Spider-Man 2, the game

I have mixed feelings about this game.

The game world is fantastic. It's huge, you can roam it seamlessly, and it has a variety of areas with different feels.

The swinging is terrific. It's easy to get the hang of and maddeningly difficult to master.

The fighting is pretty good. There's a good variety of moves available. Unfortunately you quickly reach a point where all of the enemies dodge most of your attacks unless you tie them up first, which tarnishes the dynamic feel of combat.

The story is acceptable but the story missions do not last long enough and are unnecessarily linear. The Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, and Black Cat storylines should proceed independently.

The pizza, MJ, and Daily Bugle missions rise in difficulty too quickly and do not provide adequate reward. All you get are hero points, and it's easier to get hero points from street encounters.

The exploration tokens have the same problem. The only difference AFAIK is that collecting sufficient (possibly all 150) skyscraper tokens unlocks a wallsprint upgrade. Incremental rewards, such as unlocking new moves every 25 tokens, would be much nicer. It's a particularly egregious lack in the case of the secret tokens, which are much harder to find than the other types. The secret tokens are worth more hero points than the others, but not enough - it's much easier and more efficient to buy out the spidey store using hero points from street encounters.

The city contains many stores that you can enter in addition to the spidey stores, but except for a couple of story missions, nothing ever happens in those stores as far as I can tell.

Basically, my gripe is that they created an incredible game world and left too much potential unrealized. I'm glad I bought the game but it leaves me feeling that they could have done much more without much effort.