It’s difficult to build a sense of urgency in an open world game. When you give players dozens of goals to pursue and the freedom to choose their own path through the story, the critical path inherently becomes less critical. Whether you’re saving Hyrule from Ganondorf, searching for a way to save 🤡V’s mind from being overwritten, or trying to find Ciri before the Wild Hunt gets to her, every side quest chips away at the exige🎀ncy of the game’s central conflict.
Spider-Man 2 struggles to balance its dramatic tension, but not in the way other open worlds do. From the moment Kraven kidnaps Martin Li and Scorpion, the Spider-Men know the clock is ticking. They understand tha꧑t every second they spend away from their pursuit of Kraven, the risk of catastrophe increases. But great power comes with great responsibilities, and as important as stopping Kraven is, the burden of being Spider-Man is the struggle to find balance. The way Insomniac centers this theme in the story helps alleviate the dissonance that typically develops as a result of open world diversions.

Even Spider-Man 2's Secret Playable Character Can Do The Wakanda Salute
Spider-Man 2 players have managed to get its secret character out of bounds, which reveals tha💦t even they can do the Wakanda Salute.
It helps that, ✅with few exceptions, the side quests are all pressing in their own way. Running down a cult with Wraith, clearing out Hunter strongholds, and destroying Symbiote nests are all problems that require immediate attention. It’s nearly impossible to ignore random street crimes that pop-up when I’m en route to critical missions, because Spider-Man would always stop and help no matter what. There’s an argument to be made that EMF experiments and Prowler stashes should probably be ignored while a supervillain serial killer is on the loose, but it’s not like we’re chasing pigeons around Manhattan. As far as digressions go, Spider-Man 2 handles it better than most.
There’s also a strong narrative justification for taking your time with the main story. As the symbiote digs its tendrils in Peter, he becomes increasingly n𒅌arcissistic and aloof about his respon꧅sibilities, including incredibly urgent ones like finding a way to save Harry’s life. It makes sense that he would spend time swinging around the city looking for drones when he really ought to be tracking down Dr. Connors. Throughout Spider-Man 2, Insomniac builds a number of believable ways to justify all the trappings of a typical open world game.
That being said, there’s still a kind of temporal dissonance plaguing Spider-Man 2 that compromises the ur🔜gency of the plot: a perpetual disconnect with time itself. I often found myself confused about the passage of time through my first playthrough, and now on my Ultimate Difficulty playthrough, it’s clear that the story is simply missing some anchor points that would help establish a sense of time and give greater weight to the campaign’s major story beats. This is a problem that usually affects movies more than games: I’m uncertain whether this story takes place over days, weeks, or months.
One thing that contributes to the feeling of being lost on a shifting timeline is the fact that some missions can be played out of order. To begin Miles’ Brooklyn Visions side quest, you have to attend the BV Club Fair at his school. It’s important that Miles not be late to the fair where he intends to apply for a scholarship… except you don’t have to do this mission on the day you receive it. I didn’t get around to v𒊎isiting the fair until after Peter received the Symbiote Suit, which must be days, if not weeks after the fair was held. When I finally made time for the mission, was it a flashback? Are all the side quests - helping the BV students, saving the Museum, stopping the Flame - all contained within their own timeline? This is how comic books would handle overlapping story events, but I’m not sure if that’s how we’re meant to experience them in Spider-Man 2.
Often starting side missions will transition the world from day to📖 night, but does that mean it’s happening tonight, or was it the night before? When the mission ends and it’s day time again, is it the next morning, or did we return to th꧂e moment before we started the mission?
It may seem pedantic to ask these questions, but understanding the timeline is important tജo our understanding of Spider-Man 2’s story. It seems like Insomniac understands that the gameplay loops are bound to lead to confusion, because the dialogue is frequently informing us that time has passed between events. The problem is that we didn’t experience time moving the same way. So much of the implied weight of certain events tends♐ to evaporate as Insomniac tries to hold it together with statements of fact that don’t ring true.
I have a handful of examples, as well as sense that this is a consistent problem with the presentation of the narrative. In the Act 2 mission Stay Positive, Kraven’s hunters a😼ssault and burn down the Emily-May Foundation at night, and while Harry is devastated, Peter is starting to disconnect and become self-involved. We then jump to a short mission where Miles visits his father’s grave, before turning to Pet🥀er, presumably the following morning, as he pursues the Lizard. There’s a brief phone call with Harry where he tells Peter it’s been awhile since they talked, but has it? Maybe if you spent a few ‘days’ doing side quests you could imagine that Peter has been so self-absorbed with the new suit that he has forgotten to check in on his friend, but as it’s presented, this doesn’t make sense at all.
The following questline follows Peter and Miles chasing down the Lizard throughout one day in which Peter’s hubris grows at an extraordinary rate, transitioning from overzealous and impatient to I’m-going-to-murder-my-girlfriend in a matter of hours. He wakes up on a park bench the next morning, has a row with MJ and Harry, then immediately finds Li and goes after Miles and Kraven. During this battle, Peter fully loses control and Miles has to talk him back from t🍸he edge. He tearfully lambastes his mentor, scolding him by saying Peter is so into himself right now that he never even takes his calls anymore.
Is that really true? They were hunting the Lizard together the previous day. It can be argued that Miles is feeling neglected now that Peter has reconnected with Harry, as Venom plainly states during the final fight, but once again, we don’t see that dynamic bear out in the text of the story. Harry and Pete reconnect, they go on one mission together to save Tombstone, and then Harry and MJ help Peter break into Krav💟en’s stronghold to get the anti-Lizard serum. This all seems to happen in the span of two days, so it’s hard to imagine Miles experiencing some deep emotional betrayal that his big brother has a new best friend.
It is a strange, disorienting experience to feel like the story is both moving too fast and too slow, and never being able to get a good handle on the passage of time hurts the impact of its emotional beats. There are moments that condense the timeline, like when Peter tells Miles not to help him go after Tombstone because he needs to focus on the college essay that was mentioned in the opening cinematic. That throughline of the essay makes it feel like this entire story plays out over a weekend, but the emotional stakes, irrespective of the life and death scenarios our characters find themselves in, requires a lot more than a 48 hours of drama to feel compellin✃g. T🌳he way time expands and contracts to fit the purposes of each individual mission is a detriment to the overall quality of the story Insomniac is telling.
Spider-Man 2 handles its themes much better than I expected it to, and I’d like to be malleable to the suggestion that the sliding timeline fits well with a story about Peter losing his ability to manage his life, and the consequences that avoiding the problem is having on the people around him. Under the influence of Venom, Peter, MJ, and Harry are all able to express the pain they’ve long held inside them, unable to communicate for fear of the consequences. This story is about envy, res﷽entment, and the ♏hopelessness we feel when our loved ones can’t or won’t meet our needs, and it’s important to understand that the seeds of the Symbiote were planted long before Sandman started wreaking havoc on the Upper West Side.
Still, the discordance in time, specifically as it perta🍃ܫins to the events in the game, does a disservice to these themes. Games are built into thousands of individual pieces that are eventually stitched together in a way that hopefully feels cohesive, but even Spidey’s strongest webs can’t seem to hold this timeline together.