Review — Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Nicolas Van Hoorde
Tasta
Published in
3 min readDec 30, 2020

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Become everyone’s friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man as Miles Morales takes up the mantle in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Those who closely followed the lead up to the PlayStation 5’s release, know that PlayStation 4’s Spider-Man was used multiple times as a sort of tech demo to demonstrate the blazing loading speeds of the new hardware. People were so impressed, Insomniac decided to create a stand-alone expansion based on their 2018 release. Enter Miles Morales…

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales shouldn’t be considered an entirely new Spider-Man instalment. The game is set in the exact same New York map as the original (although it is a “winter” version), the gameplay is 90% the same and the structure of the game, including menus, skill tree, et cetera are completely borrowed from the original. At the same time, Miles Morales is and feels more than just DLC, as it comes with a new protagonist (Miles Morales), new types of enemies, a few new combat moves, a completely new story and a nice bunch of side-content, totalling to about 8 to 10 hours of gameplay.

Weird beast

This makes Miles Morales a weird beast to judge, as it feels substantial in some parts and quite meagre in other parts, when comparing to the OG game. The same goes for the PlayStation 5 feeling you’d expect from a next-generation launch title. Yes, the loading times are impressive and unseen even on PC. But at the same time, the game visually doesn’t look that much better than its PlayStation 4 counterparts, since it’s in fact a PlayStation 4 game at its heart.

The game itself stays as fluent and fun to play as its predecessor. Swinging around New York is as satisfying as ever and the Batman-style combat still feels very rewarding while remaining challenging from time to time. The story is exciting enough to keep you going and in times where games are unnecessarily long and stretched out (hello Assassin’s Creed Valhalla), having a focused story experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome is kinda refreshing.

Loading times demonstrated. Get ready to be amazed!

In essence, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a stellar videogame. At the right price point that is. For players new to Insomniac’s Spider-Man, the 70 bucks for both the remastered original game plus Miles Morales is a no-brainer. The 60 bucks for players that already played and finished the original game, the value proposition is harder to defend. My recommendation would be to wait until it drops to about 40 to really get bang for your buck. But even at its current price, Miles Morales will always be an enjoyable experience.

4/5

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.
Review code provided by publisher.

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Architect of @get_delta. Also doing some videogame-y stuff for @tastatv