We analyze the first game that we have played and completed on a PS5, a great title in its own right that does not seek to be the flagship game of the new generation-
It was clear that Insomniac’s huge success with the latest iteration in the Spider-Man video game was not going to stay in one game. The purchase of the studio by SIE was a declaration of intent that made it clear that the future of the arachnid superhero would necessarily pass through this marriage and the PlayStation ecosystem, influencing that privileged relationship that Sony has managed to build with Marvel based on to the cinematographic rights of the famous character, bought at a time when it was impossible to even glimpse the dimension that superheroes would acquire in mass culture in our times.
Miles Morales is another piece in the intelligent management of the character that is being carried out. Once Activision finished squandering the rights to one of the Marvel characters with the best games to their name, Sony was quick to grab the rights and was right to lure Insomniac back into close orbit to build a huge exclusive to around it that has been celebrated by critics and reaped spectacular results among the public. Its arrival as one of the flagship games of this period between generations therefore has all the logic, a sure winner from which a double mission is expected: equally notable sales on PS4 and a boost as a launch game for PS5, a version in which we have tested it.
A familiar New York
First of all, a no-brainer. The previous game was released in the last third of 2018. A little over two years have passed since then, with the added bonus of developing for two systems simultaneously – or three if we differentiate between base PS4, Pro, and PS5. For those of you who pay attention to the development times that open world games require today, you will know that it is hardly enough time to work from scratch. Change of hero, same scenario. Manhattan is very familiar to those who have the previous Spider-Man fresh in their memories, with its same iconic corners: Fifth Avenue, Central Park, the financial district, Times Square … The structure is practically identical, although the time that has The past in the game is noticeable in some things, such as the state of abandonment of the Frisk towers, or the increase in detail and personality of Harlem, the place where our protagonist has just moved along with his mother, after the events lived in the previous game.
The setting is extremely familiar, with its triumphs and limitations, the focus only changes based on the new protagonist. It’s not just a new suit, or some new powers. It is a change of context, a different way of seeing the world, a different age, a different family, with a different social climate and an environment that diverges from the one around Peter Parker, something that we try to emphasize in this title, enhancing Miles’s most intimate spaces as a form of environmental narrative as well, which complements the dialogues and the general story.
To give a clear example, one of the criticisms in the previous work was the lack of interaction with the city, even with the most intimate elements of Parker’s life. We only had fleeting, non-interactive contact with his filthy Chinatown flat before he was kicked out, and there was no scope to create a space we could connect with. With Miles we have had time to capture some locations with special detail to make them our own. They are few, at specific moments in history, but at least they allow us for a few minutes to feel that the city is something more than a forest of floors and skyscrapers, making the less superheroic part of the protagonist more emotional. These specific locations, such as the house where he lives with his mother, are made with special care, allowing us to explore them, recreate ourselves in specific details with mental comments from the protagonist, interact (a bit) with things like putting our father’s favorite LP on the record player. … It is not that they completely solve the shortcomings of the first game in this one, but at least it is appreciated that note has been taken.
Miles Morales, a hero for our time
The warmth of the protagonist’s connections with his surroundings shines through. You can see that an attempt has been made to capture the symbolism of Miles Morales as a hero of our time, with his own problems and concerns, but with a strong sense of community and strong ties with his own. You can see the warmth and good sense used in the game when it comes to exploring his relationships with his mother, family and friends, with Peter Parker himself, and with the neighborhood where he is trying to rebuild his life while juggling between his studies to become a scientist and his new facet as Spider-Man’s friend and neighbor, with the weight and responsibility that both entail.
Already in the suit, Miles also finds his voice when facing evildoers and supervillains. Soon after we begin we will discover that the bite of the radioactive spider has given him a different variety of powers beyond the agility and proportional strength of a spider; an ability to generate electrical energy with your body capable of incapacitating rivals both individually and in groups. This opens up the range of options when planning fights and also makes things easier at all levels by having a greater variety of area attacks that do not make us depend so much on the position of the camera, complementing well the agility and choreography. general of the fighting to make it even more fluid than its predecessor.
In addition, the stealth capabilities of the protagonist have also been enhanced (perhaps too much) with the ability to become invisible, which not only greatly facilitates the infiltration tasks, but also gives us a letter of “getting out of jail” as soon as the combat gets us uphill, being able to disappear and reposition ourselves, making sure that we can enter and exit combat at will. The infiltration preserves the rhythm and the great sensations of the first game, it is extremely satisfactory when we clear an area without being seen, leaving dozens of bodies hanging between cobwebs, but simplifying it even more than it already was surely is to influence too much on Spider’s superiority -Man in front of his enemies.
Spider-man smash
These additional abilities have trimmed the character’s arsenal of add-ons, with fewer gadgets and more abilities naturally incorporated into the moveset. We will of course have the classic cobwebs with which we can totally or partially stop the enemies; some bots capable of generating solid frames that will fight for us; some electric mines that we can detonate remotely and some gravity bombs. Four gadgets compared to the eight that Peter had, in what seems like a bet not to mislead the player from direct combat and offer a more direct way than the facet of ingenuity that we had to use in the previous game, also linking how well it was. Let’s do the fights with the speed with which we can once again have our most destructive arsenal.
Miles also has a development tree divided into three branches, although also somewhat different: one is in charge of enhancing bioelectric abilities, dubbed “poison”. Another focuses on purely combat skills and a third focuses on stealth skills. There are a few skills that we can only unlock in game plus mode, in a second round, and there are also some specific skills that we cannot unlock with experience, but we will have to overcome specific challenges to access them. But in a game that we complete a good part of the secondary actions that open before our cobwebs, we will be able to unlock the vast majority of the tree and have access to almost all of our arsenal, which is more than enough to dispatch any enemy that comes our way. in front of.
The same qualities of speed, agility, quick thinking and elegance that govern the combat system are transferred to the transversality of the game, one of the best and most fun in recent years in a video game. We enter familiar ground again for those who come from the previous game; Just as we seek that in combat they do not touch us as the ideal of what it is to put ourselves in the shoes of spider man, when we cross the skies in our web we will always seek to do it in the most attractive and fluid way that we are capable. The system is once again exquisitely designed to be realistic within the internal rules of the world and physical laws, with cobwebs that can only be thrown if there is where and a movement system that rewards speed and variety of actions to maintain the moment. The ability to move around in Insomniac’s Spider-Man remains one of its main pillars and we never tire of going from one place to another for the simple pleasure of doing so.
However, just as the strengths are similar to the previous work, the weaknesses are also presented as such. There is first a certain lack of taking advantage of the magnificent scenery in which we find ourselves, more opportunities to immerse ourselves in it in different ways other than through displacement or combat. The overall design of the campaign is very jack, horse and king: a linear main mission, several side missions, a series of resource gathering activities, and random crimes that arise that we can intervene in until we get bored of seeing what They keep repeating themselves too much — yes, it’s not very heroic to go from saving a store from a robbery, but when you’ve done it a dozen times, you start to consider leaving it to the police or any other more motivated hero in the area. There are good details like using a custom app where people can ask for our help, report crimes, or post comments, which are fun to read as a reflection of our time, but ultimately only leaves a handful of secondary and some crimes of a similar nature that we cannot find while jumping between buildings.
We have our suspicions that Insomniac knows and shares this problem very well. There are a series of specific secondary missions that we will not enter to avoid spoiling, but that are rightly looking for us to try to connect with the magic of the Big Apple through ambient sounds. When the game tries to get us to do something other than combat, it usually presents somewhat boring activities, things like following electrical cables or pipes with the already tiresome “detective mode”, simple puzzles in which we have to use our cobwebs to move objects or conducting electricity or simple item-gathering missions, perhaps with some interesting detail but little else. But in this specific mission we are asked for something more, to go to certain locations and look for specific sounds to record, without giving us obvious clues that prevent us from doing what we have to do: stop and look around us, feel the roar of the city and of life in one of your biggest hearts on the planet. It is not revolutionary, but it is different and it is the kind of supplementary activities that this world needs to force our immersion in it, beyond the fantasy of being Spider-Man, which is something that it has mastered.
Returning to the defects, as in the first part we also find ourselves again battles with somewhat flat final bosses, not very epic, unable to create dynamics that generate the necessary emotion or tension that these face-to-face confrontations against supervillains should have. We reiterate something we’ve already hinted at: the game’s challenge is quite limited given Miles’s overall superiority, his ability to constantly heal himself using energy, the ability to camouflage himself at will, and his powerful electrical attacks. Even in the maximum difficulty mode, which we can only access when we have completed the game once, the protagonist sometimes seems like a bully given his ability to set the pace in combat, his agility and wide range of possibilities. The real goal here will be to make Spider-Man look good and solve the encounters in an elegant and spectacular way – a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta scoring system is almost missing to give it a little more crumb.
A new generation in the details
Of course, we come to what surely many are especially interested, its role as a “new generation” game. Or rather as a bridge to it, being a title present on both PS4 and PS5. No one will be surprised when we say that it is not the game with which you are going to impress visitors with your brand new console. The PS4 Spider-Man was already an excellent technical demonstration of the current generation and Miles Morales is a creative and technical continuation of it, which has been only two years in development, so it was absurd to expect miracles. What we find here on a technical level is a hypervitamin version of the original, in which we see how some of the past commitments are forgotten to adopt more expensive but visually more effective solutions.
There are two different graphics modes: fidelity and performance. The first at 4K at 30 FPS with graphic enhancements such as Ray Tracing and other add-ons to improve image quality. The second dynamic 4K at 60 FPS without ray tracing and the other effects, allowing us more to appreciate the smoothness of the movement of the character and the camera at the cost of the brightness of some of the facets only possible on a PS5. However, another aspect that is typical of the version of the new Sony console, which would be the DualSense and its haptic system, here it falls below expectations and provides very little of what we have appreciated with Astro Playroom, perhaps because there was not enough time to differentiate more between the different versions, but in any case it ends up being in the background for one of the outstanding titles of the first batch of the console (even if it is intergenerational).
Ray-Tracing, to be ot not to be
One of the clearest examples is found in the reflection of the glass of the buildings. In the previous game, in order to offer an illusion of that effect, Insomniac devised an interposed mapping system in which the reflections were static images of the landscape behind us, with increasing image quality depending on the height at which we were, assuming that the players would stop more to appreciate this facet on top of tall buildings and thus avoid wasting resources with the lower areas, with more moving objects. On PS5, in fidelity mode we find ray tracing in aspects such as the reflection of the crystals, so it is no longer necessary to use tricks. Not only will we see the reflection of the stage with perfect quality at any height, we will also see the protagonist and the passers-by who are in the reflection, perhaps one of the most notorious and earliest evidence of the type of possibilities that this technique allows. We will also appreciate it in certain closed places and in specific situations in which the light bouncing off the stage will give a different and richer air to the scenes.
Surely the high-end PC gamer will not be very impressed that there is a choice between 60 FPS and Ray Tracing, but for the platform we are talking about it is an interesting leap that shows a glimpse of the visual potential of the machine for the next years. More impressive is the immediate transition from the home screen to the game itself and how pleasant it is to connect the console for a quick game knowing that you will be able to make the most of your time. Indeed, there is not a single load in the entire game, which is a joy for what it means for the future of the medium on console. A comfort that cannot be underestimated.
CONCLUSION
Spider-Man is a great game whose biggest flaw is not going too far out of the steps of its predecessor, not even trying to overcome it. It is by no means a camouflaged DLC as has been maliciously said, but neither is it a sequel with aspirations to leave its own mark or mark a turning point. The priorities have gone the other way, such as ensuring that we have a PS5 game that shows some of the virtues of the new machine, but without leaving off the hook a version of PS4 that, although we have not been able to test yet, we anticipate the same. or better technically than the previous one. For hope, there are signs that the study understands the elements it has to address in order to build something even more special, but that will remain for a, hopefully, promise for an indeterminate future. Meanwhile, we will enjoy the personality of Miles, the advantages and comforts that PS5 gives us -such as that instant charge- and the enormous pleasure that is always flying through the skies of Manhattan with this magnificent implementation of the arachnid skills that Insomniac has created. .
THE BEST
- The personality that has been imprinted on Miles
- The convenience of instant charging
- The enormous pleasure of flying over the streets
- Some eye-catching graphic details like Ray Tracing implementation
- Agile and dynamic combat, with new possibilities
- Some touches that point in the right direction
WORST
- Freckle of continuity
- Little variety of enemies and lack of more varied situations
- Boss fights are still a bit flat
- Somewhat easy given the superiority of the protagonist
Very good
A game with a remarkable finish that we will enjoy and remember. A good buy, highly recommended for lovers of the genre. It is well cared for at all levels.
