Marvel's Spider-Man 2

I love comics, but the Spider-Man games as a series never quite clicked for me the way Uncharted or Horizon did. Spider-Man 2 is the one that changed that, mostly because swinging through New York by itself is worth the price of admission. Chaining a web-swing into a wall-run into a mid-air dive never gets old, and new districts load fast enough that traversal never breaks. Combat stays accessible, not demanding. The side content leans more toward map-clearing than genuine exploration, which keeps it a notch below the puzzle-heavier picks above it. If fast traversal and comic-book set pieces are what you're after, this is as polished as PS5 gets.

Not my genre by instinct, but the movement hooked me anyway. Web-swinging through Manhattan at that speed, with that fluidity, is one of those rare cases where traversal is genuinely its own reward before the mission even loads. The PS5 version is a showpiece: near-instant fast travel, rock-solid performance, visuals that hold up on a good display. The story is crowd-pleasing rather than surprising, and the open world does not have the depth of the RPGs on this list. Still, as a blockbuster exclusive you can hand to almost any PS5 owner and expect them to enjoy, Spider-Man 2 does that job better than almost anything else on the platform.

Spider-Man 2 is the game on this list I reached for first after a long day where I just wanted to switch off and move. Web-swinging through Manhattan in this game is one of those things that is genuinely hard to describe without sounding like marketing copy: it is fast, fluid, and the whole city feels built around making you feel good doing it. The campaign is leaner than the very best entries above it, and the story wraps up a little quickly, but as a pick-up-and-play PS5 experience it has almost no competition for sheer accessibility. DualSense haptics are put to good use here too, which the PS5 version on a proper display makes hard to ignore.

Two protagonists, one city, and traversal so smooth you will lose twenty minutes just swinging between the Financial District and Harlem for no reason. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is exactly what a blockbuster PS5 exclusive should be: huge production values, instant loading, DualSense used properly for web-slinging tension and symbiote combat. The story leans into its comic book DNA without being embarrassing about it. My one complaint is that it resolves its best narrative thread too quickly. The game is otherwise impeccably paced and polished. Start here if you want a cinematic open-world experience that feels native to the platform rather than ported to it.

Spider-Man 2 is the game I recommend to anyone who just bought a PS5 and wants to see what the hardware can do quickly. Web-swinging between Manhattan skyscrapers with near-instant transitions and no loading screens is still, two years on, one of the cleanest demos of what this console is capable of. The story is not as tight as the first game, and the villain arc rushes things it should let breathe. But the traversal is genuinely joyful in a way that holds up across the full campaign. Accessible, fast, and broadly crowd-pleasing. It belongs at the end of this list, not because it is the weakest entry, but because the games above it simply have more depth.

There is a specific moment in Spider-Man 2 where you first get the wing suit and realize you can cross the entire map without touching a building. The traversal crosses a line from mechanic to experience in a way almost nothing else on PS5 manages. I grew up playing the PS1 Spider-Man, so maybe I am primed to respond to this, but the city genuinely earns exploration rather than just rewarding it with icons. It is not as narratively rich as the best RPGs here, and the open world is wider than it is deep. Still the second-best reason to browse this catalog right now.

Swinging through New York in Spider-Man 2 is still one of the most immediately joyful things you can do on a PS5. The traversal is faster and more flexible than the first game, and the web wings add a gliding layer that means you are rarely walking anywhere. The story does not reach the heights of the original and the mission variety can feel thin in the back half, but as a pure, no-friction good-time game it is almost unbeatable in the catalog. I played this with my wife watching from the couch and she asked me to slow down so she could see the city. That is the kind of game it is.