The arrival of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC should have been a serious way to kickstart the 2025 season of gaming, alas, it hasn't been that well received.
I'm still in the process of installing the game myself to try out on my desktop and handheld PCs. But it doesn't take long looking at Steam to see all isn't well with the latest PlayStation title to make the leap from console to PC.
Reviews on Steam are currently rated as "Mixed" which is a far cry from the "Overwhelmingly Positive" that Spider-Man Remastered sits at, or the "Very Positive" rating for Spider-Man: Miles Morales. So what's going on?
Mostly it's down to graphical issues. Spider-Man 2 is a fairly demanding title if you want to crank up all the detail and add some ray tracing, but it has a low barrier to entry. Nevertheless, some of the reviews make for grim reading.
Here are a selection of the negative reviews detailing what's going on.
"Hold off on buying until they get a couple of stabilization patches out because holy hell. To say this is "rough" is an understatement. Lighting doesn't load in some cutscenes, those same scenes run at seconds-per-frame, audio desync issues up the wazoo, freezing, stuttering, and just about every other performance issue I can think of."
"No wonder they did zero advertising for this PC Port... Crashing every 10 minutes. Big disappointment."A problem has occurred with your display driver. This can be caused by out of date drivers, using game settings higher than your GPU can handle, an overheating GPU, or an error with the game. Please try updating your graphics drivers, or lowering your in-game settings."
"I was extremely excited for this game, and while the game play is good; unfortunately, the technical state of this port is poor. DLSS is broken and causes significant dithering on hair and shadows (only ray traced.) There is also a significant cost (7%) associated with ray reconstruction on my 4070 (both with CNN and transformer) which just doesn't seem right. Frame gen is almost a must to avoid CPU related issues. This is all barring the constant crashes. The game has crashed 5 times for me now, it's been an hour."
"Basically unplayable unless you want to spend another £3000 on a new graphics card, tried running on RTX 4090 with lowest settings and still not managing to get it playable. Either wait out stabilisation patch or save your money altogether!"
There are also reports of unusual VRAM usage, and even that changing the settings in-game can cause it to crash.
What's probably grating most suffering these issues is that there has been no public message from Nixxes, the Sony studio responsible for the port, or Insomniac, the studio that originally made the game.
The sage advice right now might be to hold off buying until some fixes have been pushed out. Based on the quality of the first two games on PC, I have no doubt they'll get it right, but it's still sad to see another big title seemingly rushed out. Players deserve better. Spider-Man deserves better.
