There has always been a general rule of thumb when it comes to open world games, which is the less space you have to cover, the more interesting you can be. Series like Yakuza and Shenmue are always going to feel more lived-in than something like GTA, which is part of the reason that Spider-Man 2’s rendering of Queens and Brooklyn feels so, well, weird.
I’m enjoying Spider-Man 2 more than I assumed I would. Insomniac has knocked it out of the park, and the game’s huge set pieces are some of the most technically impressive things I’ve seen pulled off on the hardware. Playing Spider-Man 2, I’m painfully aware of the sheer time and energy that went into crafting this game. The combat is fun, and I am having a blast playing it. It feels like a PS2 game that costs hundreds of millions of dollars. As a shining advertisement for the idea of owning a PS5, there is nothing that tops it.
Spider-Man 2’s scope ups the ante from the previous two entries, Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, by letting you not only control both Peter and Miles interchangeably, but also expanding the map to include selective portions of Brooklyn and Queens. (The Bronx is still blocked off by a version of the Harlem River that is wider than the Mississippi.) This was always an inevitability: you can’t just have Miles swinging around Manhattan without doing a disservice to his character, and seeing how Peter’s neighborhood in Queens fits organically into the world has always been a huge selling point. And yet despite feeling bigger than ever, the scope still feels intentionally conservative.
For the size of the spectacle that Spider-Man 2 is attempting–a focused 22-27 hour, web-slinging game where you rarely see the ground–creating a coherent Brooklyn and Queens is more or less impractical. Making anything approaching a 1:1 replica of a real city space is neither realistic nor fun unless it’s a very detailed, individual neighborhood like in Yakuza, so bigger games like GTA and Spider-Man always opt for a compressed funhouse mirror version of the world. This usually works for Manhattan, because Manhattan is huge and imposing and used to this kind of abuse in fiction. But this means that much of what Brooklyn actually consists of, namely 3-4 story medium density mixed use buildings, has to be de-emphasized. Those buildings are also not practical to swing on, which is going to be an issue in a game about guys who swing on webs.
Much of what you are swinging on in Brooklyn and Queens are the poorly-built and largely empty luxury condos that have come to dominate these areas. Yes, you do go to Peter’s home in Forest Park, which in the game has absorbed into Astoria, but for the most part Brooklyn and Queens are largely relegated to being Manhattan 2, with some additional flavor. It’s funny in a bleak way.
All of this would be less apparent if you were not constantly being reminded of the idea of an authentic New York experience that has become an international selling point of Brooklyn and Queens. Throughout the game, newspaper editor Robbie Robertson commissions you to snap shots of New Yorkers doing real shit: people playing basketball, kids breakdancing and doing the worm in Central Park. Some of these interactions are appropriately goofy and unrealistic, like two rival bodega owners dressed as spiderman cat mascots. My favorite is a speakeasy constructed inside an abandoned rooftop water tower with a bunch of NPCs dancing Sims style inside it. It’s a scene an alien would describe if you asked them what people do in Williamsburg for fun.
But it also makes the game feel like it was made by people who came to New York for a week or two and then tried to summarize their trip from memory. It’s not that parts of the game are inaccurate; it’s that parts of the game are shockingly accurate next to really basic stuff that isn’t. One example: the relatively new, bougie Domino Park and the surrounding condos are rendered painstakingly, and the actual Domino building is there, as is the donut shaped, 325 Kent condo, but there is no illuminated sign, which is unquestionably the most iconic part of that entire neighborhood. GTA IV did this well as a parody, and it feels like a strange omission even accounting for the potential liability. Getting the condos right but the thing the condos were built around wrong is a strange clash. It’s an uncanny valley, and I am swinging through it.
There are plenty of other examples. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden greenhouses are rendered with shocking accuracy, as is the Brooklyn Museum nearby and zoo nearby, but Prospect Park accounts for at most 3 blocks, significantly smaller than the 525 acres that it takes up in real life. It’s not that they got it wrong, it’s that they got a small bit very right and that gives me whiplash. The bridges look great in profile but are completely wrong up close, and none of them have trains, which is something that even GTA IV got right even with fictionalized bridges. There are abandoned freight lines that seem to reference lines that run through Maspeth, but they run through apartment buildings in a way that I have never seen freight lines do in my life. Also, I may have missed some lore about this, but having every neighborhood map to a real one but then turning Greenpoint into Little Odessa is so funny, particularly since the real “Little Odessa” is east of Coney Island but the Coney Island of this game omits Brighton Beach entirely.
Comparing Spider-Man 2 to GTA IV might be somewhat unfair; these were different games with different priorities, and GTA IV was a game that you were meant to inhabit for months or years, not swing through briskly and put down once you got all the collectibles. But looking back at it, it is still a game made by people who clearly understand the shape of New York, even in caricature. Spider-Man 2 is a fantastic game, but the Brooklyn and Queens it creates are an empty condo. The amenities in it are very nice, it looks like it was expensive to make, and it makes sense that someone made it within the environment in which it was made. But like much of what New York has become, I don’t understand who lives here, if anyone lives there at all, or who it was built for.
Come to think of it, maybe it is pretty accurate to New York.
