Just a quick Spoiler Warning that there will be some details about the plot of Spider-Man: Miles Morales in the latter half of paragraph four, but I really just wanted to get a pet peeve off my chest. Plus, the game’s three years old, so I figured it would be okay, especially since Spider-Man 2 spoils even more than I did in its recap of the events of the first two games.

I finished Spider-Man: Miles Morales over the weekend and I think I genuinely prefer it to Spider-Man: Remastered. The music is better, the entire game just flows so much more smoothly, traversal is faster, and the world feels so much more alive. It’s a shorter game, sure, but as I wrote in last week’s post, I have zero problems with a shorter game. This one especially, because of the ways that it is shorter. There’s a lot fewer “go stop a bunch of random crimes with a whole slew of ways to get bonus points, some of which are incredibly difficult to do because, for whatever reason, Spider-Man can always dodge every bullet with a single button press except when he’s following a car with someone inside it who is blindly firing back up at him” things, which is a big deal because those annoyed the hell out of me. There’s also a lot fewer random collectibles, fewer long-winded side-quest chains, and a whole lot less waiting for things to happen out in the world. The introduction of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man app makes it super easy to find the things that need doing, to chase down side quests, and to know what my bonus objectives are before I have to go stop a crime. The entirety of SM:MM feels like they took all of the notes they got from the first game and incorporated them into this smaller sequel. It is just a better game over all, with only one exception coming to mind.

Just to get it out of the way, the one exception I have in mind is how many times I got struck in combat without either a spidey-sense warning that an attack was coming and how many times I was betrayed by the dodge failing to actually prevent me from getting hit because it automatically sent me in a weird backward jump that the enemy just hit without having to move more. The latter issue only really bothered me twice since the replacement for the focus bar (the Venom Bar) filled up much faster and seemed to heal me more (which is good, since it felt like every time I got hit a HUGE portion of my health bar vanished…), so I had less trouble in fights since every other part of combat seemed to proceed much more smoothly. The two times it was an issue was when I was attempting a challenge in two different combat gauntlets to get a max combo of, I believe, 60 and 75, and that was super difficult because I kept getting shot without getting a prompt to dodge, because I kept getting pushed into someone else’s oncoming attack by the particular dodge that was randomly selected when I tapped the Circle button, and because I kept getting blasted by AOE attacks that sometimes harmed me after they went off and sometimes didn’t (they left behind a pool of angry red lightning goop that I could sometimes walk through and sometimes couldn’t walk through, seemingly at random). The first of these challenges was the single most frustrated experience I’d had in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, but the second was much less frustrating because I was already fairly practiced at avoiding the weird quirks of the game by then. Also, it was still less frustrating than some of those bullshit drone, bomb, or Screwball chalanges from Spider-Man: Remastered, though, so I’d still chalk this up as an improvement in the grand scheme of the game.

Honestly, the best part of this entire game was the focus on local heroism, community action, and the threat that outsiders pose to tight-knit communities of people who are seen as unimportant or lesser-than. Most of the main action for the game happens in Harlem, where our new Spider-Man lives with his mother, in the days following Christmas while Miles in on his winter break from school. Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man, is out of the country doing some photography with his girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson, in a fictional country that was enduring a horrible civil war during the first game. Which came up since the authoritarian, fascist, and murderous force known as Sable is led by Silver Sable who was from that country and taking all these jobs to help fund the non-facist and non-authoritarian rebellion. I’ll admit that this small chunk of the SM:R DLC felt a little difficult to swallow, given the fact that I spent so much time preventing Sable forces from arresting people, stealing their belongings, and harming or killing people in the core game and then spent the DLC trying to stop Silver Sable from rampaging all over New York with a gunship that ABSOLUTELY killed people with collateral damage that the game just sorta ignores. Anyway, Peter Parker, friend to cops and murderous mercenaries, is away from New York and Miles takes over briefly as the city’s only Spider-Man.

Predictably, since we’re playing a game about this moment in time, things start to go wrong immediately. A local project by a shady, glad-handing businessman who bulldozed a bunch of local businesses and homes in Harlem in order to build some kind of experimental energy generator with the promise of endless, clean energy for the entire area and, eventually, all of New York, turns out to be a little more complex than it was described by said businessman. This, predictably, is opposed by the local community, including a childhood friend of Miles’ who is introduced as being a close friend that he lost contact with. Most of her initial lines are a bunch of portentous statements about her past with Miles, the present state of things, and the future of the community. It just really sets her up as full of secrets and we spend most of the game learning what they all are. If I had to offer a criticism of this plot and how it plays out, it would be that a literal genuis of technical ability who has, as a teen, developed world-changing technology, ultimately shows she has an incredibly limited imagination. That, or the plot hinges on the classic “person refuses to listen, becomes beligerent for no good reason, and accuses someone of being full of nothing but lies rather than ever listen to an explanation of a misunderstood situation.” Which might veer a bit into spoiler territory, but this game has been out for about three years now, so I’m sure its fine. It was a little frustrating, I’ll admit, but I’m perhaps willing to cut them a little slack since they’re fifteen-years-old and teenagers can be dumb as hell. Especially emotionally distraught teenagers, which both of them are. It’s fairly believable that communication and trust might break down pretty quickly in a situation like that.

The rest of the game, outside of this plot, focuses on Miles’ place in the community, both as a young man of the community and as the super hero working in it. While quests take Miles all over New York and there’s plenty of side-quests scattered around the city (and a limited selection of collectibles, of course) that you can access via the Spider-Man Help Request App (which is named something much more clever than that, but I feel that my name conveys the purpose of it more clearly), most of the plot developments happen in Miles’ local community. Lot of them take place not even that far from his home. There’s even a chain of side quests that deal with the local community of Harlem and a number of intrusive forces trying to make it a worse place for everyone to live by forcing out local business, destroying a homeless shelter, and messing with the local infrastructure. Miles solves all these problems not just as a Spider-Man of New York but as a Spider-Man from Harlem. When he’s eventually asked why he’s taking such an active interest in whats happening to Harlem when he could be swinging around any part of the city, he plainly tells them that he lives there too and it’s up to every member of the community to work together for the benefit of everyone. It’s a very nice change from the broader, less-personal sequence of events that drives Spider-Man: Remastered.

To wrap it all up, you should definitely play Spider-Man: Miles Morales if you enjoyed the PS4 Spider-Man game or the Remastered version for the PS5. If you like this kind of collectible, open-combat, traversal-focused game, I’d also recommend giving it a shot. The game does a great job of setting the plot up for you if you haven’t played SM:R, but it does skip over a lot of details that wind up being important for the post-credits stinger that hints at what is likely to come in Spider-Man 2 (which seems to be paying out already, even with the mere two hours of playtime I’ve given it so far). It’s really just a pleasant game if you enjoy good traversal, simple but smooth combat, and Spider-Man. I’d definitely suggest it if you want something to fill twenty to forty hours of game time.