‘Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ Isn’t Very Fun: Here’s Why
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was a game that I was intensely excited for but held off from playing at launch. After seeing the loading times comparison between the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 versions, it didn’t make sense for me to play until I could secure a PS5. Needless to say, given the supply constraints, it took me eight months to get my hands on a PS5, which came bundled with a copy of Miles Morales. The first thing I did once I got my console hooked up was sink about a dozen hours into the New York City skyline with Miles at the helm. And though I felt a connection with certain story beats, there was something fundamentally off about the overall game design that left me feeling like this follow-up game is missing something.
Let’s start with what works really well in Miles Morales. Anyone who has played Marvel’s Spider-Man from 2018 will be familiar with the soaring heights of swinging through New York City. Insomniac’s web-slinging mechanics are fun, freeing, and fluid just as they were with Spider-Man, and any fan of that game will find a snowier version of New York adorned with extra details that add some cultural flavor appropriate to the story Miles Morales wants to tell. And the idiosyncratic animations for Miles’ character fittingly betray his youth and inexperience, notably in his air tricks and quippy remarks as you zoom through the skies.
Combat is also very similar to the well-polished original, featuring a diverse array of beat-em-up kicks, flips, and punches, dodges, web moves, and spider technology at your disposal. Miles is suited up with venom powers, which are not quite indicative of the iconic symbiote of the same name from the comics, but still do intense extra electrical damage. Enemy variety feels largely the same as the original Spider-Man, but I enjoyed the combat enough in that game to warrant another dozen or so hours kicking goons’ heads in. And eventually, over the course of the story, certain enemy types evolve and arrive equipped with armor and technology that prevents Miles’ venom abilities from feeling overpowered and too effective.
A Compelling Atmosphere
The atmosphere of New York City in the wintertime is infectious and I’m glad Insomniac took the effort to add visual changes like flurries of snow, piles of dirty ice heaps around street gutters, and trees whose deciduous leaves have long since passed. Instead of the city appearing stale, it feels alive and fresh with minor changes, both enabling a familiar feeling of comfort and a new feeling of exploration.
Beyond the wintertime changes, Miles Morales also has a greater focus on the everyday goings on at the ground level. One of my favorite sequences in the game just by virtue of its visual intrigue was, ironically, a forced walking section through an active street district. As you explore the tented environments strung with fairy lights and banners, you’ll notice a Puerto Rican flag, for instance, before being dazzled with ray tracing reflections from patches of raindrops melting on the ground. Other key interactions at the ground level involve helping out a bodega whose cat named Spider-Man has gone missing. Or passing by a deaf street artist whose work Miles admires. The original Spider-Man had some moments like this, but everything transpiring at the ground level of New York definitely feels more intimate in Miles.
Finally, the story of Miles Morales feels like a passion project rather than a cynical cash grab, which it easily could have been. You might point to the campaign that’s not even half the length of the original 2018 game and argue that Miles should have been a DLC expansion instead of a full-priced title. I don’t think I’d argue too heavily against that complaint except to defend the game and its story on their own merits. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like Miles Morales not only deserved his own standalone game, but that I’d love to see him return for whatever Insomniac has prepared for us next. If anything, there’s plenty of room to flesh out Miles’ take on New York City.
The Importance of Support Groups
Even though Miles Morales has less fanfare and massive action setpieces than the 2018 Spider-Man game, it still holds up on its own as a story. Players of Spider-Man will be aware of Miles’ father’s tragic death, how it still hangs over his head, and how Miles struggles to integrate his identity with his new role as the second Spider-Man. As a starting point, Miles is left alone to protect New York City on his own while Peter Parker is away, and so we see Miles get into situations that are clumsier or less wise than you might expect from a seasoned superhero. As a plot contrivance, I think Miles’ lack of experience works really well, especially considering the thematic contrast in how the 2018 game bypassed Peter Parker’s tired origin story altogether.
The thing about Miles’ story that I appreciated the most, however, is a combination of Miles’ naive optimism, this insuppressible desire to do good and protect everyone, and his deep-seated empathy for the people he finds himself in contact with. As Miles, we are introduced to a character whose interests are distinct from Peter Parker but whose morals practically overlap. Miles volunteers to help at shelters for people in need. He develops a tight-knit bond with his friend Ganke who nearly matches Miles in terms of helpful eagerness. Miles’ relationship with Phin harkens back to childhood playdates and even flirts at romance but is ultimately much more intertwined with and focused on their shared identity as scientists, or at least inventive, scientifically minded young people. And Miles’ relationship with his uncle Aaron is fraught with the trappings of authority figures who are willing to do shady things to protect one another. The original Spider-Man game carved out deeply vulnerable and human characters, but Miles Morales capitalizes on this aspect by building an even stronger support group for Miles.
Miles Morales is Missing Something
But despite all the strengths of Miles Morales, I can’t help but think that the game is missing something. Somewhere between the truncated story, the familiar city, the unfamiliar faces, and so on, I wasn’t blown away by Miles Morales in quite the same unexpected way as the 2018 game. While both games managed to yank a few tears out of my face in some key late story beats, I ultimately felt that Miles Morales just isn’t a very fun game.
Aside from the obvious caveat that web slinging and combat are just as fun and polished as the 2018 Spider-Man, Miles Morales puts the player in a number of unimaginative situations that always felt like pure filler to me. One of the obvious ways this filler feeling manifests is through the abundance of generator “puzzles” peppering the main storyline of Miles Morales. Put simply, these generator puzzles often involve simply finding a generator and connecting it to the main source of power. Sometimes these generators open doors, other times they progress the story, but the mechanics of interacting with these generators remain practically identical when you first and finally encounter them. To find these generators, Miles has to trace their cords and cables back to each source, powering on each part of the unit. Never once are these puzzles engaging, interesting, or fun.
Thank goodness that Miles Morales veered away from the tedious DNA sequencing and pipe connecting science puzzles from 2018’s Spider-Man, but what’s left in the wake is a series of interactions that feel swept off the cutting room floor from the original game. One of the examples I found particularly bewildering is the audio sampling that Miles is tasked with by his uncle Aaron. In theory, this little substory fits diagetically into the Spider-Man universe, as Miles is shown as vibing and mixing his own music earlier in the game. In practice, however, even though the story frames this mixtape sampling task as a way to connect deeper with Miles’ uncle, the act of tracking down each of these sounds is tedious and bland. This tedium results in a relatively rewarding encounter with the Prowler’s lair, as well as unlocking a suit, but the process of figuring out where each sound sample is located gets repetitive and frustrating if you’re zipping around absent-mindedly through New York City.
Quickly Burning Out
In between the acts of connecting generators and finding music samples, Insomniac’s New York City is replete with self-similar enemy combat encounters. By the end of Spider-Man, when the snipers and jetpacked soldiers turned the previously freeing skies of New York into a hellacious obstacle course, I was exhausted by the otherwise fun combat. In Miles, I tired out before the first half of its limited runtime, and it’s a shame that Miles’ use of the groundbreaking Dualsense controller doesn’t add much depth to the tactile experience of playing. Because everything carries the feeling that I’ve done this before, no interactions in Miles Morales have the impact or lasting power of the unexpected punches of 2018’s Spider-Man.
Spider-Man was guilty of padding its achievements out into grindy sessions, suggesting that the developers wanted their world to be filled with things to do, but weren’t sure how to make those things engaging or intrinsically interesting. With Miles, each of these interactions feels uninspired and iterative in all the wrong ways, often feeling like a cheap reskin or copy-paste. And that feeling significantly detracted from the things that I otherwise enjoyed in Miles.
It also doesn’t help that the only iconic villain present in Miles Morales is a beefed up Rhino, an enemy who already received ample screen time in Spider-Man, who you encounter at least twice in Miles’ combat arenas. While the second fight with Rhino adds an interesting armor dynamic that prevents Miles from cheesing his way through the battle, Rhino isn’t ever that interesting a villain when acting on his own. Harkening the Sinister Six, a smattering of which we surprisingly fought in the 2018 Spider-Man game, we instead end up spending time in antagonistic relationships with Prowler and Tinkerer. These characters are decent antagonists, however this reduced presentation of main villains feels like a clear step down from the heights of the previous game.
Without leaning too directly into endgame spoilers for Miles Morales, suffice it to say that I didn’t feel like the Prowler got his due in this game. If anything, I think my impressions from the near-perfect Into the Spider-Verse film was the reason I found his character memorable at all — because I already had developed a soft spot for uncle Aaron. And as for the Tinkerer, their powers weren’t necessarily challenging or interesting other than their ability to wallop Miles in a few scripted encounters. The actual final fight with Tinkerer completely fell flat for me. In another game, it’d be fine, but when you’re following up some incredibly over-the-top boss fights in Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018), the bar remains high. Miles Morales never delivered on these encounters in an engaging way for me, which is a shame because I did ultimately consider the people behind these supervillain personas to be likeable and well-written.
The endings of both Spider-Man and Miles Morales explicitly tease at a proper full-length sequel, and Miles certainly shouldn’t be mistaken for that sequel. (A friend of mine off-handedly referred to it as Spider-Man 1.5, which, though inelegant, nicely captures the general feel of Miles Morales as a stepping-stone game.) While it seems my favorite villain (or villains, if some more extrapolated theories are to be believed) will be the main antagonist of that sequel, I left Miles Morales feeling confident in the writers and technical directors, not the gameplay and puzzle designers. Miles Morales gets caught in its own web of repetition and boredom too many times, and this makes the lackluster boss fights towards the end feel even more subject to scrutiny.
Some Redeeming Aspects of Miles Morales
Despite these shortcomings, Miles Morales made me cry with its story beats towards the final few hours. When Miles got absolutely stomped in combat, stumbling into his home in a battered state, he was unable to continue hiding his identity from his mother. Knowing the political pressures of Miles’ mother and combining it with the pressure he felt in needing to protect her from the worry around his superhero identity, I felt a deep-seated sympathy when he broke down in front of her. With his suit ripped up, his mask gone, and his face peppered with fresh wounds and bruises, Miles is portrayed for the briefest of moments as a mere kid who has accepted too great of a burden. I know what it’s like to want to look out for your single mother who is doing the impossible, feeling the guilt of needing help and the simultaneous inability to ask for it. It was a touching moment that I didn’t expect to find in the game, and as the tears flowed from my face, I realized that Insomniac’s writing team still packs a powerful punch. The final sacrificial scenes in the game struck me in similar ways, albeit with drier eyes.
It’s difficult to pin down my feelings about Miles Morales, a game that has nearly everything going for it. Sans the tedious and repetitive puzzle design, the insipid evolutions on enemy encounters and variations, and this game could be elevated from good to great. Luckily, I will not think back on Miles Morales with sour notes; instead, I will remember the highs and lows of swinging through the city, the lifelike characters and a well-tempoed storyline. Miles Morales is good, and sometimes very good, but it is further from perfect than its predecessor, 2018’s Spider-Man.
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