Spider-Man: Miles Morales Improves Upon The Original In EVERY WAY!

If you had asked me just a few years ago what my favorite Spider-Man game is the answer would’ve always been the same. “Spider-Man 2 on PS2! Nothing outdoes it!” But I was BLOWN AWAY by my experience playing through Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PS4 when I got my console a couple of years ago. The game had beautiful graphics, excellent sound design, great gameplay and an incredibly gripping story.

Now my mind has been blown AGAIN! Spider-Man: Miles Morales is everything the original was AND MORE!

Story

The plot of Spider-Man: Miles Morales takes place during the winter holidays. Peter Parker goes on vacation with MJ and leaves Miles in charge of New York City as “New York’s only Spider-Man”

While Peter is gone Miles ends up having to take down a gang known as the Underground led by a villain known as “The Tinkerer” whose primary ambition is to destroy Roxxon, a corrupt energy company trying to push a harmful energy source known as Nuform into the streets of Harlem. I won’t spoil any of the more specific parts of the plot. The twists aren’t terribly surprising, however the atmosphere and acting all make the story an unforgettable one!

Gameplay

The gameplay style itself of Spider-Man: Miles Morales remains largely unchanged from the original game. However this games controls feel alot better than the original. Miles feels a lot lighter, he swings faster and more freely, his overall mobility in general is far better than Peter’s. These improvements to the mobility really make traveling to far away missions feel like much less of a chore.

The combat in Spider-Man: Miles Morales is incredible! What separates it from the original is that early in the games plot Miles gets endowed with a new spidey power he calls “Venom” which gives him the ability to absorb and use electricity in his attacks. These electric moves make dealing with massive hoards of baddies 1000X easier because each time you hit a bad guy with a venom attack it stuns them briefly, and so you can stun 5-6 enemies at once and then continually wail on them until you’ve dispersed a whole gang!

I’d consider the costumes and gadgets in this game to be less impressive than the prior though. I honestly just picked a costume I liked and mainly used Miles’ web-shooters throughout the entirety of the main game. I did find the suit mods themselves to be incredibly helpful.

I played this game on a PS4 Slim and I must say my only relatively big gripe is that the performance on the base-model PS4 while not horrendous can get rough whenever you’re surrounded by a ton of enemies. I never felt like I was completely out of control, but certain scenes where there’s tons of environmental effects, objects being broken, AND a lot of NPCs on screen definitely made for a VERY NOTICABLE framerate drop.

I also did get stuck a few times in pieces of the environment while crawling on walls and webbing around, however it never got so bad that I was soft-locked.

Sound

This games soundtrack is really good featuring alot of hip-hop style beats as well as some songs with actual lyrics and rapping in them. I played this game wearing my Astro A10’s and the sound design was a real treat! It sounded very cinematic. I even liked listening to the podcasts in this game, which I turned off while playing the original. Rather than listening to J. Jonah Jameson blab for most of the game you get a good back and forth of Danika Patrick AND JJJ which I found much more interesting than the very one-sided way it was done in the original. The only bad thing I can say about this games sound design is that the song that plays specifically when you’re not engaged in a mission and just swinging around New York can get a little grating, it just sounds like a short beat loop somebody made in GarageBand and decided to keep playing it for HOURS!

Despite it’s mild flaws Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a beautiful game that I plan on playing more of in the future! If these Spider-Man games keep improving with each new release like this I might have to see if I can buy a PS5 just to play the new one Insomniac has planned for 2023. They’re THAT GOOD!!