Marvel's Spider-Man 2 review on PC — Higher highs and lower lows

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was a fantastic sequel. It took everything from the original, cut away what didn’t work, and added a whole bunch more of what did work on top. I’ve gotten the platinum trophy in all three games so far, but I was still looking forward to revisiting this title on PC and going through everything all over again; it’s just that good. PlayStation’s PC ports are usually great, but the current state of Spider-Man 2 makes me a bit hesitant to recommend it, at least for now.

If you want the full lowdown on the game, check out Lead Editor David Burdette's review on PS5 here. In short, it’s a heartfelt retelling of the classic symbiote story with a massive open world and acrobatic combat. It looks great too, with some spectacular use of ray tracing and reflections, all while reaching a stable 60 fps in Performance mode. Of course, the main draw of the PC version is cranking those visuals even higher while outputting more frames per second. While this version delivers on that promise, it’s far from ideal.

The first thing I noticed when starting up the game at mostly max settings is the weird visual noise around characters’ hair and certain objects. It’s like an extra amount of film grain added to specific parts of the image, and it’s very distracting. This is a result of DLSS ray reconstruction apparently, a ray tracing feature that is supposed to improve performance. It certainly does that, in both Transformer and Legacy ray tracing modes, but  there are a lot of little things like this that bring the overall experience down. 

Speaking of DLSS, the game has the typical modes and features utilizing Nvidia cards, such as my RTX 4070. On Quality mode with all those framerate boosting features turned on, I get around 90 to 120 fps when exploring the open world. Balanced boosts the low end by about 5 frames without any real noticeable dip in visual clarity. Indoor or specialized areas will fare better, ranging from 130 to 150 after optimizing my settings. It’s spectacular to witness, though with more powerful hardware or by lowering the settings even further you could no doubt go even higher. The game also features FSR and all of its features, though I don’t have a device that can make full use of them. 

The Steam Deck can use them a little, however. With everything at their defaults for the device, I found the game to average around 25 fps. It’s a shame that it just barely misses the mark of 30, because this game is a lot of fun to play portably, even if it looks pretty rough in motion. I wouldn’t want to go through the story here, but with that framerate I can’t quite justify doing open world checklist tasks either.

That’s especially true when the game looks so good if you have the hardware to get it there. The game overall looks much more clear and crisp than performance mode on PS5, especially the RT reflections. I was consistently impressed with how detailed reflections on buildings and in puddles on the ground could be.

While the game can look and run great, provided you have the hardware to throw at it, there are still random performance issues and loading hitches. In the chase scene with Black Cat, she summons portals that transport her and Spider-Man around the city (and across the globe) instantaneously. Most portals had trouble loading the next section of the map in time, with buildings very obviously spawning in front of you, while the worst one caused the game to freeze entirely for several seconds. 

There’s also the aforementioned visual noise, but sometimes the game will just crash for no clear reason. Luckily it auto saves often enough that you won’t really lose progress, even in the middle of a mission, but this is still very frustrating. If you’re using a non-Dualsense controller, it’ll also be constantly vibrating. I love the Dualsense’s features, but they always feel weaker on PC for some reason, so I ended up just turning off rumble entirely. Neither mode felt very satisfying no matter what controller I used.

That said, patches and hotfixes are constantly being released to bring the game up to snuff with the rest of Sony’s PC lineup. In fact, the game updated so many times I was hesitant to write this review for fear that it would instantly become out of date. It probably still will be, but the main takeaway here is, while the port isn’t great now, it will probably be later. It might even become playable on Steam Deck.