Sony's PlayStation's Insomniac's Disney's Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Sony's PlayStation's Insomniac's Disney's Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Spider-Man (2018) was great. Miles Morales is okay.
In 2017 Naughty Dog released Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, a $40 expansion pack for Uncharted 4 wherein the player took control of Chloe Fraser (Claudia Black) and went on another generic Indiana Jones adventure, this time as a girl. Maybe it was my love for Black as an actress--her performance of Morrigan in Dragon Age most particularly--or maybe it was the excellent level design, but I liked Lost Legacy a lot. It's a great value for the reduced price tag and a much better experience than the bloated, although still decent, UC4. I was therefore looking forward to more Sony titles receiving the same "expandalone" treatment.
And so we arrive at Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (and yes, that's its actual full title, in case we confused the game with DC's Spider-Man, or perhaps Chase Bank's Spider-Man). A more focused, more direct take on insomniac's generally very good Spider-Man (2018). Sign me up!
On Spider-Man (2018)
Spiderman (2018) was a bloated but enjoyable and surprisingly well-written open world game. I enjoyed it overall and I'd recommend it to almost anyone. If you can look past the stupidity that is superhero fiction in general, which is something I struggle with, then there's a lot of neat stuff. I particularly like its traversal mechanics, which solve the fundamental issue of most open world games through making travel actually fun to do, and the relationship between Peter and Mary Jane, which I found a grounding force in an otherwise completely absurd world.
Exit Spider-Man, Enter Spider-Man
So Pete is mostly gone and with him Mary Jane--on vacation to Europe, apparently. Now we assume control of Miles Morales, that annoying kid from the last game and that animated movie, who is very confusingly also referred to only as "Spider-Man" when wearing his mask.
I'm not sure what name I'd give to Miles' version of the human spider, but it'd really be nice if there were some way to differentiate them.
Anyway, Miles isn't that bad. He's about the same as Peter but slightly less fun, and mercifully much less annoying than he was in 2018. I've seen Into the Spiderverse and obviously played the previous game, which told his origin story, but otherwise knew absolutely nothing about the character.
This is a large sticking point for me.
But before I get to that, I want to mention that I find Miles-as-the-Spider-Man in this Spider-Man universe to be completely tasteless.
Spider-Woman
In the last game Miles was a kid who was helpful and supportive and had endured tragedy, but basically did nothing whatsoever to earn his powers. He was randomly bitten by a spider that was transported to the F.E.A.S.T HQ near the end of the game; it all came down to chance.
Well, what issue is there to have with that? Pete also earned his powers via chance. So he gets a spider in his pants, transports it home, it bites Miles, makes sense, right?
Except the spider didn't catch its ride on Peter Parker. It caught its ride on Mary Jane.
This offended me at the time and I'm still not over it. A lot of people dislike the Mary Jane sequences of the previous game, and understandably so: she isn't Spider-Man, get her the fuck outta here so I can get back to web-slinging. But there's a lot of interesting stuff going on when you see the world from her perspective. Watching Spider-Man fights supervillains while trapped in the body of an utterly mundane woman is terrifying. It gives an entirely different color to the world of superhero fiction: what would it be like to be YOU in a world where Spider-Man really exists?
The answer is fucking horrible.
I like how MJ is written in the game--she's tough and brave and cool--but I especially like that we get to see her genuinely heroic actions from first person, effectively. It's easy for Spider-Man to flip cars and fight bad guys, but it's hard for MJ. She really is heroic. She risks her life in genuinely endearing ways. She's also intel for Pete, acting as his Cortana (basically), and is just fun all around.
...except not. It turns out that spider jumps onto her and promptly does nothing as she travels across all of Manhattan. It then uses its heat-seeking spider powers to locate Miles, just to bite him immediately and get squished. Presumably it does this because it read the comics and knew Miles was supposed to become the next Spider-Person.
This means that Mary Jane, an actual hero, receives nothing for her numerous sacrifices and extreme courage. Her role in the narrative is reduced to spider delivery service. Miles, meanwhile, an annoying kid with an admittedly tragic backstory, gets all the glory.
WHY COULDN'T MJ BECOME THE SPIDER-WOMAN?
Understand, then, that I went into Miles Morales somewhat under duress. Mary Jane would have made for a much better game.
But whatever. I'm over it. I can live with Miles. He's still more interesting than most video game protagonists and I like him well enough in this game.
Who is Miles Morales, Anyway?
Spider-bite aside, Spider-Man (2018) did still do a good job at setting Miles up. I had empathy for him and I was ready to jump into the game's action.
And then I experienced CHARACTER OVERLOAD.
I remember Miles' conspicuously named father, Jefferson Davis, for his tragic death. If his mother and the rest of his friends were in the game at all, I have completely forgotten about them. I had no idea who they were.
The game expected me to know.
More importantly for this review, they expected me to care.
Miles' mother is barely in the game and so this is a minor issue. Mary Jane has been replaced, however, by "Ganke," Miles' bestest friend ever who's staying at his mom's over winter break. Ganke serves exactly the same role as MJ. He's a serviceably written young tech genius, of the sort that exist in alarming numbers in Marvel fiction. He talks in the player's ear endlessly throughout this game. He's fine. The game gives few reasons to care about him and he's not as fun as MJ, but he's just fine.
Then we're introduced to Phin, Miles' best friend from childhood.
I presume Phin is a character from the comics, or maybe even one of the movies. I had no idea who she was--and immediately I was expected to give a fuck about her.
I really didn't.
Phin is my main sticking point on Miles Morales. Her character is why I ultimately disliked the game, although its gameplay is strong and it cuts out a lot of the bullshit 2018 suffered from (non-Spider sequences, stupid minigames). So let's talk about her.
Phinish Her
Phin walks in on a dinner scene at the start of the game and it is subsequently presumed that we
A) know who she is
and B) give a fuck about her.
She immediately reminisces with Miles over old times that I have no knowledge of and subjects the player to boring flashback sequences explaining how close these characters used to be.
My criticisms here are very similar to my criticisms of The Last of Us: Part II's depiction of Dina. I'm inhabiting Miles' body. I can do this because I empathize with Miles and I understand him. But when this character with whom he already has a relationship is introduced, I have no context. I don't know Phin and I'm not interested in her.
"BUT WAIT," I hear you cry, "ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHAT THE LAST GAME DID WITH ALL OF PETER'S FRIENDS?"
The answer is a resounding yes. So why doesn't it work here? Again, the answer is context.
I know Mary Jane and Peter and all of the other characters from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, which are the only superhero movies I actually like, and so it's not as jarring when their pre-developed relationships are introduced in the game.
I don't have that with Miles.
This hard introduction to Phin is seriously jarring. It takes me out of the story. I want to imagine that I am Spider-Man, but Miles is acting in a way that I can't empathize with because I'm expected to know more than the game has shown me.
This is just the beginning of my Phin problems, though.
I could probably have learned to get over this dissonance between myself and Miles, but the game doesn't give me much of a good reason to. Because, to be entirely honest, Phin is a complete motherfucker.
Fuck Phin
This character has no charisma.
I don't know about you, but the moment I saw Phin I knew she would be the game's supervillain. It was blindingly obvious. Big surprise, that's what she is.
Oh, spoiler alert.
Whatever. This comes down to the nature of superhero fiction. Comic book-readers or Avengers movie-watchers will hang up on this less than I do. Superhero stories are dumb, their worlds make no sense. Move on. You have to. I can deal with that.
But Phin's presentation misses the mark. She has no real sense of humor. She's overbearing and uninteresting. Her performance leaves no impression. Her only motivation is revenge-seeking against Roxxon, the generic and obviously evil corporation responsible for the death of her brother (another character only seen in flashbacks that I don't care at all about), and she goes about this revenge in the least-sensible way.
Rather than murder Troy Baker and put an end to the evil designs immediately, Phin's plan is to instead co-opt the resources of a bunch of insane Manhattan thugs, give them supervillain tech, blow up Roxxon's new reactor in Harlem, and all to...make Troy Baker embarrassed, I guess.
It doesn't really make any sense.
As a result, Phin seems like an out of touch psychopath throughout the entire game. Mercifully, the one saving grace is that the writers agreed with my assessment, and Miles does take her down in the end. This ultimately saves the game for me, but it isn't enough to avert frustration.
Because I have no context for not-insane Phin, it's impossible throughout for me to understand what Miles once saw in her. We see her in a few flashbacks, one of which comes way too late, and then all of the rest of her screentime is complete psychosis.
This doesn't make me like the character. I already didn't care about her; now, I hate her, and I want her to be D E A D. She is really, truly, a delusional terrorist. In real life, children across America would celebrate when they heard she was vaporized. It wouldn't be a tragedy.
All in all, the emotional combat between Miles and Phin fell totally flat for me. Miles is trying to save his friend, but I can see no reason to--maybe Phin was once sane, but she's so far gone, and her designs are literally going to kill millions of innocent people. My lack of context becomes irritated apathy.
JUST KILL HER. MILES. SHE'S INSANE.
Of course, superheroes can't murder people. That's more superhero logic that you just need to ignore. But Miles' unending attempts to redeem or rescue Phin, or talk sense into her, are exhausting. They're annoying, not emotional, especially because it's obvious early on that Phin will never stand down.
By the final cutscene, I was ready to throw my controller. I was so sick of this character. She has no real personality and nothing to make her interesting.
Mercifully, Phin does kick the bucket in the end (spoiler). That partially saves the story for me. If she had been redeemed without sacrificing herself, I think I would have demanded a refund.
Still, I can't help but feel like this all could have been handled better. Phin needed something to stand out--a stronger voice, a better performance, maybe less obviously insane methodology. As she is, she's a weak and uninteresting villain.
The Prowler
This stuff I liked much more. Aaron Davis' relationship with Miles is far more grabbing; maybe it's because Aaron has more going on, or maybe it's performance based, or maybe it's because I've actually seen a Miles Morales story with his character before. I don't know. But there's some genuinely compelling stuff with him in this game and I like the character's ultimate redemption a lot.
Unfortunately, he's not in very much of the game.
Narrative Design
I could forgive Phin's lackluster appearance if the narrative design itself were strong. 2018's narrative design WAS strong, with a host of well-realized characters and some interesting, if flawed, storytelling choices.
Miles Morales' narrative design is much weaker.
The characters are okay but unimpressive. Ganke is nowhere near as charismatic as MJ. Danika, the podcaster, is fucking annoying and I really hated listening to her. Phin is lame. Rio Morales is, honestly, pretty lame. Simon Krieger is awful. Aaron is good. Miles is likeable, although not as funny as Peter. Miles' deaf girlfriend is fantastic but hardly in the game.
This all translates to an unimpressive and uncharismatic cast, a problem 2018 did not suffer from.
Too Many Cutscenes
This game has way too many custscenes that go on for way too long. There are multiple confrontations between Phin and Miles throughout the game, all of which Miles arbitrarily loses in cutscenes. This is a massive sin of video game writing. Our confrontations with Phin should have been mechanized. Instead, only the final boss battle is actually a battle. Why couldn't Miles beat her earlier on?
I don't know. She has no powers. She's just wearing a fancy suit. There doesn't seem to be any reason. She's just off-limits so the story can happen.
There are also protracted sequences of combat that are, for some reason, all in cutscenes. The beginning of the game is one of the worst offenders, but it persists throughout. I recall 2018 utilizing far more QTEs, which, although not perfect, do alleviate some of this dissonance between story and gameplay.
In the writers' defense, most of the cutscenes are, taken by themselves, pretty good; and I especially like the opening scene of Miles emerging from the subway and the closing scene of him retreating back into his house. But mostly, I found the cutscenes too long and in contradiction to the game's mechanics.
As For Gameplay...
It's well-designed, but, just as in 2018, the stealth sections are awful. They're frustrating and unrewarding. I recommend steering clear of stealth whenever it isn't mandated; you'll regret it if you don't.
Otherwise, Miles Morales is an entertaining game. You probably know whether or not you'll like it by now. It's exactly the same as the last game, basically, with some small improvements to resource management, a faster progression scheme, and an invisibility button, which I found a great addition.
In Conclusion
Miles Morales is a decent open-world experience that suffers from weak antagonists and uneven narrative design. For $50, its playtime is shorter than I would have liked; it took me no more than fifteen hours to do the main story and every side quest. Considering that I played the $10 Chimera Squad for upward of 70 hours earlier this year, that isn't a great exchange rate--especially considering that Miles Morales has no branching narrative and all of its cutscenes are unskippable. The replay value is limited.
But if you liked 2018, I would still recommend picking it up. If you're story obsessive like I am, your mileage with the characters will vary. If you can get over the mediocrity that is Phin, or you're familiar with her from the comics, the story is probably less abrasive. Otherwise, you might want to wait until the game is on sale.