Spider-Man: Miles Morales - Full (hopefully spoiler free) Review (Version tested: Playstation 4 Pro)

 Oh the irony. In the "First few hours" article I wrote about Insomniac's "Spider-Man: Miles Morales" I (rather foolishly) tailed off by saying "This is a game that you can tell will consume vast portions of your time" - and yet here I sit typing up a completion review after around 6-7 hours of play. 

You could say "Short and sweet" is the sub-heading for this one, I really thought there was going to be a lot more to it than there actually was, but on 99% (and no idea where the 'errant' missing 1% is thanks to the game actually not making that obvious) I'm done just a few days after the game arrived in the post. 

So let's start with the positive stuff. This game ticks so many of my gamer boxes, it's fun to play, it looks amazing (even the choppiness I complained about seems to have disappeared on a second playthrough, so I will chalk that up to background data installing while cut scenes were playing out) and it's a beautifully put together game. 

But that whole 'value for money' thing. Let's face it, if you'd paid the entry price for the PS5 version of this, you'd probably be feeling a little bit ripped off with RRPs starting at between £60-70 (you are, of course, a complete idiot if you don't shop around for your games but if you bought the 'diskless' PS5, you're going to have to wait a while for the sales to kick in for a lower price I guess). 

Even buying the PS4 version I still felt like Sony and Insomniac have offered up a bit of a hollow shell of a main game in the box, possibly in preparation for a mountain of DLC as with the original Insomniac Spider-Man game. 

The actual main story quest is over in the blink of an eye, in fact it felt like the big reveals happened so early on in the game that I initially thought "Nah, there must be more to it than this?" - only to notice that the percent complete was worryingly high after a few short hours. Once the main quest was over (with some glorious "Black Lives Matter" stuff worked into the game, and a lot of beautiful little nods to both the Miles Morales comics and of course the movies) I set about clearing the map of all the side missions, tasks and the stuff coming in through Ganke's app. 

Just a few hours later those were all done. I'd like to point out that I'm not the sort of gamer who has acres of disposable time on my hands but in the few short hours of gaming I squeeze in occasionally I'd reckon my 6-7 hours for the lot was probably on the generous side. You can toast the main quest in a little under 5 hours and if you know the map well enough, clear all the side quests in an hour or two. 

"Rinse and repeat" is the order of the day - in fact the side missions became irksome because of this. I felt like there was a ton of potential to do something really amazing that was skipped in favour of the age old problem that all open-world games have, a sparse population of missions to really get your teeth into. In fact, that said, the most fun I had in the game was with Peter Parker's training missions, which were genuinely challenging (and in the case of the stealth missions, quite tough!) and really satisfying to complete (and get a high score in). 

Even the boss fights, usually the weakest link in most games, felt all too easy even on a reasonable difficulty level - and again I should point out I'm an old dude, by no means a gaming ninja who plays everything through on the most difficult levels. 

Despite the game's satisfying moments and slickness, I'm left here in two minds about this one. It's fun, it's a fantastic technical showcase for what the PS4 pro is still capable of (and from what I'm hearing, it dazzles on the PS5 particularly with the new haptic feedback controllers being made good use of). But short, oh so frickin' short. Compared to the 2 years plus I just put into polishing off Days Gone, SMMM was here and gone in the blink of an eye. What a crying shame. 

Oh and PS: the cat suit was even disappointing after all that!