The Good:

• Gameplay is refined and extremely fun
• The story is fully fleshed out and well-paced

The Bad:

• Feels unfinished, technically – tons of minor bugs and glitches
• Dull, repetitive boss fights

The Ugly:

• If you’re playing woke bingo, you will run out of cards

Spider-Man 2

Set directly after the events of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2 is a third-person action game set in a near-future aspirational vision of New York City.  Players will switch between playing as Spider-Man and Miles Morales to accomplish the mutual and exclusive goals each of them have throughout the course of the game. Players will fight street thugs, solve puzzles, collect and upgrade equipment, and try to thwart the mysterious plans of Kraven. Where they follow their individual goals, Miles uses his superhero duties as an excuse to procrastinate on writing his college entrance essay and also to support the underprivileged community with missions like saving a music museum dedicated to musicians of color. Peter Parker will complete experiments for the Emily May Foundation to generate clean energy with wind power and develop GMO crops to feed the homeless.

Story: The Gift of Gab

One of the things that sets this series apart from other action games is just how much story it manages to squeeze in while still providing extremely well-refined and varied gameplay. In games like Assassin’s Creed, the story and dialogue are concentrated around cutscenes and maybe a handful of set-piece events, but in Spider-Man 2, the dialogue almost never stops. Every fight, from the iconic plot-centric boss battles to the generic street crime skirmishes, is filled with constant commentary or repartee. Every time you pick up an object or come close to a side objective, someone has something to say. Even just traversing the city from one objective to the next, Spider-Man and Miles can’t go more than a couple of minutes without audibly musing or getting a cell phone call that furthers one of a dozen concurrent story threads.  

It’s difficult to decide which is more impressive – the sheer volume of non-repetitive dialogue or the fact that all voice actors sound on top of their game (no pun intended – well, maybe a little).  Aside from being laced with woke ideology, the content of the dialogue is very well written. The jokes land perfectly, and the drama is only hamfisted when it’s serving some ESG quota. Otherwise, it comes across as sincere and realistic.

Gameplay: So Many Options

Just because the game is story-centric doesn’t mean the developers let the core of the action slide.  While the bulk of gameplay is still combat-driven, the game never misses an opportunity to introduce a new type of interaction. This often happens in the form of minigames, such as solving puzzles to splice plant genes, isolate chemical compounds, or find hidden items, but it also manifests in races on the ground and in the air or controlling drastically different types of drones to train AI models or repair a broken security system. And the list goes on and on.

Gameplay: Traversal

Getting around in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 can be a sheer joy. Web-swinging through the streets has a rhythm that feels almost natural. As if that wasn’t good enough, the new web-wings ability, which turns the spider suits into wingsuits, gives players even more crazy-fun ways to zip around skyscrapers, across bridges, and over the bay. 

The ability to fast travel is locked behind completing a certain number of side objectives in each borough of the city. This is a fairly organic way to make sure players don’t start skipping chunks of the environment until they’ve had a chance to see and experience it.

Gameplay: If You Can’t Be Original, Be The Best

This game borrows most of its combat system (as do many other third-person action games) from Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), so the attack-dodge-parry combat isn’t new or unique, but this implementation does set a high bar among imitators. As with environment traversal, there’s a rhythm to combat that just feels right when you manage to sync up with it. Wade into a crowd of a dozen thugs unprepared, and you’ll get your butt handed to you, but get into the groove, and you start to feel unstoppable. 

The game still offers its share of cheap deaths from baddies that have attacks that can soak up half of your health in one shot if you don’t manage to parry or get out of the way fast enough. While frustrating, it also incentivizes the player to take a more frenetic and aggressive approach on the next attempt. 

The player and the enemy aren’t the only elements of combat. There are always environmental actions available to give the player an edge in combat  Sometimes, it’s just loose objects scattered around that you can web up and throw as projectiles, and sometimes, it’s something specific to a boss fight, like a water pipe, or a trapdoor. 

Several enemies are immune to direct attack, meaning that you constantly have to adjust your approach – for example, enemies with shields can’t be defeated head-on, so you have to get behind them to do any damage, and enemies with hand weapons can only be hurt by special attacks or a well-timed parry.

Boss fights are a little repetitive and predictable.  Every boss has to be defeated three times per encounter, and while there’s some variation in what environmental advantages can be used, there’s otherwise very little variety in the combat. In this, the designers clearly chose cinematics over gameplay.

Gameplay: Shhhh Be Very Quiet

During sneaking sequences, it’s up to the player whether or not the character is discovered.  If discovered, the enemies will attack until they’re defeated, or the player manages to break line of sight long enough for them to lose track. The stealth mechanics here are nothing new (most again taken right out of the Batman Arkham games), but they are well-implemented.  For instance, enemies have realistic lines of sight and respond somewhat convincingly to distractions. Environments are arranged to give the player plenty of opportunities to strategically separate the bad guys and use silent takedowns to incapacitate them.

Audio: A Feast for the Ears

The audio production is nothing short of fantastic.  The high-quality voice acting is mixed perfectly with the sound effects and music and is never difficult to understand. Full advantage is taken of multi-channel surround sound setups, not just to provide convincing ambiance but to give players positional awareness.  The music is well orchestrated and borrows heavily from the most recent Spider-Man films while still delivering unique performances. The Spider-Man “theme” gets multiple context-based renditions, including a rhythm-action game they managed to slip in.

Technical Evaluation: A Spider Web Full of Bugs

As polished as much of this game is, it was also released clearly unfinished. Minor bugs and glitches are evident throughout. If you’re curious why it was dinged for performance and technical issues, a fairly comprehensive list exists here. While disappointing, they amount to annoyances more than hindrances.

Final Thoughts

From start to finish, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is paced like an Avengers film; the action and story comprise a flashy, dense, nonstop feast of dopamine.  It’s clear that a lot of the right kind of passion, i.e., art, voice acting, complex storytelling, gameplay design, environment design, and audio design, went into this project. Unfortunately, a lot of the wrong kind of passion – DEI, decolonization, misandry, and a litany of other woke concepts also found their way into this virtual world.  It presents an Overton Window in which non-woke, non-leftist ideologies don’t even exist. As great as this game is technically and as fun as it is to play, it amounts to 20-ish hours of woke propaganda targeted at young people. Don’t let your children play this without at least first discussing that superpowers and future tech are not the only things in it that are at odds with reality.

WOKE ELEMENTS

To the writers, the true villain of this story is not Kraven or Venom; it’s whiteness. The reason this game gets such a high wokeness score is because it is fundamentally a story about decolonizing Spider-Man, and nearly every part of the narrative supports this though it isn’t necessarily obvious while you’re playing. You’ll find a lot written about “decolonization” online, and like all politically controversial topics, there is little consistency in how it is meant and how it is applied.  James Lindsay delivered a speech about wokeness that addresses decolonization if you want a based opinion, but it basically means removing white people from positions of power, public life, and, to some, from existence.  

Spider-Man’s woke slant is not worn on its sleeve. The writers didn’t try to make either Spider-Man gay, plaster the environments with pride flags and trans-rights slogans, or stop every five minutes to acknowledge the indigenous peoples that used to inhabit New York.  Everything it does is subtle, almost subliminal, and many players will, no doubt, brush off what they see as innocuous or coincidental, if they even notice it at all.  When I tell you this game ranks high on wokeness, I won’t be shocked if some readers who have already played it are dismissive or skeptical. You won’t necessarily be dealing with it the whole time, and that seems to be the point.

Spider-Man 2 resists the temptation to depict racial inequality between Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Indeed, without making Miles literally homeless, it would be difficult to depict him as less privileged than Peter. There are indirect inferences to racial inequality in the way that a music museum seems to struggle, specifically because its theme is “musicians of color,” but in thousands of lines of dialogue, no one cries “racism” out loud. If anything, Miles’ advantages over Peter (still has one of his parents and isn’t dirt poor) are meant to bring balance to Peter’s one advantage of being white – this is what the woke call “equity.”

One of the woke categories that Spider-Man 2 scores some points in was surprising to see in a video game at all.  That is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Google has memory-holed most articles that aren’t fawning endorsements of this concept so it was difficult to find a good one to share. Chances are you, however, have already encountered it and know exactly why it’s a plague on the corporate world, but if you would like an elegant and clear primer on it and how it relates to wokeness, you are encouraged to watch the James Lindsay speech linked above as it also touches on the elements of DEI.

On the surface and taken a piece at a time, the woke elements are scattered and appear unrelated.  Moreover, the sheer volume of dialogue effectively dilutes the woke parts, as prolific as they are, blending them in with what is an impressively large tapestry of narrative.  Despite the laundry list of problems, narratively speaking, the game isn’t all bad. There are great themes of friendship, familial loyalty, mentorship, honesty, and redemption throughout. Nevertheless, when taken as a whole, there are undeniable patterns that reveal the woke parts are not innocuous. 

As a game marketed to young people, the most immediately troublesome parts are the messages it sends to girls about boys and boys about themselves. For example, Peter’s self-effacement goes beyond healthy humility, and MJ’s beyond expressions of her own insecurities.

Some understanding of Venom is necessary for the context below. It is a symbiotic alien creature. Very analogous to demonic possession, Venom can take a person as a host and affect the person’s mind, blending his thoughts with theirs. This also causes them to lose most of their inhibitions. Since Venom is a creature of pragmatic self-interest, it magnifies a person’s aggression, anger, and resentment while suppressing empathy and compassion. Most of the words they speak are still their own but without a filter.

Anti-2nd Amendment

• While fighting a group of thugs looting a gun store, Peter monologues about how irresponsible it is to have a gun club in the middle of New York City, implying that the owner is at least partly to blame for the crime.

Anti-capitalism/Pro-communism

• Peter lectures, “Profit shouldn’t be part of the equation when it comes to basic human necessities.” Here, he’s referring to a non-profit being morally superior to other tech companies because it open sources the spliced genomes of modified plants. This is done expressly to make them available to feed the homeless for free as opposed to profiting from them the way normal corporations do.  How a homeless person is going to use an open-source gene sequence to grow food for themselves without the need for equipment, specially educated personnel, land, and raw materials is not fully explained.
• There’s a podcast that you will hear snippets from between missions and while traversing the city.  In one of these, the caster, Dana, laments getting cut off while having a riveting discussion about “philanthropy and using the means of production for good.” This is a blatantly Marxist concept.

DEI

• Sometime before Aunt May’s death in the first game and the start of this one, Norman Osborn, Harry’s billionaire father, set up a non-profit think tank in the middle of New York City called the Emily May Foundation to celebrate her legacy.  While Harry’s father set things up, Harry himself “changed a couple of things” when he recently took it over.  He casually mentions that he “Installed a diverse board to keep us on track.”  “Diverse” in this context refers to basically anyone who is either non-white, non-straight, or female. Harry’s change can only mean one of two things. The first one is that he fired any straight white males who were already serving on the board in order to replace them, and the second is that there was no board, to begin with, and no straight white males were considered for positions. Either way, this is anti-white racism doled out as casually as choosing the color of the floor tiles. Not to mention the naivety that comes with hiring people on the basis of something other than their qualifications and thinking this is going to keep things “on track”. 
• It isn’t just the board of Emily May that’s “diverse.” With the exception of Harry, Peter, and Dr. Curtis Connors (a.k.a. The Lizard), who is there as a short-lived plot device, there are no white males working at Emily May. In fact, out of the sixty or seventy people you see milling around, there are no white males in the building at all. This is subtle but 100% intentional.
• There’s a point after Peter is merged with Venom when the symbiosis is nearly complete, so Peter’s inhibitions are gone.  He begins ranting about how he is the only hero and that he has to save everyone. It’s a rare moment where the dialogue takes a turn for the awkward because there really isn’t anything in the plot up to that point that supports him having that belief, even subconsciously.  When Miles confronts him in order to bring him back to himself, he says, “I’m trying to save you, Peter!” Peter answers, “I’m the hero, you don’t save me, I save you!” Suddenly, the awkwardness of this left turn in the dialogue makes sense. The writers are tacitly apologizing for legacy Spider-Man being a White Savior.  This is the notion that much popular fiction depicts white people as the only ones who can be endowed with special powers to save everyone else as a way to promote white supremacy.
• Additional items can be found in the [Spoilers] section below.

Misandry

• In the opening sequence, Peter is fired by his black female boss. If the roles had been reversed and a white male had fired a black female for the same infraction, we would be reading about how “problematic” this game is in the actual New York Times.
• MJ, in an act of feminine chivalry, offers to pay Peter’s mortgage for him. (His altruistic Aunt May mortgaged the house and donated all of the money to a homeless shelter before she died. Since his lady boss fired him, he can’t pay the mortgage.) Later in the story, she uses this to emasculate him.
• During a fight scene when Miles has just met Felicia (a.k.a. Black Cat) five minutes prior, they’re confronted by an enemy vehicle with a turret on top, causing Miles to panic and ask Felicia what he should do.  Felicia tells him, “You got webs, use them,” which his panic has obviously made him forget. This is a blatant attempt to make Miles appear weak and uncertain and show how cool and collected Felicia is.
• In one scene, we’re treated to a sparring match in which a female soldier uses brute strength to overpower a male soldier who easily has a seventy to ninety-pound weight advantage over her. She knocks him to the ground and gleefully kicks him in the ribs over and over. In real life, a single punch from this man would probably have caved in her skull. As a bonus, the scene is on a loop, so she kicks and mocks him over and over indefinitely until the player triggers the next event.
• Upon their first meeting, the main antagonist, Kraven, explains to Peter that he “hunts that which man most fears.”  Kraven is using the term inclusively – when he says “man,” he means mankind.  Peter’s witty retort is, “He’s hunting failure? Intimacy?” implying that these are exclusively masculine fears.
• During a mission, MJ finds out that one of the Hunters has a lady boss, and she uses this, along with her sudden fluency in their language (deus ex machina much?), to impersonate his boss over the radio in order to learn the location of an access code. Once he tells her where the code is, she piles on a little verbal abuse and belittlement. Lest we mistakenly believe she was just being nasty to sell the part of a gruff paramilitary boss lady, she immediately remarks to herself it felt “kind of nice” to emasculate him.
• MJ is completely aware of the fact that Venom is altering Peter’s behavior; however, when he calls her to tell her the good news that he was freed and apologizes, she urges him to “go on,” as though she’s owed a more groveling apology.
• Peter’s character is a model of humility and selflessness. Throughout all three games that make up this series, he could hardly have been more empathetic and self-sacrificing.  This makes what happens when MJ is caught by Venom and turned into the symbiote monster “Scream” all the more disgusting. The character only exists for the duration of a fifteen-minute boss fight, but the entire point of it seems to be the diatribe of feminist grievances and attempts to emasculate Peter that plays out in the background as MJ (as Scream) lobs verbal abuse at him. Here are some highlights:
  • “I’m done begging for validation from you…or anyone!”
  • “For once, it’s not about you!”
  • “I’m finally in control.”
  • “I live in your shadow.”
  • “You just want to stay the stronger half.”
  • “You always patronize [me]!”
  • “You can’t keep a job.  You can’t pay the mortgage.”
  • At one point, Peter starts to say, “I always fix things,” then catches himself and amends it to “We always fix things,” before descending into sickening self-effacement where he apologizes for things that he didn’t do and that are not even in character for something he would have done off-camera.
    • “I’m sorry, I was wrong. You don’t have to trust me, but trust yourself.” 
    • “You’re right. I was selfish. I was so wrapped up in my own life I never thought about yours.”  

Gay Agenda

• Black Cat, Cat Woman analog and ex-girlfriend of Peter Parker, reveals through the course of conversation that she’s bisexual now. Just in case the player didn’t catch it the first time, the dialogue gratuitously works her “girlfriend” in several more times, as well as getting Miles to virtue-signal his allyship when he characterizes his motivation for saving her from the hunters as “We’ve got to get you back to your girlfriend.” 
• In Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), when Miles attends a local fair at a park, we’re introduced to a lesbian couple, and the game makes sure we have a conversation about it. In this game, Miles revisits that same park to complete a mission. Standing in the exact same spot is one of the girls from the first game, and out of an entire crowd of people with whom he is familiar, Miles singles her out to ask about what else, where her partner is. This is done in order to remind us that she’s a lesbian and that Miles is an ally.

Atheism is not a religion

• The writers use the diminutive lowercase “g” when using the proper noun God.  This is not just bad grammar; it’s the hallmark of a zealot who does not believe his/her religion is a religion.

[Spoilers Warning] Do not read below if you don’t want spoilers. [Spoilers Warning]

[Spoilers] DEI

• Lest you think the early reference to the White Savior trope was isolated, the game ends with Peter quitting his role as Spider-Man and passing the torch to Miles.  The only way to completely avoid the White Savior trope is to not tell stories with white heroes or to diminish their roles to sidekicks and supporting characters.
• What Marvel presentation would be complete without post-credits scenes? This game has two. One is to set up the next game’s villain, and the other is to complete the pattern of “decolonization” by introducing Cindy Moon, a character that fans will know as Silk – essentially a female Spider-Man.

The post Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Platform Reviewed:

Nintendo Switch

Hardware Detail:

Launch model Switch

OEM Pro Controller

The Good:

• Quick, reactive controls
• Caters to multiple skill levels but is still very challenging
• No stage timers

The Bad:

• Talking Flowers

The Ugly:

• Nothing

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a 2D side-scrolling platformer that proves the genre still has new things to show us.  Players embark solo or with up to three player companions at once across eight worlds to save the Flower Kingdom from the machinations of Bowser, the evil king of the Koopas, his wannabe supervillain son, Bowser Jr., and his host of new and returning minions.  Each thematic world has a unique terrain and region-specific level design. In addition to Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad, players can also choose to play one of two other Toad characters, four Yoshi characters, or The Nabbit.

The story is ridiculous, which is par for the course for a Super Mario Bros. game, and it’s okay if you’ve totally forgotten it sixty seconds into the first stage.  This time, Bowser has invaded the Mushroom Kingdom’s neighbor, the Flower Kingdom, and stolen the Wonder Flower, which has transformed the houses and castles spread throughout the kingdom into sad and dreary places. However, you won’t be rescuing a princess this time. While rescuing a princess is traditional for the series, this isn’t unprecedented either. As far back as Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988/NES), Princess Peach has joined the adventure as an active player character.  

In this iteration, the  Flower Kingdom is ruled by Prince Florian, but you won’t be rescuing him either.  Instead, the royal caterpillar, who dreams of becoming a larger caterpillar someday, will accompany you on your quest to save his kingdom from Bowser’s clutches.

What’s New? What’s The Same? What’s Better?

Super Mario Bros. Wonder isn’t just a new coat of paint slapped on an old game. The innovation is woven into every aspect of the gameplay itself rather than just presenting a handful of new power-ups, for example. 

Although new power-ups are most definitely part of the game, most of the innovation is in the “badge” system.  As you progress through the game, you’ll find, earn, or buy badges that will grant additional mobility or some other type of advantage. That said, only one badge can be active at a time, so there’s a strategy for figuring out what the best badge is for a given situation. Need a specific power-up to get to that secret area? You can turn all the power-ups into the ones you need. Need the ability to jump just a little bit higher to get to that out-of-the-way platform? There’s a badge for that, too.

Controls

The Super Mario franchise has always been known for its smooth and intuitive controls. In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the controls have been tuned to what feels like perfection, besting even the efforts of the most recent prequel, New Super Mario Bros. U (2012/Wii U). Players are never left to feel like they are fighting the device or fighting their intuition to make the character do what they want. If you screw up, it’s because you screwed up, not because the input device stymied you. In fact, the controls most closely resemble those of Super Mario World (1990/Super NES), which was a 16-bit masterpiece of golden era platformer perfection.

Although multiplayer closely resembles that of its predecessors, Super Mario Bros. Wonder offers a  handful of subtle tweaks that make all the difference. Playing with four people is still a chaotic mess, but it’ll more often end in a room full of people laughing hysterically than grinding their teeth in frustration.

The biggest single improvement is the fact that, with the exception of Yoshi, the players don’t interfere with one another onscreen.  You’re never going to miss a jump because someone else bounced on your head or go careening off into the blue because another player happened to hit you from below. On the other hand, players who actually want to interact directly can use Yoshi characters, which the other players can ride to impart a little invincibility and coordinate tricky double-jumps.

It’s All About The Game

For fans of the series, game progression is a familiar formula, although there are plenty of twists to keep this from feeling like deja vu.  Individual stages are grouped into “worlds” with a common theme, like the desert or the clouds. As usual, players don’t need to complete every stage to finish the game, and there are alternate paths for those who seek them out.

This being the Flower Kingdom, everything is plant-themed, so progression depends on earning “Wonder Seeds.”  Most stages will award one seed to the player just for completing the stage and another for finding a hidden Wonder Flower, which unlocks a different version of the stage with added challenges. Some seeds are simply given away just for making it to a new world, and others are sold in shops so they can be earned by collecting the new purple Flower Coins spread throughout each level. Additionally, many are hidden in cleverly hidden secret areas and secret exits.  

A certain number of Wonder Seeds is required to unlock the final stage of each world. With so many ways to earn Wonder Seeds, the player has the freedom to choose the path that matches their ability rather than being forced to play harder levels that then become a frustrating barrier to progress. Additionally, each level is helpfully labeled with a difficulty rating in order to make these choices obvious.  

The main object in each world is a “Royal Seed,” which is one of six flower-themed MacGuffins that unlock the final confrontation with Bowser.  Not every world follows the same formula. Sometimes, just finding your way through a tricky puzzle will be enough to net you the Royal Seed at the end without having to fight a boss for it.  

If you’re a completionist or a Mario “veteran,” there are plenty of secret areas and challenges to test your mettle.

A vestige from their roots as an arcade game, where it was important to limit the time taken by each credit, side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games have traditionally used a timer. When time runs out, you lose a life and have to begin again. While, in the past, this helped to keep the action constantly moving and added pressure when trying to find a secret or work out how to do a tricky jump, Super Mario Bros. Wonder does away with this, leaving the player free to hunt for secrets without fear of the clock running out.

If there’s one single, very minor element of this game that becomes annoying over the duration, it has to be the Talking Flowers that are now spread throughout the stages. These will occasionally offer hints about secret areas or speak words of encouragement, but they will also express a range of emotions and try to tell bad jokes. They can detract from the experience sometimes more than they add to it, but thankfully, there’s a setting to mute them, so no harm, no foul.

Hearing It Out

The music is new but with enough classic elements like reworked melodies and passages from older titles woven in to satisfy the staunchest of fans.  Though you’ll find orchestral scores, the soundtrack doesn’t confine itself to any particular genre; gamers will be treated to everything from heavy metal to disco to sitar music.  More than once, I found myself smiling and nodding my head or tapping my foot to the beat while I was playing. The music is also dynamic, often changing according to what a player is doing.

Final Thoughts

For a series celebrating its 38th anniversary, Super Mario Bros. Wonder feels impossibly fresh. Everything from the sound effects to the character animations has been subtly crafted to evoke nostalgia, but there’s nothing actually old about it.  Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t just hold up to its impressive pedigree but raises the bar as well.

Woke Elements

While some might argue that making Peach a playable character instead of the more traditional damsel in distress, as I stated before, it’s not without precedent. With no real story to speak of and no other obvious ideologically driven elements, we’re going to err on the side of this decision being less about agenda and more about freedom of gameplay.

The post Super Mario Bros. Wonder first appeared on Worth it or Woke.