With its arrival on PC, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 brings with it another solid launch effort from everyone’s favourite porting house, Nixxies.
Despite some minor graphical glitches and some early in-game crashes, which thankfully have seemingly been mostly alleviated with a hotfix that dropped during the writing of this review, Spider-Man 2 on PC is among one of the better PC ports to release in recent memory.
Still, Spider-Man 2, in its current state on PC, isn’t without its flaws. Most notably, the game currently suffers from some very apparent artifacting during cutscenes with raytracing enabled on my AMD 7900XTX. Thankfully, they are still less egregious than some of the issues I had with Ghost of Tsushima on launch, which forced me to downgrade my drivers to get the best playable version of the game at that time.
One aspect of Spider-Man 2’s arrival on PC that I was interested in checking out was how the game would fair running on an older SSD. With its initial release on console, the title seemingly took advantage of gen 4 NVME drives on the PlayStation 5 to deliver a seamless experience when loading in assets.
“Spider-Man 2 on PC is among one of the better PC ports to release in recent memory.”
On my desktop, I installed Spider-Man 2 onto my Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD, which has a read speed of around 550mbs, and outside of some minor pop-in when loading into cutscenes or swinging around the city, Spider-Man 2 performed close to its initial PlayStation 5 release. Switching between Peter and Miles felt seamless, as did transitioning from cutscenes to gameplay, with the only real notable instance of loading stemming from its initial launch, which felt a few seconds longer than playing on the console.
After the controversy with Helldivers II requiring a mandatory PlayStation Network account, even on PC, it seems Sony has decided to make logging into PSN optional going forward. Spider-Man 2 allows players to skip it entirely. As a bonus, those who opt-in for the PSN integration will receive in-game bonuses, which, in Spider-Man 2’s case, give players the Spider-Man 2099 skins for both Pete and Miles, respectively.
“Switching between Peter and Miles felt seamless, as did transitioning from cutscenes to gameplay.”
Sadly, if you were hoping for a free Platinum trophy, as was the case with Spider-Man Remastered on PS5, which allowed importing saves from the PS4 game, Spider-Man 2 on PC, like other PlayStation PC releases, share the same trophy data from their PS5 equivalents, meaning no additional trophies for you!
On more pressing matters, in terms of performance, Spider-Man 2 running on my Zen 2 machine coupled with the AMD 7900XTX and 32GBs of RAM resulted in a hitch-free and smooth gameplay experience. Despite not seeing any form of shader compilation upon first boot, Spider-Man 2 during outdoor sections ran an average of 130 FPS, with drops to 87FPS via FSR 3.1 on high settings with raytracing enabled.
In-door or story-based missions in the game, such as the sequence on the Raft, netted an average of 150 FPS. But thanks to VRR, even outdoor sequences where the FPS dropped did not distract or slow down the overall experience.
Ultimately, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s PC release is a good one, with the most egregious of issues seemingly already ironed out, at least on my setup, which likely means Nixxies will only continue to improve the title as it matures.
