its centre. Miles is outright against this, seeing purposeful destruction of any kind as unethical, but its not! Destruction of this property is a good idea and Phin is established to be incredibly intelligent and resourceful so I trust her to have calculated the explosion to not harm anyone. Miles is trying to convince her that this is a bad thing to do for quite a while and it maybe feels like he'll possibly accept he can't change her mind and he should look the other way, but instead the game just establishes that the main villain (who's great by the way but isn't Alan Tudyk, somehow) has made some last minute adjustment to the reactor that'll make the explosion destroy all of Harlem, not just the square. Its like the game even knew that Phin was kinda doing the right thing and had to invent a reason for it to be bad. Phin won't hear it when he starts trying to tell her because Miles has lied to her a bunch and has been trying to convince her not to do the whole time, so I don't blame her!

Ultimately though again, Miles is an imperfect character. He's a kid, and he's learning to be Spider-Man. And I guess ultimately he did, in a literal sense, save the day, even if it was more against plot contrivance than a realistic threat. And the final boss is incredibly satisfying gameplay-wise, and is accompanied by an incredible score.

The dialogue was sometimes eye-rolling and sometimes charming but that's to be expected from any Spiderman media. maybe I am still feeling the shock from the 2023 bombastic 2023 movie, Spiderman Across the Spider-verse (mwah masterpiece), or/and maybe its cause I'm not a fan of the recent videogame trend of making character animation so realistic that the characters look like a subpar wax statue, whatever the reason(s) is I know that I hate the way the characters look especially their face animation.

Hey this is still a solid 7 game so here are some points that I like, the gameplay is just as good as the first insomniac spider-man but with Mile morales powers(bio-electricity and invisibility) and they are executed really fucking well, they look great and the finisher animations are just perfect, especially with spider cat lmao. But with all that options you got to kick the same 4 groups of enemy types with the same 2-3 skins not only do you feel overwhelmed(like seriously who needs a tech that spawns HOLOGRAM ROBOTS THAT FIGHT, not me I can do my own ass-kicking I'm literally him) it also makes the gameplay really easy and I played the game with some dumb rules I made up- no gadgets, no finishers on easy opponents, etc- and I still came out on top. And it goes without saying I played on the highest difficulty of the 4 difficulties that the game allows you, the fifth one is unlocked once you completed the story mode which made things actually challenging.
and I don't want nobody saying "it's only easy for your video game addict loser ass", because not only I haven't played the first game in 3 years but also any games in months prior to this game so I'm, not an addicted loser I'm just a loser HA.

and as for my last compliment cause this review feels really negative, is the swinging mechanics its definitely not an upgrade but it's still stellar, and I couldn't get bored of swinging for hours on end and the random crime that pops out while your way to a location is at least for me is very welcomed.
And for the Main story, it's decent but it's struggled to establish the characters with its short runtime I can't really blame it since this feels like a 1.5 more than a sequel.

I know I criticized the game more than I praised it but I still think it's a great game with misses and few hits that really hits.

Arguably better than the first both for its brevity and for its more holistic approach to game design. Gone are the god-awful stealth and hacking minigames, and the combat system has been trimmed down to linear upgrades instead of constantly swapping equipment, but Miles has a couple more options at his disposal during combat to mix things up. On top of that, he does a lot less damage than Peter, so the combat has a more rough-and-tumble feel overall. It succeeds at bringing a different energy to the game despite mostly having the same mechanics, and thanks to better level design and optic camo, the stealth is a lot better too.

The story mostly succeeds at continuing the emotionally charged but mostly pulpy energy of the first game, but centering the game around Miles' unique background is a double-edged sword, lending the narrative some bite with regards to local community and the threat of white-bread gentrification and venture capitalism that threatens the fabric of what makes us human, and the value of family both in blood and without, but it also exposes the ultimate toothlessness of these themes when it can only go so far in threatening the power structures of blah blah blah. This kind of thing doesn't bother me often, it's just underlined here when we're expected to believe that the legal system is "the right way" to bring down these structures when the game itself highlights its flaws should the villain's plan to simply blow it up succeed. It's a microcosm of how the push for more diverse stories can give us more interesting ones, but corporate interests of monolithic companies like Marvel will still put up substantial boundaries into how incendiary and thought-provoking they can be.

Aside from that...it's Spider-Man, which means it's excellent. The snowy New York makes for a fun backdrop for web-slinging, the added lo-fi beats to the orchestral score are fun without being gimmicky, the voice direction and facial capture are still top-notch, the collectibles are arguably better and more emotionally charged than the first game's, if only because there's no science stations with tedious missions hiding the best parts this time around. And the appeal of an open-world with small limits cannot be overstated; I like exploring, I like side missions, but I don't like padding, and Miles Morales gets it just right.