Launch line ups tend to be devoid of big hitters, and often have a habit of bringing gamers’ sky high expectations plummeting back down to earth. While Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is certainly a cross-gen game at heart, the PS5 manages to elevate the experience substantially thanks to its two display mode options, incredibly fast load times and crystal clear 4K visuals.

It’s a beautiful looking game, then, and a fitting sequel to 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, but it’s more akin to a generous expansion than a full-blown successor – think Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and you’re on the right lines. That means it’s a more condensed experience overall, though no less entertaining. Expect spectacular, jaw-dropping set pieces, Hollywood-rivalling voice acting, and sensational HDR implementation throughout (if you have a capable display).

Harlem heroics

The star of the show is – perhaps unsurprisingly – young Miles Morales. The seventeen-year old New Yorker is instantly likeable and refreshingly… well… just nice. He loves his friends and family, cares about others, and is the type of good-hearted person we can all strive to emulate. In a world where too many loud voices are vying for attention and genuine acts of human kindness are few and far between, Miles’ wholesome personality really resonates. There’s no unnecessary bravado or sense of misplaced confidence.

It makes the character all the more believable for it, as Miles learns to juggle his new dual life. Acting as a normal teenage kid while helping save New York as Spider-Man is no easy task after all, even with an excellent mentor like Peter Parker. But Miles also has to cope with less heroic feats, such as adapting to a new environment after moving to Harlem with his mother. The end result is a story that feels engaging from the outset, and is delivered with exceptional presentation values from the very first moments through to the last.

Miles is entrusted with protecting a snow-enrobed New York after Peter heads on a well-deserved vacation, and the events that take place while Pete’s away ultimately help shape Miles into the hero the city needs. However, Miles will also uncover some secrets close to home that will force him to make some difficult, life-changing decisions.

The game begins in dramatic fashion as you team up with Peter to halt a rampaging Rhino, who’s careering through everything that’s within his path. It’s the perfect introduction to Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and an impressive teaser of what awaits during the game’s captivating story.

Steering Rhino through a packed mall while sat atop his giant shoulders is an arresting moment, and the seamless switch between gameplay, quick-time-events and cinematics is achieved with aplomb. It’s easy to forget how close video games are to mimicking the best Hollywood has to offer, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales only helps drive home that the gap continues to diminish.

Come out swinging

Just like in Marvel’s Spider-Man, the moment you take control of Miles Morales as he takes his first swing through the bustling city is a spectacular thrill. The difference the PS5 makes is immediately apparent, too, with impressive draw distances, far more densely populated streets and ray-traced reflections all catching the eye.

In fact, you feel the benefit of Sony’s new hardware as soon as you start the game. Booting Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales takes mere seconds thanks to the PS5’s super-fast SSD, allowing you to jump into the game at breakneck speed. You can also bypass the main menu entirely and jump into specific challenges from the PS5’s home screen, which are displayed as Activity cards.

While it would be a stretch to say that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is something that only the power of the PlayStation 5 could provide (remember, a version of the game is headed to PS4, too), this a gorgeous-looking title regardless of the extra graphical flourishes. The biggest benefit that the PS5 version brings is the aforementioned ray tracing, which brings realistic lighting and reflections to the game, instead of the usual smoke and mirrors that we’ve been used to. You’ll get to see Miles’ reflection in an office block as you swing past, for example, and while that might sound like a small addition, its impact is quite impressive.

Textures and material work are also worthy of praise. Everything from the glistening sheen of Miles’s Spider suit to the bobbly bits of wool visible on worn jumpers look extremely convincing, and it really adds an extra level of fidelity. Character models are a bit hit and miss, though, and a clear reminder that Spider-Man Miles Morales is essentially a super-charged PS4 game.

Venom extract

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales puts you in the figure-hugging suit of the younger web-slinging hero who, naturally, brings his own unique abilities to the table. His Venom moves are the obvious highlight, surging a yellow electrical current through certain attacks, but Miles also feels more nimble than his mentor Peter Parker.

Not only are Venom moves spectacular to look at on a HDR display, they’re also extremely enjoyable to pull off. You can smash through stubborn enemies and perform some shockingly effective crowd control techniques using Miles’s new found powers. Oh, and you can also turn invisible for a short period of time, making stealth sections far more forgiving. It’s enough to make the original Spider-Man’s abilities seem pretty generic by comparison.

While Miles is still learning what it takes to be Spider-Man, and the responsibility that entails, you’re not necessarily hampered by his rookie hero status. Your skills can be upgraded and improved over time of course, much like Miles’s array of Spidey gadgets, but the game re-treads many gameplay mechanics from 2018’s smash hit.

The free-flowing, combo-chasing combat system that was successfully pioneered by Batman: Arkham Asylum remains intact, complete with more calculated sections that see you pick off enemies one by one using various traps, distractions and, of course, sticky spider webs. While we still think Arkham Asylum and subsequent Batman games do a better job in representing how enemies react to their colleagues being neutralized one by one, it’s still incredibly satisfying when you bundle up a bad guy in a webbed cocoon or knock out a hapless foe with a well timed trap.

You’ll need to utilize all of Miles’s move set to overcome the various types of enemies in the game, of course. Some require that you lay the smack down aerially, while others will need softening up with a few Venom attacks. Each enemy type poses a different challenge, and learning how to approach each encounter is the key to success. Combat continues to be engaging, if a tad familiar, and can pose a stern challenge at higher difficulty levels, though we did find the camera to be problematic at times.

Traversal is arguably Spider-Man: Miles Morales most enjoyable gameplay mechanic, though. Diving off the edge of a vertigo-inducing building only to fire out a web just before you scrape across the asphalt is simply exhilarating. You can shoot yourself forward at a moment’s notice, perform aerial tricks as you freefall towards the ground and take in snowy New York in all it’s glory as you fly through the air. Fast travel is available, but swinging through the city is so engaging and perfectly captured that it honestly never gets old. There’s just so much joy to be had in simply being Spider-Man.

Marvellous modes

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is hopefully the first of many PS5 titles that give players the choice of how they want to play, and there are now three modes to choose from after the game received a new update: Fidelity, Performance and Performance RT.

Fidelity is the default setting and features graphical settings like ray-tracing, enhanced lighting and additional effects. It uses temporal techniques to provide the best image quality possible, but you’re locked at 30 frames per second. Performance mode, meanwhile, does without these graphical enhancements and upscales to 4K from a lower base resolution. Performance RT mode keeps ray tracing and 60fps, but reduces the resolution to around 1080p, lowers the reflection quality and reduces pedestrian density.

While ray-tracing is certainly an impressive graphical effect, offering realistic reflections and lighting that simply wouldn’t have been possible on the last generation of consoles, we found ourselves gravitating towards the game’s Performance or Performance RT modes thanks to its numerous benefits.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales is at its best when you’re leaping off skyscrapers and zipping over the bustling New York streets below – a higher framerate keeps the onscreen action looking silky-smooth and allows all the world’s detail to shine.

Input latency is also reduced when opting for 60fps, making combat feel more fluid and responsive when you’re beating up bad guys. We also found that animations appeared more life-like as a result of the higher framerate mode, even without the lack of graphical flourishes found in Fidelity mode. We didn’t experience any noticeable drops or hitches, either, which has often been the case with Performance modes on the last-gen PS4 Pro, that weren’t really worthy of the name.

Power in your hands

Though the game’s main story clocks in at around 10 to 12 hours or so, there’s plenty of content to enjoy after the credits roll. From traversal, combat, and stealth challenges to accepting side quests and preventing crimes using the game’s ‘Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man App’, there’s enough content to justify the game’s slightly steep price tag

Side quests are thankfully more than just “travel from point to a to point Side quests are thankfully more than just “travel from point to a to point b” affairs, and you’ll be rewarded with tokens that can be used for upgrades upon their completion. There’s enough variation to keep things interesting, too: one mission sees you saving a store owner’s cat, while another will have you scanning an underground network of pipes to help restore a local food shelter’s water supply.

Collectibles are also scattered across the city and include things such as mementos from Miles’s childhood and mini-challenges that help flesh out the games backstory and characters. Most involve reaching a specific destination to seek them out, but again, because traversal is so satisfying, the journey there is part of the appeal.

Verdict

With so many superhero films being pushed back because of the pandemic, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is comfortably the best action blockbuster of this year. While we wouldn’t consider it a must-have game to show off the power of the PS5 – honestly, Astro’s Playroom does a far greater job of showcasing the potential of Sony’s new console and controller – it’s yet another excellent PlayStation exclusive that will have fans of other consoles eyeing Sony’s system with envy.

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2018’s Super Mario Party represented a “back to basics” shift for the series, and Mario Party Superstars has taken that idea several steps further by focusing in on the N64 and early GameCube days. There are no motion-controlled minigames, no item capsules, no character-specific custom dice blocks, no buddies to recruit, and of course, no party car. Just four players, each taking turns rolling dice, moving along a virtual game board, playing minigames to earn coins, and using those coins to buy stars. And maybe it’s because it has been a long while since we’ve had a Mario Party game without some sort of extra gimmick, but this simplicity is incredibly refreshing, and I certainly didn’t miss having something there to mix up the formula.

It helps that the five boards are some of the best-designed in Mario Party’s history. Yoshi’s Tropical Island is an excellent starter board with an easy-to-understand layout and a fun twist involving the star marker swapping between its two islands – it’s sure to lead to heartbreak and elation in equal measure among your friends. Space Land, meanwhile, is a go-to when I want to play without any game-changing board mechanics and just get that pure virtual board game experience; Peach’s Birthday Cake offers a completely different style of play by keeping the star in one position and sprinkling spots where you can plant coin or star-stealing piranha plants; Woody Woods forces you to think several moves ahead thanks to its constantly changing arrows that send you down different paths; and finally, Horror Land is a personal favorite of mine because of its fun day/night mechanic and a King Boo that can let you steal a star from every other player… if you get a skeleton key, 150 coins, and are able to reach him while it’s night. It’s an insane hail Mary win condition to shoot for, but if you are able to manage it, it’s sure to be a story you and your friends won’t soon forget.

Developer NdCube has done a fantastic job of bringing both the looks and sounds of these boards up to modern standards as well. Character models are pretty much identical to how they looked in Super Mario Party three years ago, but the remade boards are immaculately detailed, with Peach’s Birthday Cake being a clear standout thanks to the hyper-realistic and delicious-looking snacks decorating the linear path around the cake. It also can’t be understated that not only have all of the boards and nearly all of the 100 minigames undergone dramatic visual transformations, but they’ve also gained new instrumental arrangements for every song that accompanies them. You can even unlock the songs from the store and listen to both the classic and modern versions of each one in the Data House, which is great because while the N64 songs still hold up, their modernized versions are even better.

One more board from Mario Party 3 would have made the overall package feel more robust.

But while the boards are all impressive, the one bummer is that there are still only five of them. That is a step up over the dismal four that Super Mario Party offered, but still not on par with just about every single other numbered Mario Party game in the past, which have almost always included six. Even just adding one more board from Mario Party 3 would have gone a long way toward making the package feel more robust, and it would have evened out the balance of boards from the three N64 games at the same time

Minigame Madness

At the heart of any good Mario Party game is its minigames, and fortunately almost none of the 100 that were cherry picked from every numbered entry in the series disappoint. You’ve got your all-time classics like Bumper Balls, Shy Guy Says, Hot Rope Jump, Revers-A-Bomb, and Booksquirm, just to name a few favorites. What makes these games so great is their sheer simplicity, plus a small added twist. Bumper Balls, for instance, is literally just a game about bumpingyour rivals off a small circular platform while riding a bouncy ball. But the twist is that in order to knock an opponent off, you have to put yourself in a dangerous position by building up momentum and bumping them close to the edge, which puts you in prime position to get bumped off yourself.

And then you also have some picks that might not immediately come to mind, yet wind up being great selections because of the variety they bring to the table. Honeycomb Havoc, a game in which you just take turns picking one or two fruits at a time and try not to be the one who’s forced to grab a honeycomb, may not be the most exciting game in the world based on what’s happening on-screen, but the metagame that’s happening between you and your friends as you’re all able to see their loss or victory several moves ahead makes it one of my favorites out of the whole pack.

Very few, if any, are complete duds. That said, there are a couple of minigames that are so close to each other that including both of them feels like a waste of space. Leaf Leap and What Goes Up both have you racing upwards by hopping up platforms as fast as you can; Pokey Pummel and Mecha Marathon both have you pressing a button (or buttons) really fast; and Roll Call and Goomba Spotting both have you counting the number of things that appear on screen. All are fun games, and none are completely identical, but when you consider that classic minigames such as Platform Peril, Locked Out, and Running of the Bulb didn’t make the final cut, it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed at these handful of double-ups.

Very few minigames, if any, are complete duds.

My only other gripe with the minigame selection is that many of the 1v3 minigames are so skewed to favor either the single-player or the group of three that it really doesn’t make it much fun for either. In Piranha’s Pursuit, for instance, it doesn’t even feel like you’re part of the minigame when you’re on the team of three, Archer-ival feels actively terrible when you’re not the archer, and Tidal Toss feels nearly impossible to win as a solo player if even one of the team of three is any good. Oh, and there’s the iconic, N64 controller-destroying Tug o’ War, which actually requires an in-game warning to advise you not to use your palm to rotate the control stick in order to avoid damaging either your Joy-Con or your hand.

That said, there are a couple of genuinely great 1v3 minigames, like Tackle Takedown, which is a football minigame that has the team of three attempting to tackle the single-player who is able to use three bursts of speed to try and juke them out of their boots. But the majority are underwhelming and I always groaned when I saw one was coming up.

Bringin’ It All Back

Mario Party Superstars doesn’t do much that’s completely new for the series, which is completely fine with me considering it brings back so many things that I love and missed from recent Mario Party games. Like for example, stars that cost 20 coins instead of 10, which was a big issue I had with Super Mario Party. It was just far too easy for everyone to afford stars in that game, which really hindered the actual board game strategy and placed too much importance on recruiting buddies to bolster your dice rolls. In addition, Duel Minigames are back and help make the final five turns way more exciting by giving you and your adversaries the opportunity to challenge each other to high-stakes, 1-on-1 minigames with wagered coins up for grabs. And of course, Chance Time is back as well, which introduces all sorts of chaos into the mix..

Bonus stars can also be turned on, off, and even set to the classic style of always going out to the ones who collect the most coins, win the most minigames, and/or land on the most event spaces – but the one truth of Mario Party is that even despite all of those options, luck will always be a factor. Try as you might, you’ll never be able to completely remove its hold over every game, and that’s part of the magic. There will absolutely be times when the person who won the least amount of minigames will end up the overall victor, stealing a win from the person who held the lead for the majority of the match in the final seconds. And yeah, that may feel bad for some people at the moment, but the joy I get from Mario Party Superstars doesn’t come from winning or losing. It comes from the hilarious interactions it pulls out of me and my friends, which it does with a reliability that few other games are able to match.

Mario Party Superstars pulls hilarious interactions from me and my friends like few others.

Playing locally in the same room is obviously ideal, but Mario Party Superstars also has a pretty solid suite of online options. The standard Party Mode has both matchmakings with random players as well as private lobbies that let you invite specific friends, and if someone drops out their character will be controlled by a bot until they are able to reconnect – an amusing selection of emoting stickers can even let your rivals know exactly how you feel about Boo stealing your hard-earned stars. There’s also Mt. Minigames, which offers a variety of modes that let you play minigames a la carte. In the limited amount of testing, I was able to do before launch, lag certainly played a noticeable factor in one of my sessions, especially in the more reflex intensive games like Hot Rope Jump and Bill Blasters, but online play was generally fun and serviceable overall.

Verdict

Mario Party Superstars is more than just a collection of excellent boards and minigames from the series’ past: It’s a complete return to form for the Mario Party series. There’s a really great mix of classic and more modern minigames, the overall quality of which is top-notch, even if some of them are a bit redundant. It really could have used one more board, and the balance of the 1v3 minigames isn’t the greatest, but with solid online play-acting as the icing on the proverbial Peach’s Birthday Cake, it’s easy to say that this is the best Mario Party has been in at least a decade.

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Visually the game is impressive, with a major cosmetic update from its predecessor. However, this change is not as obvious for the PS4 version as it is for the PS5 game, which is a true shame, as the game offers impressive renditions of famous NBA players. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said by the public during matches, as they, as they often tend to be, are just copy-pasted models with slight changes in appearance. On the other hand, music is still as good as always. 2K Beats, as the soundtrack is called, consists of a very impressive musical selection, with an emphasis on independent artists, which is noteworthy as not only does it give a major platform to these emerging musicians, but it also adds freshness to the game’s ambient. A win-win-win scenario.

Now for the elephant in the room, the city mode vs the neighborhood mode. In NBA 2K21 we got to take a first look at the City, a new model that fell flat the first time around. Now, the City has become the focal point of the career mode. The main story of the career mode takes place in its entirety within the limits of the City, and as your character progresses, so will your house and your mingling with the worlds of music and fashion. This transforms NBA 2K22 into an open-world sandbox that can only be described as a proper NBA simulator or NBA: the game if you will. That is if you own the PS5/PC/Xbox Series X version. If you, instead, have the PS4 version, your experience will be vastly different, as the career mode is deeply intertwined with the City mode, which is absent from this version of the game.

Instead, last-gen players get to play a revamped version of the Neighborhood but this time, the neighborhood is not on firm land but aboard a basketball-themed cruise ship and most of the gameplay takes place on the high seas. It may sound weird, but it is pretty refreshing that games like these, so obviously most of the time, take risks and offer a refreshing experience. This basketball luxurious yacht has 5 levels, which can be navigated guided by Heather, an NPC that will offer insights and tutorials on how the ship works. Deck 4 houses the lobby; deck 8 houses MyCourt, your home base which you will be able to customize and decorate with different murals, redesigning the court or even changing the scoreboard. Here you will also find the Pro-am matches and the training facilities for the team.

Deck 14 is interesting as it entertains in the form of restaurants and, well, gambling. Because no cruise ship is free of gambling, and it wouldn’t be an EA game without rewards and incentives for microtransactions. But we will get to that. Aside from daily rewards, restaurants will also offer bonuses and boosters, which is a nice addition to immersion. Now for Deck 15, here you will find courts for 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 games, as well as the Gatorade gym, with everything you need to keep yourself in shape.

Now for the seasonal content, this will come in the shape of in-land tours. The ship will reach different ports, and each offers famous tropical locations throughout the year. Rewards, events, and everything you need to keep yourself coming back to check the new content available. This in turn is also an interesting take on seasonal content but feels a bit out of place for a sports game.

Back to other games modes, it is worth noting MyTeam, a card collection mode in which players will be able to create their dream team, with current players as well as from past eras. NBA’s take on FIFA’s Ultimate Team.  There is also a sub-mode called MyTeam Draft, in which we receive 7 booster packs from which we must select 13 players, an interesting take in which luck and strategy intermingle. This game mode can be a blast for those with a collector mindset or a total nightmare for those who dread FOMO.

Finally, we get MyNBA, the game mode in which we get to see the big picture and manage not only a custom team but the whole league. This game mode is created with every single detail in mind, from the configuration of the conferences to the selection of our team’s uniform, its governor, MyStaff, where we can select every single person in charge of the training and general wellbeing of our athletes, with intricate skills, options, and subsystems that will quench the thirst of the most dedicated and controlling players.

NBA 2K22 is a nice addition to the franchise and, while PlayStation 4 players get the shorter straw in terms of content, it is still a good opportunity to test the improved mechanics of this long-lasting staple of sports games.

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