Marvel's Spider-Man 2 launched on PC yesterday, the latest in the conveyor belt of PlayStation first-party games that now spend a year or two exclusively on console before coming to PC. Insomniac's open-world sequel was generally well-received on console, and the quality of Sony's PC ports has seemed to be improving over recent releases, but it looks like port studio Nixxes may have slightly fumbled this one.
"Hold off on buying until they get a couple of stabilization patches out because holy hell," says Lumi Kløvstad. "To say this is "rough" is an understatement. Lighting doesn't load in some cutscenes, those same scenes run at seconds-per-frame, audio desync issues up the wazoo, freezing, stuttering, and just about every other performance issue I can think of."
A player going by the handle of, erm, Xtreme Hot Diarrhea says it's "crashing every 10 minutes" and keeps claiming there's a problem with their settings being too high for their GPU, or old display drivers. "My PC: NVIDIA RTX 4090 (Newest Driver 572.16), I7 13700KF, DDR 5 32GB 6000MHz."
There are just over two thousand reviews thus far split between positive and negative, so some players aren't running into these technical issues, though it does seem that the folk with higher-end cards like 4080s and 4090s are running into the most problems. Players are also reporting that the game goes on the fritz when you fiddle with graphical settings in-game, while others are encountering a repeated problem with crashing in cutscenes.
PC Gamer has a few copies on the team, and our results are mixed too. "Seems to run pretty smoothly for me but it just hard locked and crashed to desktop 10 minutes in," says senior editor Robin Valentine on a 3080. "It demanded a driver update for me too when I booted it, though it still crashed and said my drivers weren't up to date."
"It crashed because I hadn't updated my drivers, did an update and it opened ok," says video editor Dave Jones. But both add that the game's being doing some otherwise impressive stuff, and outside of these moments has been running OK, so hopefully a few hotfixes can handle the majority of issues.
At the time of writing Spider-Man 2 has in fact just received its first hotfix, which targets "device hang crashes that could occur while playing the game with ray-tracing enabled." That could have been what PCG was running into, so we'll see if that nixes the general issues that Nixxes' work has so far been running into. But if you've been thinking of dropping the cash on Spidey's latest adventure, good luck but maybe give it a week or two.
