Good Distractions

With Armored Core VI in the rearview, I’ve dived headfirst into Spider-Man 2. I’ve played a good amount, but I’m still early in the story — I keep getting distracted. Like the first one, this takes place in Manhattan, New York (with the addition of an abbreviated Brooklyn and Queens). Just like in real life, there’s a lot to do in the city, and, as Bono said,

“In New York you can forget,
Forget how to sit still.”

I’m not always a fan of typical open-world games: there are all those things to do, a bunch of icons on a map to visit, a long checklist of a game. Spider-Man 2 is a delightful exception to that frustration. It might be in part due to just how good it feels to be moving around the city. The stinking mechanic is fun and feels responsive to your surroundings so navigating through the city means actually having to account for the buildings that surround you. Moving is fun, so going to those little icons on the map doesn’t feel like a chore.

Also for how much there is to do in the game, it doesn’t feel like there’s too much. Thus far the assorted side quests feel plentiful, but not grueling. They are, for the most part, quick diversions and have enough variation amongst themselves to not feel rote. Splicing plant genes for this community garden means finding the leaks in the pipes to irrigate them, but for that garden, you’ve gotta find the goons that stole a rare plant from the local university. It’s small tweaks, but enough that things feel mechanically interesting.

But, perhaps most of all, it’s because it’s New York. I’m biased here, having lived in the city for nearly ten years, but there’s a particular joy to seeing an anomaly in the West Village and then realizing it was hanging out in the stand-in for the Whitney. So much of New York is lovingly rendered in the game (including beautifully tiny details like the late NYU Timekeeper) that traipsing about and realizing where I am is a joy unto itself. This was a major appeal of the first game, and it’s back again this time. I know I gotta gotta go over there and see what Kraven the Hunter is up to, but first, there’s something happening over in Bushwick I wanna check out.