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We now have two Spider-Men on PC! | Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales - First Impressions

25K View2022-11-19

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the follow-up standalone expansion to this year’s PC release of Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, Continuing the first game’s story, more importantly its DLC “The City That Never Sleeps”. It introduces Miles Morales’ version of Spider-Man as the playable character and his “year one” activities in New York city.

Is it really standalone?

If you’re wondering if you can play Miles Morales without playing the first game’s DLC, or even the first game itself, worry not. Miles Morales will give you a short video recap of all the things that happened before, including his origin story. This is something comparable to the very cool character introduction scenes seen in the animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales plays and feels very much like the first game. The combat and animations feels just about as smooth as ever, but not without its own personality stamped onto it. For instance, Miles has a different set of moves and animations compared to Peter Parker. In contrast to Peter’s more experienced and serious swinging form, Miles has a more youthful and playful approach to it. Miles also has two new cool abilities which are invisibility and electricity. So gameplay wise, it will feel very familiar to old players while still introducing fresh stuff to keep you interested.

Perfecting the Spider-Man gameplay mechanics

To describe it for newcomers to the franchise, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (and the game that came before it) perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being Spider-Man. Swinging around in New York city, with total control over your maneuvers, responding to street crime. The combat is clearly inspired by the free flow combat of Batman Arkham and in a good way. Dodges and counters feel satisfying, the dopamine rush induced by performing really cool uninterrupted combo sequences are highly addicting.

A more intimate story

As for the story, it’s much more personal and more of a coming of age for Miles. We see Miles here as a newbie Spider-Man, with his own trials and tribulations. Again greatly in contrast with Peter’s much more experienced and middle-aged story in the previous game. Also, we have already seen Peter’s coming of age story in other incarnations multiple times, so seeing Miles here instead of reliving Peter’s origin story again makes for a nice change. Having said that, you might think it’s just a repeat or rerun of Into the Spider-Verse — it’s not — The story is unique and interesting enough in its own right and even more highly recommended for fans of that film.

Technical Performance

The game feels and plays very much like the PS5 version, only now with support for ultrawide and superwide resolutions and a higher graphics setting ceiling. Performance has been satisfactory so far, maintaining 60fps on a mixed of ultra and high settings running on my 6 core 12 thread RTX 3080 setup. I tested it on my secondary rig with a 4 core 8 thread RX 580 setup and it still ran well, albeit struggling to maintain 60fps due to CPU limitations. It is also tagged as "Verified" for the Steam Deck and runs well if you lock the performance to 40fps.

PC Release

At the moment, PC players should rejoice, now that all the recent Spider-Man games have now come to PC, with a proper port at that. Bringing uncapped performance and limitless visuals of the Spider-Man franchise to the PC platform. That is until Spider-Man 2 releases next year for 2023, exclusive to PS5. We might have to wait a year at best for that to come to PC, if it will ever come.

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