In mid-February, the pretty dang buggy PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 got upgraded to Verified status on the Steam Deck. It was a few weeks after its first major patch, which brought some badly-needed stability and UI fixes, as well as auto-save backups.
Players were skeptical, to put it simply, because it just barely worked on the Steam Deck in the first place. You could hover around 30 fps, but you had to tweak it a lot, and it just wasn't very stable.
Over a month later, as of the end of March, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 now finds itself de-verified. Which I'm sure has happened before, but I'm not sure if it has happened to a game this high profile and high production value.
Either way, seems Valve now agrees with the user consensus: Spider-Man 2 is rated as "Playable" on the Steam Deck, and that it'll take some manual tweaks to your graphical settings to make it run decently.
Either way, port developer Nixxes is still hard at work on patches to address the graphical and performance issues. The most recent update—Patch 8—just released this week. It includes such beautiful gems of patch note wording as "improved performance in areas with trees."
PC Gamer's review of Spider-Man 2 rated a fairly dismal 57% back in February, with reviewer Robin Valentine summarizing it as "A flawed port of a flawed sequel."
"What you have is about 10 hours of pretty fun action and impressive spectacle intercut with another 10 hours of limp character moments," he said. "From a project this obviously big and expensive, it all feels disappointingly undercooked ... But not, it must be said, as undercooked as the port work."
