Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales – Review
When it comes to Spider-Man films, Into the Spider-Verse is up there with the best of them. Truly, I enjoy them all (even the horrifying campiness of Spider-Man 3), but that particular one really spoke to me. Though I, like everyone else, can’t wait for the sequel, I couldn’t resist preordering the Miles Morales spinoff that was announced for the PlayStation 5’s launch. Two years after its initial release, the game is finally accessible to a new generation of internet users on a different platform. You’ve read Ron’s review, in which he calls it “one of the best Spider-Man games,” and now you can read mine, in which I also call it “one of the best Spider-Man games,” but this time for the PC.
This origin story for a Spider-Man takes you all the way back to when he was just a kid. As Peter Parker is eight years older and has been doing this job for a while in Marvel’s Spider-Man, we get a chance to see things from his perspective. You’re not exactly a rookie at web slinging now that you’re Miles, but you might be surprised at what your abilities allow. This is evident in the clumsy way Miles botches a prison transfer in the opening sequence, but he more than makes up for it by uncovering abilities that even Peter finds surprising.
Because of Peter’s departure with MJ for work and his own little vacation, Miles will be able to embark on a truly incredible adventure during his winter break in New York. That it’s a Christmas story makes it all the more endearing to me. Every second with Miles, his mom, and his pals is heartwarming. While we did find traces of sympathy in various encounters with villains in Marvel’s Spider-Man, the holiday setting makes it stand out even more. The world that Insomniac is currently creating is incredible, with fully realised characters on both sides of the argument.
Performance on PC is going to be the deciding factor here, despite the fact that I could sit here and gush about how well Miles Morales builds off the original, how fantastic the story is, and how much fun it is to swing around the city. It doesn’t matter if you agree with them or not, if a PC gamer has the hardware, they want to show it off, and they want games that showcase it. While not every scene in Miles Morales runs at 4K/60fps/ray tracing at maximum settings, the PC version has a good chance of looking just as good, if not better, than the console version.
Fortunately, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales offers a wide variety of customization options to suit your needs, regardless of the type of computer you happen to own. Miles Morales will use relatively low-end hardware, as shown in the chart below, consisting of an NVIDIA GTX 950, Intel I3-4160, and 8 GB of RAM. However, you won’t be able to enjoy the full experience of this game. If you’re accustomed to that kind of accuracy, you probably won’t notice either.
PC master race fans have high expectations, and Miles Morales can deliver. I’m running an RTX 3080, a Core i9-10900F, and 32 GB of RAM, so I know I need every single thing. In our previous review of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered for PC (which you can find here), we found out that, with everything turned up to eleven, the game maintained a steady 50fps to 60fps in the open world, with performance increasing during enclosed missions. Based on my time with Miles Morales, this seems to be mostly accurate, with the caveats I’ll get into below. The frame rate increased to over 100 fps when I disabled ray tracing and all other visual effects to their minimum settings. You can expect to gain or lose around five to ten frames on average, which isn’t too bad, depending on the graphics presets you choose. The frame rate fluctuated a lot as I flew through the world and when I was fighting off groups of bad guys, and it was distracting.
For the sake of diversity, let’s talk about the incredible PC that our Chief Editor, Ron Burke, used to take on Miles Morales. The internals also boasts an NVIDIA RTX 4090, and he’s got video below so you can see exactly what it can do. As a bonus, he does a fantastic job of explaining the various options, and he even goes so far as to discuss how well the game runs with the brand new DLSS 3 technology.
Yes, ray tracing is stunning, but hear me out. And it’s the number one culprit in slowing down your computer. Ray tracing, in case you didn’t know, is a thief because it uses up a lot of your computer’s resources to render all the realistic looking lights and shadows. After enabling ray tracing and cranking up all of the graphics settings, I was able to bring my frame rate in Miles Morales to a grinding halt. Even though the graph claims that my PC is capable of 4K/60fps with high ray tracing, I highly doubt that includes the increased shadow detail I have enabled. I don’t think it made a big difference either, so I’d avoid changing that setting altogether. The cost in the end is usually around twelve to twenty frames to get all of the traced rays you’d like, so you have to decide what’s worth it to you.
This is why I believe the reduced frame rate caused by ray tracing in this game is justified. To put it bluntly, Miles Morales is gorgeous. The brightness can be reduced by turning down the graphics settings and disabling ray tracing. I tried quite a few different combinations, and the best I came up with was running High graphical settings, along with ray tracing on at its default settings, with shadows on Medium. Ray tracing makes cutscenes look better, especially at night when the Christmas decorations are lit up.
You can get a few more frames by adjusting the traffic and people settings. This changes how populated the city seems, giving you the option of seeing more or fewer cars and people out and about. As for me, I say set it as low as possible. It doesn’t hinder the experience, and it gives you a minor boost. If you’re not a number and counter geek like me, you probably won’t even notice these subtleties. On PC, the game runs flawlessly at the suggested settings.
Even though I’d rather use a controller, I will concede that using a mouse and keyboard is a workable alternative when playing as Miles Morales. I completely ignored it while reviewing Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (mostly because I forgot to use it), but I did try switching to it in the middle of an infiltration mission just to see how it would play out. It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped; I hit the wrong button and drew the attention of all the bad guys, but fighting back wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared it would be. If you don’t have a controller, you’re not out of luck, but I do think you’d be better off with one. Though the DualSense’s haptics and adaptive triggers are nice, they are hardly game-changing on their own. My choice of controller was the Xbox Elite Series 2, but any will do.
Finally, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales offers a wide variety of accessibility settings for players with disabilities. This game’s selection is staggering compared to others’, including the most recent God of War Ragnarok. It’s great to see how much work has gone into improving accessibility, from making quick-time events (QTEs) auto-complete to adding high-contrast shaders to distinguish between characters for the visually impaired. It’s great to see developers working to make their games more accessible to a wider audience, and I’m sure many of these features were borrowed from Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered.
