Through the past 3 months of my absence between my personal school projects and work, I have been extensively playing Spider-Man 2 with RetroAchievements on, and I could say without hesitation, the game holds up with modern Spider-Man games without flinching, and competes with a hardcore heart.

The city is fun to explore! once you got ahead of the mechanics to maneuver around the city, it becomes very fun AF. not only that, if you mastered your Aerial movement, web swinging, and not to hit the buildings all while keeping momentum and speed going, you can make some FIRE moves getting around the city with ease. I personally prefer this type of gameplay over the modern one, as it feels to automated for my liking, even after adjustment and the modern releases.

The combat feels simple but varied, and unhinged! you can pile drive a guy off a 1000ft building all the way down to their death, drown them if you're not feeling like going after them, hell, you can hang their corpses off the traffic light pole and leave them. the game just doesn't give a fuck, and it lets you do whatever you can imagine. the rag-doll physics, only add to the experience a ton more than you would think. I didn't mention the combat itself, which as stated, simple but varied. you can still pull out sick but powerful move, and the combat lets you experience a lot, and gain more skills as you go to encourage you to do multiple things and not just mash the [square] button over and over again. even Bruce Campbell will comment on this many time throughout your gameplay.

There is a decent web system in the game that lets you do more than just the bad guy up, and with the combat, it can be insane what you can do with it.

The Graphics, oh, I just love the graphics of this game so much! it has a calm style that somewhat is very relaxing yet at the same time, just beautiful. the sunset is amazing, the night's blue light sky is an experience! I did notice an issue with texture streaming that I had went back to confirm with the original hardware, and it was there. it has something to do with the draw distance, but it's very annoying not to notice once you see it. it also on the GameCube version. not sure about the Xbox, but will have to look it up.

The story is... not bad? I don't know, honestly. it just works for the job it did. the in-between main missions like Mysterio, Rhino, Shocker, Black Cat, and some part of the original movie were very interesting, but the Doc Ock plot felt very rushed and unfinished. speaking of rushed and unfinished; let me tell you about the content and problems that I found in the game.

I enjoyed the previous game's side content a lot. while some are beyond ridiculous in difficulty, they were still doable. in this game, they expanded some of the previous and altered some. adding the likes of Pizza missions, taking photos, MJ races, Survival, collecting tokens, and city events to make the world living. while exploring and playing some of those missions, you will realize there are a shit-ton of cut content was taken off the game. so many unused interiors, and special places that went unnoticed. there is also rare side mission of a bank heist (by 2004 slandered) that you will barely find during your play time, because it only happens during one specific area, that was probably going to be used originally, but wasn't. the Lizard and the other witch boss lady?! there are bugs that will stop your progression entirely if you got a car robbery mission during the sunset, sunrise time, which after completion will soft lock the game and you are still in the side mission unable to finish and you have to start from the last save. the camera is horrendous! there is also a bug after the first or second black cat chase that will make the peds not move at all until you restart the game with the save file. there is a bug that if you got 100.96%, you will not get the award that says you completed the game. (there is a workaround to get it, but still)

The game really needed more time in the oven to Cook. it would have been The best spider-man game of all time even by today's standards.

nonetheless of all the troubles I had with the game, it was still a pure joyful experience to go through, and the game genuinely holds up way better than I thought.

If you've heard nothing but high praise for this game, Imma keep it real with you: it's really only for the web-swinging. Everything else is kinda meh, but enjoyably meh, like a cheesy pizza at a theme park.

To be fair, the web-swinging is pretty cool, and still kinda unique. It was the first Spidey game to have realistic swinging, with webs that actually attached to buildings instead of just up in the air. The modern Insomniac games look dang good, but have a more automated and player-directed mode of swinging, whereas this one is more physics-based and kinda slippery, but in a good way. It won't feel perfectly fluid and it won't look impeccably polished, but there's a one-to-one-ness with the swinging that arguably hasn't been recaptured since. Plenty of times I boot this up just to web swing around and hit the zone.

Oh yeah, the other stuff. Umm...

Story's alright, combat's fun, levels can get creative, voice acting is... alright (listen, I grew up with the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, and even I have to admit, a voice actor he ain't. I'm not even sure he's that good of a regular actor.)

If you're a fan of the webhead at all, you'll probably enjoy this game, if only for the historically impressive web swinging mechanics. If not, I wouldn't say no, but don't expect this to be a hyper-polished Insomniac title. It's a charming cult classic whose web-swinging mechanics are worthy of its praise (at least, at the time) but understand: that's really all you're getting.

But hey, that might be enough. It is pretty damn fun web swinging, after all.