It's Spider-men now.
The plot takes place some time after the original game, with Peter showing Miles the ropes, but it's not too soon before Peter gets nerfed so that Rhyno easily wrecks him so that Miles can, in turn, easily defeat Rhyno. It felt forced, but thankfully that's about the only shilling they do in the game, afterwards Peter takes some time off to go abroad and leaves Miles as New York's only Spider-man. Seeing Miles come into his own felt pretty well done, and he makes for a slightly younger and dorkier Spider-man, which is quite endearing. And it's hard not to smile then the people of Harlem start calling him 'our' Spider-man. Oh! And for returning PS4 players, Pete has a new face and it looks terrible. He has a larger frame than Miles, and is supposed to be older... but his face looks like a baby's. It's awful.
That said, the plot has kind of a big issue... it's highly political. From the usual wokeness of having white people being the biggest bad in the entire world, I swear, about the only named white characters, Peter is the only good one. Once again, the plot is about an evil white rich man, as per usual. The black villains are portrayed as sympathetic... and it works in the case of the Prowler, but as far as The Tinkerer goes... Yeah, they are very unlikeable and only come off as worse than the mandatory generic evil white guy. They also have characters for every color, there's a girl that mentions her girlfriend in a very forced way and is never seen again, and then there's a deaf character too. Incidentally, the deaf character was my favorite, she is a bundle of smiles and however sparse and brief her scenes were... I loved her. I hope she makes it into Spider-man 2! Lastly, they even shoe-horned in a BLM mural, which is funny considering how shady BLM is and how it has nothing to do with the game. And then there's a character mentioning how debates are not about who's right but about who talks the loudest, which is true, but once again, it takes me out of the game since it means to make social commentary about modern times. And it doesn't matter if I agree with the political messages it's forcing down my throat or not, it comes out as preachy and completely threw the immersion away.
Before getting into the nitty gritty, they added some very welcome options when it comes to QTEs, namely, automatically passing them AND being able to hold down a button instead of tapping it. Thank you, devs!
As for the game itself, it's much shorter than the original, and it reuses the same New York City, albeit now taking place in a very snowy winter. It looks pretty good! There are new collectible and crime analogues to the ones in the original game, so don't worry, if you like collecting goobers and what not, it's all here, albeit in a more limited fashion. Miles even gets a fair amount of costumes to collect, which is always a boon in Spider-Man games.
Miles is weaker than Pete, and has access to less gadgets, however, the Focus gauge is now the Venom gauge, and you can use this gauge to perform all sort of Venom attacks by holding down L1. It makes Miles a ton of fun to use, because hitting enemies with Venom stuns them for a while and makes enemies take more damage for a short while, so Mile's fighting style is speedier and built around landing venom attacks to make enemies more susceptible to Mile's attacks. I think they did a fantastic job at differentiating both characters, and I hope they build around this for the sequel.
In a funny twist of fate, I think the shorter length and smaller scale of this game is actually a positive. Modern open-world games can feel very bloated with worthless collectibles and what not, but in this case it feels just right. The game takes about 6-7 hours to finish if you don't dabble in the extra content, something I know because I did a second playthrough to get the Platinum, but the extra content adds quite a bit more, without it feeling like filler.
Miles Morales is a pretty great game, I mean, of course, it uses all the basic elements from the original, which were already good to begin with! The swinging feels really good, and I think I appreciated how it feels and looks a bit more this time around, the combat is also pretty fun, and I loved the new Venom powers. I also loved this take on Miles, and I love his friendship with Pete. If anything, maybe, I would've added more time of Miles being a sidekick before becoming Pete's equal, because I've always loved seeing a character graduate from sidekick(Robin) to his own hero(Nightwing!), but that's just a personal thing, as I felt the plot worked really well, shame about all the cringy political stuff.
8.5
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