Highlights

  • Marvel's Spider-Man 2 impresses with its technical performance, offering stunning open-world traversal and fast travel with practically no loading times on the PS5.
  • Insomniac Games is known for incorporating features from its previous games into its future projects, such as the traversal mechanics inspired by Sunset Overdrive in Marvel's Spider-Man.
  • The sequel has abandoned the gadget wheel feature from the previous games, opting for face button inputs instead, which allows for the inclusion of unique abilities but limits the number of gadgets to four.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 might not be an immediately noticeable upgrade over its predecessors in terms of visuals, regardless of how impressive the fidelity of these games is. But where it truly shines is in its technical performance, draining as much juice out of the PS5 as it can to create stunning open-world traversal with practically no loading times in fast travel. Insomniac is the kind of developer whose work always seems to influence and enhance its future work, with obvious tethers created between each concerning how they are all designed.

Sunset Overdrive clearly displayed Insomniac’s traversal talents that would then inspire the traversal of Marvel’s Spider-Man, for instance, while Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s instantly loading portals would then inspire the portal rifts Miles pursues Black Cat through in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. It’s been interesting to see what features carry over into future games and it’s now presumed that Marvel’s Wolverine will have a parry mechanic. However, Spider-Man’s trusty gadget wheel has now vanished in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and that might mean Insomniac has found a reason to shelve it indefinitely.

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Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Has Bid Farewell to Insomniac’s Weapon Wheels

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Abandons a Gadget Wheel for Face Buttons

Besides Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s web wings being a show-stopper of a mechanic, arguably the most alarming disruption of players’ muscle memories is the fact that there is no gadget wheel in the sequel. Both Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales featured a gadget wheel for players to select their equipment from, included as a paramount feature players would be cycling through constantly in strategic scenarios or impromptu encounters alike.

This made sense as a feature for several reasons, particularly due to how many gadgets Peter had in the original game, but it was likely an easy transition for Insomniac after it had utilized weapon wheels in the Ratchet and Clank franchise as well as Sunset Overdrive. That said, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 added unique abilities alongside gadget equipment this time around and Insomniac needed to reevaluate how players would interact with its interface.

This resulted in two assortments of face button inputs, one while pressing L1 and one while pressing R1. Pressing one of these bumpers while also pressing a face button now allows the former to trigger abilities and the latter to trigger gadgets, which essentially meant that Insomniac would need to limit its Spider-Men to four gadgets (excluding a default web-shooter that is always equipped now).

Insomniac May Be Abandoning Weapon Wheels in the Future

If this is any sign of what future Insomniac games may look like, there might not be any point behind a weapon or gadget wheel ever returning to its gameplay design formula. Of course, if a future Insomniac game isn’t as mechanically comprehensive as the two-protagonist Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 it might not need more than a weapon wheel to sort out its associable inventory. Still, such item wheels may be an antique nowadays if they are yet another piece of gameplay that slows the experience down even a little.

These wheels are helpful in that way since they can almost pause the action momentarily as players scramble to decide what weapon or gadget to select, and one concern Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 might make sense of is the idea that players are encouraged to spam face buttons rather than tactfully approach the game’s mechanics. It’ll be tremendously interesting now to see if a weapon or gadget wheel returns in future Insomniac games, though it seems like a game such as Marvel’s Wolverine could easily adapt the face button schema instead and definitively shelf inventory wheels.