Spider-Man 2: Canned vs. Canned on Cloudy Eyeballs
The initial generation of Spider-Man for PS4 was released in 2018. At that time, gamers were gradually getting tired of “canned games”, and self-publishers and KOLs had learned some terms, like what formulaic open world, checklist …… everyone has no mercy for games full of question marks on the map, it seems that as long as it takes on the It seems that any game with a canned flavor can’t be a good game.
Spider-Man was one of those games, and I remember an UP user praising Assassin’s Creed and then complaining about Spider-Man, saying that Sony was so disappointing that they had to make a canned game to fool people. While the logic is very confusing, it does reflect some of the climate of opinion at the time.
It’s true that Spider-Man is a canned game, but there are three or six cans, and Spider-Man is clearly one of the finest. Whether it’s the brilliant use of spider properties to solve the age-old problem of open world running, or the high quality of the combat, scripting and plot performances, even the most uninteresting elements of collecting in the usually formulaic open world are done with the utmost sincerity, and IP enthusiasts will find a lot of heartfelt detail.
But it’s also the fact that the first Spider-Man was already accomplished enough, tapping into all aspects of the IP itself (especially in terms of gameplay), to give the impression that “the new Spider-Man doesn’t know where to start”. It’s already made sprawling and realistic cities, and the gameplay based on Spider-Man’s abilities is pretty much everything imaginable.
The difference between the two forms of media, games and movies, is that all of Spider-Man’s movies combined in this century are only 20 hours long, but Spider-Man Generation 1 and the subsequent outings can easily contribute over 50 hours of gameplay. In other words, the game consumes the IP at a much faster rate than the movie, and by operating Spider-Man for long periods of time as he echoes through the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the player is much more likely to feel aesthetic fatigue - in fact, this fatigue was already very apparent to me when I played through Generation 1 and then played the DLC again, and it was my biggest concern before I started playing Spider-Man 2 before I started playing Spider-Man 2.
That doubt did come true, especially at the start of Generation 2, when the game routinely opens with a gorgeously cinematic scripted battle. But I didn’t really feel anything inside, other than “again?” I just felt like, “Again? That’s because this opening scene has happened in three consecutive installments. And the hardware optimization for the first hour of the game’s runtime has some kind of major problem, as the graphics don’t show up at all at the level of a PS5-exclusive masterpiece. In the opening battle against the Sandman, the yellow sand in the sky both makes the buildings in the scene look and feel like pieces of paper, and also consumes a huge amount of functionality, but does not show the texture of the sand as it should be.
Insomniac doesn’t seem to be very good at making huge boss fights, and this scene feels like an homage to God of War 3’s Battle of Kronos, but the gigantic Sandman has size, but not much compression!
For a moment I thought it was because the media beta hadn’t yet actualized the final graphics effects, but when the game went live today, the prologue’s graphics were still off the charts
After the prologue, however, Spider-Man 2’s graphics are back to normal, with 40 fps “fidelity” with optical tracking on, and the city’s architecture, hair, and suit fabrics are in the top tier of the PS5’s. The game’s art resources are still a bit flaky, but the game’s graphics are still a bit flaky. While the art resources are still a bit iffy, with the faces of the villains often being more detailed than the protagonists, the further I play, the better I feel about the game’s overall graphics.
This villain, for example, has one of the most detailed faces in the game.
The gameplay belongs to the series’ collection, and it looks like each of the Spider-Man traits from the first two installments work well, so this generation the team not only added, including various combat and non-combat design elements from the previous installment, but also multiplied - you get to operate two Spider-Men, each of whom has a separate set of skill trees, in addition to a set of shared skill tree, as well as add-on options for suit traits and spiderweb accessories. You have four combat resources alone - there are two slots on each side of the screen to display resource status. This has led to the fact that Spider-Man 2 is the action game with the most key combinations I’ve played since Ghostbusters - not only are there a lot of combinations for combat, with attacks split into long and short presses, but even the usual rushing around involves several key combinations ……
I envy fans of the series who only started with Spider-Man 2 this year, how happy they must be to be dazzled by the sheer volume of what’s on offer. But for me, having played the previous installment, it no longer felt fresh, whether I was weaving in and out of buildings, infiltrating enemy camps, or mauling hordes of enemies with a variety of signature skills. With the exception of the new Venom feature and the spider web wings, the “very Spider-Man” elements of Generation 2 were a bit of a burden to play.
Just when I was wondering if I had the motivation to get through the game, here’s where Spider-Man 2 really took me by surprise - the game delivers an almost extravagant quality of storyline that goes beyond what one would expect from an “open-world game”, and is even better than the storyline experience in a lot of linear games. Even better than many linear games.
The overall pacing and performance level of Spider-Man 2’s main storyline is so high that it’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s the equivalent of putting a copy of Deus Ex 4 into the open world, which is more of a giveaway than anything else. From the moment you first ride a bike with Harry and relive your school adventures, the game pulls off a superbly paced episode with Naughty Dog-level quality of linear scripting, and also takes on the role of a gameplay tutorial - you can see where the homage is going to be paid to this flow, but it gave me a much more mature experience than the one in Mystic Seas 4 when Drake was a kid and his older brother’s adventure was more mature.
There’s far more than one main flow of this caliber in the game, and it’s horribly fleshed out. The amusement park sequence, for example, is so lavish in its materials, rich in its interactions, and subtle in its performances, that it doesn’t have the same flimsy pallor of a formulaic open world, but feels more like a carefully constructed linear game level.
Then there’s the part in the middle where you’re treated to one of Ricki and Tinkerbell’s proudly PS5 hard-drive-accelerating “traversal” experiences, complete with Spider-Man’s own action, and even more visually stunning - and that’s just a small taste of what’s to come in the game. It’s just a blip in the game that doesn’t go much further than that, and it’s the kind of stunning one-off experience that’s so lavish in an open-world game that it’s almost a waste.
You’ll travel to the poles and back to New York in an instant
What’s even rarer is that the main quest is not only comfortably paced, but the story is also good enough. If you take the highest Marvel movie score of 10, the plot of this Spider-Man 2 game is at least a bottom 7 - a very high score for a game. This is partly due to the excellent expression capture, which makes the “actors” much more tense. Spider-Man 2’s facial modeling isn’t particularly good, but the vivid details of the expressions are definitely in the top tier.
So, even though I was severely fatigued by the main gameplay, I eventually made it through Spider-Man 2. You can certainly continue to categorize Spider-Man 2 as a formulaic open-world game, or a canned game, as it does have a lot of repetitive laboring or collecting elements scattered around the map, which is a typical element of formulaic open-worlds - there’s always something to fill the huge maps. But after contributing some of the best plot performances in open-world games in recent years, Spider-Man 2 also proves that there’s a cloudy difference between canned and jarred.
