Sony’s biggest exclusive of the PlayStation 5 generation has finally arrived on PC and it probably shouldn’t have, at least not in this state. Spider-Man 2 already has a rating of “mixed” on Steam, players warning about crashes, freezes, and all sorts of other issues, even for those with high-end graphics cards like GeForce RTX 4090s.
Spider-Man 2 arrived on PC on January 30, just a little over a year since its launch on PS5. The record porting time doesn’t seem to have come without a price. Developed by Nixxes Software, which has collaborated on tons of other Sony ports that didn’t have day-one issues, Insomniac Games’ open-world comic book game appears to be giving even players with powerful gaming rigs trouble unless they drastically dial down the settings.
“After my excitement to swing through New York City, I ran into significant technical problems with Spider-Man 2 on my RTX 4090,” one Steam player wrote. “Despite having a high-end GPU and running the latest NVIDIA drivers (566.36), the game frequently crashes with graphics controller errors.”
Another was similarly flummoxed. “Hold off on buying until they get a couple of stabilization patches out because holy hell,” they wrote. “To say this is ‘rough’ is an understatement. Lighting doesn’t load in some cutscenes, those same scenes run at seconds-per-frame, audio desync issues up the wazoo, freezing, stuttering, and just about every other performance issue I can think of.”
Lots of players report requesting refunds from Steam until a patch or two can sort out the trouble. Others have spent so much time trying to optimize settings to stop the game from crashing that they’ve exceeded the refund limit. “I can’t even refund this now because I’ve spent more time trying to optimize this game than actually playing it,” one wrote. “Worst birthday gift ever.”
Of course, not everyone’s having a bad time with Spider-Man 2 on PC. There plenty of players who aren’t reporting any major issues as they take on Kraven The Hunter and Venom. Only about half of the reviews are positive at the moment, however, so that’s potentially a 50/50 chance of whether prospective buyers are in for a good time or not.
This isn’t the first Sony port to get heavily criticized at launch. The Last of Us Part I came to PC in even rougher shape. Updates subsequently solved most of the problems, and it currently has a 94 percent rating among recent reviewers. But it raised questions around why Sony would release the game if things were in such poor shape. Then again, we’ve seen lots of big blockbusters struggle day-one on PC as developers perform triage on unique issues isolated to certain PC gaming setups that couldn’t be tested during production.
We’ll see how long it takes Spider-Man 2 to get sorted out. It’s one of 2023's best games and something that no doubt has the potential to look even better on PC than it did when it first came to PS5.
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