Marvel's Spider-Man 2

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered sits at 96.4% positive. Its sequel sits at 82.6%. Same studio, same porting house, better game — and fourteen points worse.

The gap is entirely about arrival.

What went wrong in January 2025

Sort Spider-Man 2's hundred most-helpful English negatives by month and the shape is brutal: 20 in January 2025, 23 in February, then a trickle of one to five a month ever since. Forty-three percent of its substantial criticism was filed in the first five weeks.

The subject was the port. Crashes appear in 41 of the hundred, port in 32, performance in 24, optimisation in 19. A 1,971-vote reviewer reported "crashing every 10 minutes" and quoted a display driver error. An 884-vote reviewer with an RTX 4090 and current drivers described frequent graphics controller crashes. A 672-vote reviewer summarised it as "Nixxes dropped the ball hard with this port. Performance is all over the place. Ray Tracing is broken in many places."

That last one stings because Nixxes have a genuinely good reputation — I credited them earlier today for the Ghost of Tsushima conversion, which is one of the better PlayStation PC ports. This was not that.

The complaint at the top isn't about performance

The single most-upvoted negative review, at 4,444 votes, says something else entirely: that the game installs the PlayStation PC SDK runtime on first launch "without any pop-up or option to decline," that the game runs fine without it beyond an error message on startup, and that the reviewer regards it as data collection.

I'd separate the checkable part from the characterisation. That a Sony PC release installs PlayStation runtime components is straightforwardly true and consistent across their catalogue — Ghost of Tsushima's reviewers discussed the same PSPC SDK folder, in that case circulating a performance workaround involving deleting it. What that software does with data is not something a review corpus establishes, and I'm not going to assert it.

What's fair to say is this: it's installed silently, players noticed, and four and a half thousand of them thought that was worth flagging above every technical complaint on the page. If you object to bundled publisher runtimes, that's the thing to know before buying.

The game is very good

Underneath, this is a better game than the first one, and the first one was excellent.

Traversal is the reason. Web-swinging in these games is the finest movement system in the medium — I said as much reviewing Spider-Man Remastered, where players report actively refusing fast travel — and the sequel adds web wings and a larger, denser New York to glide across. Combat has more depth, with symbiote abilities that change your approach rather than just your damage numbers, and two playable Spiders whose movesets genuinely differ.

It looks superb and it sounds superb. The median playtime among recent reviewers is 17 hours and among critics 25, which is about right for the campaign plus a reasonable amount of side content.

Where it stands now

Ten-plus patches have done their job. Patch 10 in May 2025 added DLSS 4 support and fixed FSR frame generation; updates continued into July 2026 with DualSense Edge support, a joint update across all three Spider-Man PC titles, and two new free suits for Peter.

The numbers moved with it: 2026 negatives run at one to five a month, and 83 of the 100 most recent English reviews are positive — level with the lifetime figure rather than dragging it.

More tellingly, the subject changed. Recent negative reviews are about design rather than technology: excessive cutscene density, forced character swaps interrupting play, a tutorial that runs an hour deep, and a story that several reviewers feel looks backward rather than forward. Those are legitimate criticisms of a game, and they're the ones a healthy port generates.

Performance hasn't stopped mattering entirely — a recent reviewer notes you want "a fairly high end pc for this game to have an enjoyable experience" — but the crash wave has passed.

The verdict

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 earns a 7.5. As a game it's a 9: the traversal is unmatched, the combat improves on a strong foundation, and the city is a genuine pleasure to exist in.

The score reflects what buying it has actually been like. It arrived on PC broken enough to lose fourteen points against its own predecessor, from a porting studio that normally sets the standard; it still asks NZ$104.95 at list for around twenty-five hours; and it installs publisher software without asking, which four thousand people found more objectionable than the crashing.

Buy it discounted, ideally deeper than the current 33%, and check recent reviews against your hardware before committing. The good news for anyone who was burned in early 2025 is genuine: the game you refunded is not the game shipping now.