Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

This library now has all three of Insomniac's Spider-Man games — Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered at 8, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 at 7.5 — and Miles Morales is the one people argue about most, for a reason that has almost nothing to do with its quality.

Count the hundred most-helpful English negatives. DLC appears in 42 of them. Short in 36, price in 34, hours in 37. The top negative, at 369 votes, is one sentence: "Finished the game in few hours. This game feels more like a DLC than a full fledged Spider-man game of its own."

The rebuttal, from inside the negatives

The most interesting review in the corpus is a 182-vote thumbs-down that takes issue with the framing everyone else is using:

Everyone says this game is a DLC of the original Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered. That is not the case here. DLCs usually expand and enhance the content that the base game offers. In Miles Morales, the game doesn't contain most of the content of the base game and has very limited content to offer in general.

That's a sharper criticism than the one it's correcting. "It's DLC" implies you're getting an add-on to something larger. What you're actually getting is a smaller, self-contained game that removed most of the first game's side content and kept the traversal and combat. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether the first game's checklist was something you wanted more of.

What's genuinely good

Rather a lot. The web-swinging is unchanged, which is to say it's still one of the best traversal systems anyone has built — a real physical skill you get better at. Miles's bio-electric venom powers and camouflage give combat a different tempo from Peter's, and they're not cosmetic; fights resolve differently.

The story is the quiet strength. It's smaller in scope and much more personal, set in Harlem at Christmas, and it's about a teenager and his neighbourhood rather than a city-wide crisis. Story appears in 52 of a hundred negatives — the top term overall — and a good share of those mentions are people saying they liked it and wanted more.

Visually it's excellent, and the snow-lit New York is more distinctive than the first game's brownstone summer.

A note on the port, because the keyword count misleads

Crashes appear in 21 of a hundred negatives, which looks like a live technical problem. It isn't one, and dating the mentions individually shows why: 16 of the 19 crash reports come from 2022 and 2023, with one in 2024 and two in 2025. Of the hundred most recent English reviews, exactly one mentions crashing or stutter.

Nixxes fixed the port. Reading the raw keyword total would have had me marking down a problem that was solved two years ago, and performance scores a 7.5 rather than a 6 as a result. The one caveat still live: a Steam Deck user reported in November 2025 that enabling ray tracing crashes the game permanently thereafter.

The price question

The critics' median playtime is 16.1 hours, and the main story is widely reported at around five to eight. So these are people who finished it, and often completed the side content too, before objecting — the same completion test that made the length complaints credible for Stray and 007 First Light.

A 150-vote reviewer states the position without rancour: "it is hard for me to recommend this game, not because it is bad, because it is not, but because 50€ for this game is just to much… Maybe pick it up in a [sale]."

That is exactly right, and it's the whole review. At NZ$89.95 list, a seven-hour campaign is a poor deal. At the NZ$35.98 it currently costs, it's a good one. Negative reviews have fallen year on year — 29, 34, 15, 16, 6 — as the game has spent more of its life discounted.

The verdict

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales earns a 7.5, level with Spider-Man 2 and half a point below Remastered.

It's a better-told story than either, in a more interesting setting, with combat that adds something real. It scores where it does because it is markedly smaller than the game before it and priced as though it isn't, and because there's little to come back for once it ends.

Buy it in a sale — it is in one — play it over a weekend, and treat the DLC argument as what it is: a complaint about a price tag, not about a game.