Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a three quarter length(ish) sequel to the truly great PS4 exclusive Spider-Man from 2018. That game was an absolute stunner, giving any gamer and superhero fan the peak Spider-Man experience (that’s right, Spider-Man 2 on the PS2 – piss off!). From a stirring and emotive story through to an incredible game engine that truly made you feel like the webcrawler, Sony really hit the jackpot – and the game introduced us to comics co-spidey Miles Morales, who gets his own game here.
A quick plot synopsis – after the events of the Peter Parker game, OG Spidey is going to Europe for work with MJ, and Miles (who gets his powers towards the end of the first game) is deputised by Peter while he’s abroad to look after the city. This being an action game, and this being a superhero story, you know shit’s going down and Miles is going to struggle with the great responsibilities and powers he has – so far, so standard superhero fare.
However – the strength of the first game was its ability, unlike so many AAA games before it, to create an ACTUAL story and PROPER characters to care for and empathise with. Peter’s strifes were better written and acted than a fair few of his live action films, while the gamemakers managed to balance his relationships with a rogue’s gallery of famous villains. The gameplay, while a bit button mashy (in the Arkham series style of combos, combos, combos) was well balanced between effortless exploration of a finely recreated NYC and the many, many fights.
While you can buy the first game remastered on PS5, Miles Morales was made for the new console – and my god you can tell. Taking full advantage of the technical strengths of the beast, the game provides whipcrack loading times (none in the city at all, an incredible sight to behold) that gave me zero time between booting up and the main menu to even check my phone once.
As mentioned in the 60FPS/ray tracing article [insert link], activating said visual features makes the game visually explode – movement is super fluid, animations and lighting are disturbingly realistic and reactive, while the character models are so well made as to be unerringly realistic. The gameplay remains the same but has twists based on Miles’ more unique powers (aka electricity), meaning that any player who’s played the first will effortlessly pick this up.
Traversing the city is just as fun as before, with the DualSense coming into its own (something we will see with many more games in future) and providing feedback and tension when shooting a web or firing web shooters. The more sophisticated rumble features of the controller also play into the game’s more immersive visual feel, and I can’t wait to play games down the line that truly take advantage of the controller.
If there’s a complaint on the gameplay side, it’s that – as with so many other games – the side missions become repetitive, and the unique nature of Miles’ powers/the controller are deadened after the tenth time you’ve fired electrically charged webs at some goon on a building site. The boss levels also segue into the dreaded quicktime events too often as well, an issue with the first game but clearly a sop to those of us who fondly recall or enjoy them (I really don’t enjoy having my immersion broken by “HAMMER X TO ESCAPE RHINO’S GRASP).
The story and characters here though are worthy of discussion, simply because the game does much more than many others of its type to make you feel at home in the world you’re playing in. Miles’ life is in Harlem – his family and friends – and the game’s storyline works to make the player feel part of the area, with the strong visual recreation of the borough and its tight streets, not to mention the memorable neighbourhood characters, all working together to create a sense of place and meaning.
I’ll try not to delve into politics too much either, but suffice to say that as a liberally minded human being who cares, the gamemakers have paid strong attention to the BLM movement and the importance of a protagonist who’s both black and Latino – the story sensibly and sensitively juggles this with everything else, and when games can be so lazy about representation as well as “making a statement”, this all felt natural and evocative.
THis ties in with the musical soundtrack, which is a brilliant fusion of hip hop beats and classical score that feels so Marvel Studios I wanted to check who the composer was, in case a film composer had again been tempted over to the dark side. This flows and soars with Miles’ movements through NYC – as the original game’s more superheroic score did – and again helps build that sense of place.
On a storyline level, Miles is a far younger and more sensitive character than Peter, always trying his hardest to do the right thing by everyone – even if they’re the nominal villain. His relationships with his mum, best friend/”guy in the chair” Ganke and old friend Phin are given time to breathe and develop, whether through cutscenes or in game phone calls – while the character’s family dynamics with uncle Aaron, his mentor/big bro connection to Peter and his strong moral core really do make for a more sympathetic and involving protagonist.
All of this is to say that you get sucked into the story because you care – and the action, the actual gameplay, swoops into and complements to the point that at times you’re playing, but you feel as if you’re in a Marvel film. The story’s twists and turns are perfectly calibrated superhero cliches deployed surprisingly, and while the sidequests can feel onerous the game’s shorter overall length means they are either easily dispatched or best left ignored.
The game’s length is actually the root of a lot of criticism, but I don’t buy that. I enjoyed it and I felt it was an adequate length of time to play such a story – perhaps many reviewers or gamers are already being changed by the 100 hour storylines other AAA games provide. For me – I felt it was a lesson developers can learn; that making shorter, more impactful games that don’t drag on might actually provide a boom for gaming that TV appears to have discovered with miniseries.
Should you be lucky enough to find and actually buy a PS5 in 2021, I can’t recommend this game highly enough. Even its one flaw – the sidequest curse blighting all open world games now – is tempered by how few there are and how perfectly judged the 35 hour completion time is.
a minority of one 