Summary

• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 offers an assistance mechanic to make travel easier, but turning it down enhances the experience and adds a layer of skill and mastery.
• Adjusting assistance can significantly impact gameplay, providing a more rewarding and engaging experience.
• Adding fall damage in Spider-Man 2 adds stakes to traversal and offers a throwback to older Spider-Man games.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 features several distinct difficulty modes, but it's possible to accidentally play the game on training wheels without even selecting the overall easy mode. Like the first Marvel's Spider-Man, a huge focus of the game is enabling the sensation of web-slinging like the pros, and the game nudges this along in a number of ways, both obvious and subtle. Although it can be nice to have a helping hand, one particular feature takes too much control away for the sake of streamlining, making for an ultimately less engaging experience overall.

It's not uncommon for games to provide a little surreptitious assistance, and there can sometimes be a lot to gain from the care taken in this regard. Aim assist can make console shooters more fun to play, and smart steering in Mario Kart can make it easier for newcomers or children to get a hang of driving on narrow winding tracks. Tipping things too far in this direction, however, lowers the skill ceiling of true mastery and gives a certain sense of autopilot to gameplay, making it easy to lose interest or look for something that provides greater freedom and involvement.

Swing Steering Assistance Is Too High In Spider-Man 2

It may not always be immediately noticeable, but Marvel's Spider-Man 2 offers its own form of steering assistance for swinging between the skyscrapers of New York City. Labeled Swing Steering Assistance, the default setting for this feature is 10, which maxes out the game's involvement in traversal. This choice helps make Marvel's Spider-Man 2 easy to pick up and play, but it can make it feel like the game is doing all the work, with occasional button presses essentially acting as enough to navigate the city without trouble.

Turning Swing Steering Assistance down quickly adds another layer of interest to web-slinging, forcing the player to step up to the plate to truly conquer the art of navigation. Although bottoming the setting out entirely can remove too much of the fluidity and fun that make swinging through the city so engaging, picking something in the range of 3-5 makes for a much better balance than the default setting. Peter and Miles may no longer feel quite as effortless to control, but the experience of mastering their movement is significantly more rewarding, and the results can still look and feel seamless in motion.

It's easy never to realize that Swing Steering Assistance exists or can be adjusted, but turning an intentional blind eye is a waste of Marvel Spider-Man 2's full potential. Ratcheting it down for even a minute quickly makes the difference in gameplay obvious, and it's hard to go back to the default without feeling a sense of stepping back inside Plato's cave after seeing the outside world for the first time. Finding the perfect balance can take a few minutes, but there's ultimately no wrong way to play, so whatever feels right should do just fine for any playthrough.

What Spider-Man 2 Swing Steering Assistance Does

Swing Steering Assistance is more than just one basic function; its overall intent is to keep Spider-Man in the air, maintaining forward momentum easily and enabling him to pick up plenty of speed. Holding an analog stick forward and shooting webs is essentially enough to stay on course, as nuanced effects of angles are essentially tossed out of the window. It's also possible for Spider-Man to pick up height before the arc of his webs would manage it, as shooting a web at basically any point before touching the ground will keep him in the air.

Setting Swing Steering Assistance to 0 turns off all of this help, making it difficult to avoid careening in unfortunate directions and whacking into obstacles without plenty of practice. Finding a comfortable balance in between keeps the base functions that make web-slinging fun and fast in place while requiring some level of skill to control direction and momentum. This system will feel much more comfortable for veterans of older Spider-Man games, although Insomniac's sophisticated animations and movement tech remain in place.

Fall Damage Is Another Way To Make Spider-Man 2 Harder

Another setting new to Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is the option to add fall damage, which can give a missed swing devastating consequences. Although developer Insomniac Games' previous Spider-Man titles stuck purely to web-slinging without consequences, fall damage hearkens back to the approach taken by some older Spider-Man titles in a similar manner to reduced Swing Steering Assistance. It's not a setting that everyone will enjoy, but considering the generally strong history of Spider-Man games, this can be a nice throwback to a different style of gaming and an interesting way to ramp up the stakes in traversal.

Spider-Man has a history of surviving many rough falls in comics and other media, as his enhanced abilities give him a unique level of resistance to forces that could be fatal to regular humans. The lack of any punishment for making a critical mistake in a video game, however, can make web-slinging feel somewhat trivial, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has skills to unlock that offer significantly more interesting powers instead. There's nothing wrong with preferring to avoid friction in this gameplay element, as challenge can be found in missions and combat, but embracing the potential of failure adds an extra sense of thrill to every big swing.

At the end of the day, there's no shame in keeping the easier settings turned on in Marvel's Spider-Man 2, as both it and its direct predecessors have been principally designed around these assists. Exploring the other options, however, can lead to enormous amounts of fun and a truly rewarding sense of mastery that's significantly more difficult to find with assists in place, and making the choice available is an excellent method of appealing to all skill sets. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 gives the freedom back to players in a big way, but it's all too easy to play with Swing Steering Assistance without knowing there's any alternative.