Spoiler-free tips for playing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, from a guy with a 100% save file
Here's what I wish I knew before playing Insomniac's latest
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has set a new standard for superhero games. My review went live over on NME last week if you want to read me quantifying that statement across roughly 1,000 words. I liked it so much that I did everything one can do in the game weeks ahead of the embargo. It took me around 30 hours, and I enjoyed every minute.
Spider-Man 2 is already out in Australia and New Zealand, and it launches later tonight in the UK, so it’s pretty much open season for coverage, which is why I’m coming to you with a little guide. Here are a few spoiler-free tips I picked up during my playtime to help you enjoy it to the maximum.
Stick with the story until you get the Symbiote suit…
Spider-Man 2 lets you fool around in the open world as soon as you’re out of the opening, and it’s tempting to start digging into the extra-curricular activities ASAP, but I’d warn against that if you can help it. You might have guessed from the trailers that you’ll be getting access to the Symbiote powers early on in Spider-Man 2, but I was surprised by how long it took before I was given access to Pete’s coveted tentacle abilities.
There’s also a bunch of cool sidequest chains and important gameplay mechanics (including powers for Miles) that you won’t be able to access until you get the Black Suit, so it’s worth pushing through the missions until this point so that you’ve got all the bases covered. Especially with the combat-focused missions, they’re miles more fun if you’ve got the full combat suite at your disposal before you engage with them, so you can toy with your food and avoid bristling against spongy, frustrating enemies.
…but find all the Spider-Bots ASAP
Okay, so VGC’s Jordan Middler tweeted about this the other day, and I did a big nod of the head when I saw it. There are a bunch of collectable Spider-Bots in Spider-Man 2, and as you grab them, you’ll be teased about their origin, and the way it wraps up kind of ripped my head off a bit. I would be gutted if it was spoiled for anyone, so in spite of my previous comments, I suggest you chow on this particular morsel of side content as soon as it becomes available.
If you’re struggling, the map tells you how many bots are in each district, and I used that to turn every stone and grab them methodically. However, there’s also an ability called All-Seeing in the Traversal Suit Tech tree, and this allows you to see all of the collectables on your minimap as you’re zipping around, which I would have loved to have, in hindsight. Speaking of Traversal upgrades…
Focus on traversal upgrades first
There’s a Shared tree in the Skills menu where you can upgrade the abilities of both Spider-Men. The middle spine of this skill tree ending in ‘Aerial Escapades’ is where you should stick your points first, IMO. Traversal is the bread and butter of Spider-Man 2, and it makes the game feel much better once you’ve maxed out all of your web-slinging abilities.
At the same time, you’re going to want to use your tokens to fill out the Traversal tree in Suit Tech, which speeds up your swinging and the general gusto of your launches and pivots. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to fill the tree out completely until you hit a certain level - but focusing on traversal skills early on conveniently makes earning XP so much easier.
Use Air Tricks to farm XP
With Spider-Jump, Spider-Dash and Aerial Escapades, you can extend your time in the air indefinitely by hitting L1 + X and L1 + Triangle when you’re losing altitude and then tricking in between swings to get them back. Rotate the left stick frantically in a circular motion to juice the multiplier, and you’ll have the skills back in no time to give you more airtime.
With this, you can comfortably earn thousands of XP points in minutes by zipping around the map like a ball of pure velocity. This is great if you don’t want to be gated by certain combat abilities in the mid-game. You can spend your tokens more wisely early on if you’ve surpassed all the arbitrary level caps. Naturally, it’s also super useful in the endgame when you’re trying to wrap everything up. However, when you boost through the levels, you’ll consequentially be introduced to a number of tempting unlockable suits… but stay strong!
Don’t buy suits until the endgame
It’s super tempting (especially when you unlock the Tobey Maguire suit from your favourite Spider-Man movie) to want to buy it and wear it and test it out immediately to see what secrets it is hiding. But I am going to urge you, once again, to exercise restraint. It’s pretty hard to resist the call of the Spider-Verse suits, I won’t lie, but they cost precious tokens that you could be using to upgrade your abilities and gadgets. The rewards for the suits are purely cosmetic, and some of them cost Hero Tokens, which are really hard to come by, especially in the midgame.
Be honest with yourself: are you really going to wear a weirdo suit for the game’s main campaign missions? In many cases, Spider-Man 2 forces you into certain suits for periods of time anyway, so you’re not really going to see the benefit of wearing custom suits in the cutscenes. With that in mind, I’d say avoid buying them until you’ve wrapped up the story, and then you can swing around in them to your heart’s content without shitcanning some of the story’s emotional scenes cos you’re in a hilarious getup.
Savour the side content
I’m at 100% now, and all that’s left for me is to swing around and deal with ambient petty crimes that I’m overqualified for. It still looks cool, sure, but it’s a lonely existence, and The Big Apple is starting to feel kinda lifeless now, as I touched upon in my review. Instead of rushing through it all before you’ve got all your kit together and having a tainted time, I suggest you should savour the side content as much as possible in Spider-Man 2.
Especially when it comes to the Hunter Bases and their preliminary rooftop facades, once you run out of those, there is no challenge mode where you can properly enjoy the finer notes of SM2’s combat again, so I’d take them slowly and flex your muscles as much as possible. Don’t sleep on the FNSM Requests, either. They’re easy to forget about, but there are six of them in total, and I think four of them made me bawl…
Your newsletters haven’t been coming up in my inbox, but I’m glad I found this one. Haven’t started playing yet... I’ll leave the suits until the ending