Another reason why I feel like Miles is the worst part of the game is because he inconveniently brings powers to the table that Pete doesn't have. I didn't like the combat changes in Miles Morales, but it was tolerable since it was something different. But now we have to bring his combat to Pete, and now I just don't feel like Spider-man anymore. I won't pretend that the gadget system in the first game was the peak of gaming, but they still made me feel like I was Spider-man more than having four random supermoves with robot arms. But that's just a complaint about the vibe, I also don't think it's a great mechanic in general. It really does feel the regular combat only exists to enable you to use your supermoves, instead of your supermoves complementing the rest of the combat. In Miles Morales, your Venom attacks needed to be used against certain enemies. The Venom punch takes out blocking enemies but not agile enemies, who are countered by the Venom dash. However now all his and Peter's supermoves are equally effective against every single opponent. They also make many of the remaining gadgets you have redundant. I at first thought there would be some synergy between the supermoves and the gadgets, but by the time you unlock all the supermoves the gadgets are just there for the occasional spam. These new supermoves also kind of impacted the story, because you just KNOW that Peter is going to keep all his symbiote supermoves by the end of the game. That Pete sort of gets 3 different sets of supermoves in the game shows how way too focused the game is on them in my opinion.
So then combat is pretty much reduced to biding your time until you can use your fire-and-forget supermoves. This is also reflected in how ridiculously spongey enemies are. But now there's also parrying! I love parrying in games, but fuck the parrying in this game. Again, the vibes are all wrong. Why would Spider-man every parry something? It doesn't help that it also looks really stupid. Miles does this weird shove like a grade schooler getting into his first fight in the playground, while Peter uses his robot arms and then this weird symbiote splooge. In terms of how well it works in combat, it feels like an addition solely for boss battles. They throw in some regular grunts who use attacks that can only be parried, but supposedly, every melee attack can be parried. So it's really weird that a base level grunt can sometimes be harder to parry then the five ton giant lizard man. That "every melee attack" bit also comes with a huge asterisk, because the game is incredibly unclear about what constitutes a melee attack. There are quite a few enemies that use what look like ranged or AOE attacks, but the game expects you to parry them. For example, a flamethrower enemy will create a circle of fire around them. For some reason, the game expects you to parry fire. I guess you can say you're parrying the hands carrying the flamethrower, but it just feels dumb. It also could not be clearer that Insomniac did not expect people to try parrying certain attacks. I even discovered a bug where a certain enemy didn't take any damage after successfully parrying and attacking them. Eventually they introduce an attack that can ONLY be dodged (after training us for hours to parry), which you are warned about with a barely different sound cue and a different colored icon. Poor UI/UX in my opinion, which is exacerbated by many of these dodge-only attacks being counter intuitive. Many of them look like you could definitely parry them or jump over them, but the game says no arbitrarily.
How do the boss battles Well, I ended up playing every boss battle by standing still and parrying them. Not how Insomniac wanted us to fight them, but you could. One thing that really impressed me about the first game was that they actually trusted the player to be web swinging all over the place in boss battles, sometimes in the actual open world. The Vulture and Electro fight, the Doc Ock battle. I spent most of my time in the air in those fights. There is absolutely nothing like that in this game, except maybe the Sandman boss fight that feels more like a tutorial. Boss fights take place in tiny little arenas, where they want you glued to floor, parrying like a good little boy. I felt like I was playing a shittier version of GoW 2018. As a result, even though supposedly the boss battles are flashier, they felt underwhelming. I think it's what truly cements why parrying is just not a good fit for a Spider-man game.
In general, I will also say that combat is just messier. The fun I found in the first game was not the difficulty in defeating opponents, but the difficulty in defeating them perfectly. The Arkham series knew this, which is why they emphasized rewarding unbroken combos. The power fantasy comes not from being being able to dish about damage, but from being able to react to anything coming your way without breaking a sweat. Spidey 2 however is just a much "harder" game than previous ones. Enemies have more health, abilities like the perfect dodge into web strike takedown are gone, and throwing objects has been massively nerfed both in terms of damage and crowd control. They've added a lot of enemies who interrupt your flow, such as dodging or straight up countering. This all builds up annoyance, that can be conveniently solved by mindlessly unleashing your arsenal of supermoves. If you do just want to play with the good old punches and kicks, the complexity of all the new attacks your enemies throw at you creates situations where you feel like failure was not your fault. The visual clutter alone increases the difficulty. Actions where enemies would normally give you some grace to do cool shit are punished, in ways that does not feel intentional. I thought the same of Arkham Knight. It felt like the game itself could not really keep up with the increased complexity and variety. The camera getting stuck behind objects while enemies piled on happened quite often.
Let's talk enemy factions. The Hunters are a cool addition to the game, and the ones I feel play the best. The robot dogs are perhaps the most annoying enemies, but I could forgive them. What I could not forgive were the flame cultists, who feel so incredibly out of place and are extremely irrelevant story-wise. I could not believe that they were just an excuse to tease Carnage. Has Carnage ever been linked to fire??? I dunno, but it feels even worse when you now know Insomniac will never get to deliver a conclusion to that in a DLC (which can be said for many other side missions in the game). The last faction are the symbiotes, who are uggggllyyy. Absolutely unpleasant to look at. They share basically no design language with Venom himself, besides all the goo effects. Meh. They're definitely the toughest opponents in the game, although they still fall way too easily to your supermoves.
On traversal, it is excellent. The end. I don't like the web wings, but they are 95% optional. I would have never used them period if I wasn't just tired of the game in general by the end. I won't say much about traversal, but I will state that I think it is easily the saving grace of this game, along with the game world. I honestly didn't really notice how the map was bigger, but I definitely noticed how dense it is. Huge upgrade from the previous games.
What unfortunately is not an upgrade is the side content. I don't even mind having pointless activities ala Ubisoft cluttering the map. I treated them as convenient excuses to be web swinging around. But man, after two previous games, they still have no fucking idea what to do with them. Collectibles are a huge step down from the first game. I have already mentioned that I despise the new photo collectibles. The spider-bots would be fun, if they were a little more interesting to collect (the payoff for collecting them all is painfully stupid too). I was excited when I saw that there were chests littered across the map, but actually collecting them is a fucking bore. Your momentum completely stops because you need to interact with them, as opposed to just walking over them such as in more fun games like Saint's Row 4 or Just Cause. Hell, if you opened the chests by punching them open, that would have already been an improvement. It doesn't help that the resources they provide you are hardly needed, I have wayyy too much of them despite already 100%-ing the game. The open world activities just never take advantage of either being open world or being Spidey. Remember how in the first game, there was a pigeon sidequest where you could just be swinging in the air and the game would organically start a chase that tested your web swinging skills? The equivalent of that in this game is you hunting a drone that requires you to stop, trigger the mission, play a cutscene, and then boringly do a web wing challenge across the city that also for some reason ends in a cutscene. It makes you feel so much more like you're ticking boxes off a check list rather than enjoying this game world. Imagine that, chasing pigeons is more fun and engaging than chasing a military drone equipped with rail guns and rockets.
The other open world activities can also be separated by Spider-men. The only replayable combat challenges in the open world are exclusively for Miles for some reason as well as tedious Prowler hideout missions, while Peter gets to have boring, oddly overdeveloped science-y missions that are worse version of the ones in the previous game. How many fucking times do they expect us to pilot drones?
As much as I was disappointed by the story, I think I was way more disappointed by the gameplay. I wanted to keep playing the previous games even after the main story, because it was so zen to just swing around the city and tackle crimes. But the endgame of Spidey 2 is one of the biggest indicators of how rushed the development was. The game just ends. No dialogue to mention that why all the factions are still active in the city despite finishing all their missions. Insomniac clearly sprinted to the end and had no bandwith to go any further.
The Spider-Man games had the same issue: Scorpion, Rhino, Vulture, Prowler, whatever the hell they turned Yuri Watanabe into... oof. Miles gets a Prowler suit in Miles Morales and it looks better than the main Prowler suit.