Marvel's Spider-Man 2: The Traversal Is the Game

There is a point, maybe forty minutes into Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, where the game hands you web wings and asks you to glide off a rooftop into open air over Manhattan, and the thing that happens next has almost nothing to do with the symbiote plot the marketing sold. It’s just movement. It’s the best movement this genre has ever produced, and it’s worth reviewing the game almost entirely on that basis, because everything else it does is in service of getting you back into the air faster.

Insomniac Games shipped Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5 on 20 October 2023, a sequel to 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man and 2020’s Miles Morales spin-off, again playable as both Peter Parker and Miles Morales with the ability to switch between them at will outside of fixed story beats. The plot brings in the Venom symbiote and Kraven the Hunter alongside the returning cast, and the two-hero structure is the headline feature on paper. The traversal upgrade is the one that actually changes how the game feels to hold.

Why the loop works: momentum as a resource

The original Spider-Man’s web-swinging was already the genre’s high bar — physically modelled lines that had to anchor to actual geometry rather than an invisible ceiling, building real momentum that a skilled player could chain into ever-faster arcs across the city. Spider-Man 2 takes that base and adds two things that change its texture rather than just its speed: web wings, which let Peter or Miles glide and use wind currents and updrafts around the city’s skyscrapers to gain height without a web-line at all, and faster web-zip verticality that lets a swing chain directly into a wall-run or a dive.

The result is that momentum becomes a resource the player manages continuously rather than a state that resets between swings. A glide can be converted back into height by diving toward a building and web-zipping off its face; a fall can be arrested by catching an updraft; a swing that’s about to hit the ground can be rescued by a wing-assisted bank into another arc. None of that is explained in a tutorial screen so much as it’s discovered by playing, and the discovery curve — realising you can chain glide into swing into dive into swing without your feet touching a rooftop for a full city block — is the actual pleasure the marketing under-sold by leading with the symbiote instead.

Fast travel exists, loading in a few seconds through a subway-themed transition, but the game is engineered so that using it feels like admitting defeat rather than saving time — a rare case of a modern open-world design correctly diagnosing why fast travel usually costs more than it saves and then building a traversal system good enough that most players opt out of the convenience it still, generously, offers.

The ancestor: this is what Titanfall 2’s movement wanted to grow into

The clearest systems ancestor for this traversal design isn’t another open-world game at all — it’s Titanfall 2’s pilot movement, wall-running and double-jumping through a linear campaign that treated momentum as the core skill expression of the whole game, a case made at length here. Respawn’s pilots never got an open world big enough to prove the movement could sustain itself outside curated set-pieces; Spider-Man 2 is effectively the answer to what that movement grammar looks like when you hand it an entire city instead of a corridor. Momentum-as-resource, chained verticality, a traversal skill ceiling that rewards practice over button-mashing — the DNA is the same, just given the scale Respawn’s campaign structure never had room to offer.

The other useful comparison is negative: this is exactly what a traversal system looks like when a studio refuses to let the quest marker replace spatial memory. Insomniac’s New York is dense enough and distinctive enough, borough by borough, that returning players start navigating by skyline rather than by HUD icon within a handful of hours, which is the opposite instinct to the waypoint-dependent navigation this site has argued against elsewhere.

The map grew, and the traversal is why that matters

Spider-Man 2 expands the playable map beyond the first two games’ Manhattan to include Brooklyn and Queens, and the expansion is the clearest evidence that Insomniac designed the traversal system first and the map second rather than the other way round. A wider map with the original game’s swing-only movement would have meant longer stretches of empty air between skyscrapers, since Brooklyn and Queens are lower and less densely vertical than Manhattan’s core. Web wings solve that problem structurally: gliding across a borough with fewer tall anchor points is viable in a way pure web-swinging wouldn’t be, so the new movement option isn’t just a speed upgrade, it’s the mechanism that made expanding the map survivable at all. Building the traversal upgrade before greenlighting the bigger map, rather than bolting new movement onto an unchanged one, is the kind of ordering decision that rarely gets credited in a review but shows up in every single minute of play.

The city itself carries real specificity borough to borough — Queens reads as residential and low-rise in a way that changes the rhythm of a glide compared to Manhattan’s canyon of towers, and Brooklyn’s mix of industrial waterfront and brownstone streets gives the traversal system a third texture to work with. None of that would matter if the underlying movement couldn’t adapt to it, which is the whole argument for treating traversal as the primary system under review rather than a delivery mechanism for the plot.

Two heroes, one traversal grammar

The dual-protagonist structure could have diluted the traversal work by giving Miles and Peter different enough movesets that switching characters meant relearning momentum each time. Insomniac avoided that by keeping the swing-and-glide grammar identical between them and reserving the differences for combat: Miles retains his bioelectric Venom-branded powers and camouflage from the first game, distinct from Peter’s newly acquired symbiote abilities later in the story, but both characters read New York’s skyline the same way. That’s a disciplined design choice — the temptation to make each hero mechanically distinct in every system must have been real, and Insomniac resisted it exactly where distinctiveness would have cost the game its best asset.

Combat itself iterates on the established Arkham-lineage rhythm of attack-and-counter with gadget variety layered on top, competent without reinventing what the first two games already proved. It’s traversal that carries the sequel, and the game’s own pacing seems to know it — missions are stitched together by swings and glides long enough that combat encounters read as punctuation rather than the main event.

The symbiote abilities Peter gains partway through the story are the one place combat briefly competes with traversal for attention, adding tendril grabs and a rage-state finisher that changes his silhouette and animation set noticeably from Miles’ bioelectric kit. It’s a genuine third moveset rather than a reskin, and it’s introduced late enough that it reads as an escalation of stakes rather than a system the game leans on from the start. Even so, the symbiote’s combat flourishes are the part of the sequel most likely to feel familiar to anyone who played the first game’s gadget progression — inventive within a rhythm that’s now three games old, rather than a genuine departure from it.

The hardware is part of the design

It’s fair to credit the PS5 platform itself for part of what makes the traversal land the way it does. The SSD-backed fast loading means the subway fast-travel transition genuinely takes a couple of seconds rather than the tolerable-but-noticeable pause of the 2018 game on PS4, which removes one of the few structural reasons a player would default to fast travel over swinging in the first place. The DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers give web-shooting and the wing-glide’s directional air resistance a tactile signal that a standard controller couldn’t produce, reinforcing exactly the momentum-management feedback loop the traversal design depends on. That’s a case of a platform’s specific hardware being leveraged for a mechanical purpose rather than a marketing checkbox, and it’s part of why the sequel’s movement reads as a generational step rather than an incremental patch on the original engine.

The verdict, and where to swing next

The side content is worth a specific mention because it’s shaped by the same traversal-first logic. MJ’s stealth-focused missions return from the first two games, now with a non-lethal takedown tool, and they work as a deliberate change of pace precisely because they strip the swinging away — the contrast makes you feel how much of the rest of the game’s rhythm depends on being airborne. Black Cat’s side missions, built around a rooftop chase structure, exist almost entirely to give the wing-glide system a dedicated showcase outside the main story, which is as clear a signal as a developer can send about which system they’re proudest of.

Spider-Man 2 is worth playing for the two hours it takes to stop noticing you’re playing a superhero game and start noticing you’re playing a movement game, at which point the story’s twists become the thing happening in the gaps between building tops rather than the reason you picked the controller up. The symbiote plot and the Kraven hunt are competently told, well performed, and almost beside the point next to what Insomniac did to the verb “swing.”

Anyone who wants the traversal-as-mastery feeling without the licensed universe should go back to Titanfall 2’s campaign for the purest distillation of the same idea in a shorter, cheaper package; anyone who wants to see where that movement grammar goes when it’s given an entire open city is already in the right place.

Spoilers below

Peter’s arc with the symbiote suit follows the broadly familiar shape of the character’s comic and film history — increased aggression and power paired with a personality corruption that alienates his allies — resolved through a climactic separation from the suit rather than a permanent bonding, which frees Kraven’s own hunt-focused storyline to conclude on his own terms, separate from the symbiote plot, in a way that leaves Venom’s eventual comic- accurate host ambiguous going into any future instalment. Miles’ half of the story deals more directly with his mother Rio Morales’s political career and the personal cost of his double life bleeding into it, giving the two heroes genuinely different emotional stakes even while sharing one traversal system.