Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS4)

     I'm a big fan of Miles Morales due to the Spider-Verse and the simple fact that he seems to be a fun character who nicely contrasts Peter. Peter was a jaded misanthrope as a teenager and outsider. Miles is a happy go-lucky kid. Peter is motivated by soul crushing guilt. Miles want to live up to his idol. Peter is the stereotypical 1960s nerd. Miles is a cool 21st century geek. Peter is so whitebread that he doesn't even have a cultural identity. Miles is biracial black and Hispanic. Yet both are heroic science heroes from New York that I love to follow the adventures of. 

The Rhino delivers a serious beatdown.

 

   I really loved Insomniac's Spider-Man game from last year, which I think was the second-best depiction of Spider-Man in decades. Basically, I grew up in the Eighties so the Peter Parker I was most familiar with was the adult man married to Mary Jane. As such, I tend to prefer an older Peter versus the attempts to de-age him to high school. Indeed, it was The Clone Saga followed by One More Day that put me off my favorite superhero for the better part of a a decade. 

    So, I was glad when they decided that the "teen hero" story of Spider-Man would be occupied by Miles in this spin-off game from the main title. While I'm very eager to see what happens in Spider-Man 2, I really was glad to see Miles get his own spin-off game. The one in the game is a bit of a mixture between the Spider-Verse and the comic book version but comes into his own quickly enough. This Miles lost his father to Mr. Negative in the previous game and is still suffering from both the financial as well as emotional turmoil losing a parent can do.

    The premise is that Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is leaving for Symkaria to have a working vacation with Mary Jane. Given that they're having a civil war, I'm not sure how relaxing that would be but he leaves the city to the freshly trained Miles. Miles is a little rough around the edges despite a year of training under Peter as he crashes a Osprey Police helicopter and accidentally releases the Rhino during his first mission. Miles manages to put down the supervillain by himself, though, proving that he has the potential to equal Peter.

The Tinkerer is surprisingly good.

    Much of the subsequent story deals with the sinister Roxxon Energy Corporation's attempt to build a clean energy reactor in the middle of Harlem. This being the Roxxon Corporation, there's something nasty afoot and Miles begins investigating it. He also has to fight off the Underground, a bunch of incredibly well-equipped juvenile delinquents that is led by a female version of the Tinkerer. Roxxon and the Underground are having an enemy civil war with Miles caught in the middle. No points for guessing that Miles super-genius best friend with a name suspiciously similar to the canon male Tinkerer's is wrapped up in all this.

    For the most part, this game plays very close to Insomniac's Spider-Man but has some key differences. Miles feels like he hits softer than Peter, so he's forced to rely on his Venom blast powers to make up the difference. He's also facing a gang of miniature supervillain as Roxxon's heavily armed sci-fi PMC troopers. Miles is only "lucky" enough to face ordinary gangsters a few times in the game proper. He also later develops camouflage powers and these make the stealth segments of the game much smoother than the original ones. A typical "fortress" mission is sneaking around and eliminating rooms of bad guys without being discovered versus dealing with waves of identical foes.

The game in a nutshell.

    Miles' supporting cast is well-developed with Ganke serving as his partner in crime. Well, crime-fighting. Ganke has created an app to help Spider-Man fight crime and the most unrealistic part of it is that it's not constantly being called by white women on people who look like Miles. Ooo, too topical? Well, there's also a BLM mural and it's beautiful. Rio Morales, Miles' mother, is also running for local government in order to oppose Roxxon's encroachment on Harlem. The main villain, Krieger, kind of just feels like a discount Dane Vogel. Which is a shame because Dane was a great corporate enemy. As for the Tinkerer? I really liked the build-up between her and Miles as archenemies.

    I feel like this game manages to earn its identity by focusing on the colorful nature of the environments as well as bad guys. The individual missions are more personalized and have a lot more character to them. The Underground reminds me of the Deckers baddies in Saints Row III, which feel like good opponents for Miles versus Peter. The music is also much more varied than the instrumental score of the main game. 

I love swinging around in the Spider-verse suit.

    The architecture of the game deserves a few notes as it's clear that Sony had some issues getting the rights to certain buildings. The Chrysler Building, Trump Tower (now the Rand Corporation Building), and Freedom Tower are some recognizable landmarks that don't appear in the game. Personally, I would have gone all in on using fictional substitutes when I couldn't get the rights but it is kind of weird since most of these were in the main game.

    If I had one complaint about the game, it's the length. If you do all of the side content, it'll be about twenty hours, which is about right but you can breeze right through the main story without difficulty. While I didn't expect this to be as long as the original game, I could have played a full price game without difficulty. Add some more supervillains as well as ordinary crooks to go along with Miles' supertech enemies and this would have been golden. As is, this is a very good but somewhat less filling game than it could have been.

8.5/10