 So I'm playing a bunch of games right now. I finished Call of Duty Cold War and I want to do a video about that game because while it has a lot more diversity than the other recent COD games, it's still a really great example of what COD is. A unique experience that lets you control a movie in a very specific way. I'm slowly making my way through AC Valhalla. I'm still too conflicted on it to start writing. I mean, I can see why some people like it, but there are so many flaws that it's a perfect example. Of everything I don't like about the open world genre. I'm also playing a game I figured I wouldn't like, but ended up absolutely loving. I'm one of those weirdos who didn't really like Breath of the Wild. I thought it was kind of boring and I hate the handheld switch thing. I just don't like the way it controls. And yet I love the shameless Ubisoft Zelda clone Immortals Phoenix Rising. I'm definitely doing a video on that because it's like crazy what a ripoff it is and even crazier how ridiculously great it is. I'm still playing Destiny 2's highly disappointing Season of the Hunt. And for some reason I replay Dark Souls 2 again. And of course, Cyberpunk is coming this week. But today I want to talk about something rare. An open world game that is so good. It's almost like a direct answer to all the things I don't like about open world games. There is nothing innovative or different about Miles Morales. It is a standard open world action game. But from its story, to its combat, to its movement system, everything is so universally great. That it ends up being one of the best games of the generation. And it'll probably end up being one of the best games of the next generation as well. And as always, if you like what I have to say, or at least how I sound saying it, do me a new favor and like, share, subscribe, yada yada yada. Marvel's Spider-Man's Miles Morales after the logo. Don't suck. I've played a lot of open world games and an awful lot of them bore me. Most have a similar problem, which is they're too big. And moving around the map is annoying. It seems like making these games is so expensive and difficult that they rarely have the time to really make certain that at least something in them is excellent. They're almost always broad, but shallow. The open world games that work for me are the ones where at least one thing is way above average. And the truly excellent ones have a few things that are exceptionally good. Fallout games have great maps, great lore, usually a good story. In the case of 4, surprisingly great combat and a totally unique gathering and crafting loop. The Witcher had story, missions and side quests that were better than anything else around. And a combat system that was wonky, but fun enough to last 100 hours. Rage 2 had great, great shooting. Horizon Zero Dawn had lore, setting, combat and enemies that stood out from anything else. Even Red Dead 2 and Breath of the Wild, which I don't really like. I still respected because the story or the world or the missions were so obviously good. But then a game like AC Origin, which reviews really well, was just a huge bland expanse of mediocre. Nothing terrible, but nothing that could even remotely be described as great. It's fine. But like fine for 70 hours, man. If you're gonna have me spending hours and hours traversing a map, there needs to be something great. That's more than just 8 minutes of me pushing forward on the analog stick looking at trees. One of the funniest things about these new AC games is how Ubisoft acknowledges this fact. Games like Red Dead and The Witcher at least have some mechanics involved in the horse riding. It's not just a faster walking animation. You're involved in the process as a gameplay mechanic. Whereas the new Assassin Creed games have a button to let the horse or even the boat take you to the next location. In Valhalla, there aren't even any side missions, man. There's the occasional boring world event. But mainly, you just sit and wait for the horse to get where you're going. The reason Black Flag is still far and away. The best of these games is because the travel was excellent. The naval combat was great. It was mechanically involved and deep. So the process of sailing to the next quest marker was interesting. You didn't just press a button and wait for the boat to get there. Valhalla turns traveling to a mission into a 4 minute live action cutscene. Any time the game can play itself for long stretches, something is wrong. Whatever game you're playing, you'll be spending most of your time doing one thing. Not combat, or puzzles, or cutscenes. You will spend the majority of your time just moving your character around a map. Because this is the thing you'll spend most of your time doing, it is highly annoying that so many developers fail to make moving around feel good. Over the years, I've come to realize that my enjoyment of a game is directly correlated to how smooth movement looks and feels. One of the main things that makes Dark Souls 2 less fun than the other games is how shitty the movement feels in that game. When you look at my favorite shooters like Rage, Destiny, Doom, Ultra Kill, the one thing that stands out is those have great movement systems. This works in almost any genre. The Division plays better than most third-person shooters because movement and cover is smooth and responsive. Miles Morales makes moving around the map almost a game on its own. Now, I know someone is thinking, well of course, you can't compare moving around in AC Valhalla to Spider-Man. Spider-Man can swing through the air. And while that's true, it's not everything. Marvel Avengers is entirely superheroes including several that can fly and yet movement in that game feels bad and is one of the big reasons I didn't like it. I have to imagine that Insomniac Games spent ages getting the web-slinging movement of Spider-Man just right. They could have just implemented some way to swing around the city and call it a day but instead what you have is something truly special. In fact, Miles Morales improves on the other game quite a bit simply because of how great Miles is animated compared to Peter Parker. Miles is new to being Spider-Man. Everything he does looks out of control and on the edge and kinda awkward. It's awesome. Swinging and doing tricks across Manhattan makes you feel like Miles. In fact, I think it's a big part of what makes you love the character as you play. Animation is such a big part of developing a connection with a player character. I hate to go back to Dark Souls again, but this is the big problem with Dark Souls too. The animation feels clunky. It doesn't look real and so as a player you're simply less connected to your actions on screen. The unconvincing animation cements the experience of being one where you're controlling a character as opposed to inhabiting an avatar. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 do not suffer from this. The animation is so smooth and realistic it sucks you into the experience. Miles Morales is laid out very much like a typical open world game which means a large map, a shit ton of icons to clear. There are missions, side missions, world events, collectibles, the whole nine yards. This often demoralizes me as a player. I can't help it. When I open a map and see a million icons it just immediately puts me into the state I'm in when I'm considering how much shit I need to get done at work. This remains one of the greatest strengths of the Fallout games. There are no map icons to chase. You explore the map, you find things along the way because the simple act of exploring the map is the gameplay. There's no need to push me out into the Mojave Desert with a thousand icons. I want to go out there because it's fun to explore. So what makes Miles Morales amazing even as it does the same thing that annoys me in other open world games? It's that I never got annoyed when a map marker was across the map and in fact I think I fast traveled like three times the whole game and that's because the actual mechanics and animation of swinging through the city is fantastic. The game rewards you for doing tricks in the air but you'll quickly realize it's like 3xp for each trick. I soon understood that it was an insignificant amount of reward but you know what? Doesn't matter. I still constantly did tricks in the air because it feels good just to move him around the map. And beyond simply looking and feeling great, what makes the movement so satisfying is there is a real degree of skill and mastery involved. You start out shitty and you get better. Not all games need to be super challenging, okay? But I play games basically because I love the feeling of getting good at something. That is what I look for in games. If there is a harmonica on the ground I pick it up and figure out how to play it. When I go to a restaurant with that little peg game I play that. When my kids got the paddle and ball thing I took that and played that. Games to me are all about learning how to use them and then how to master them. That is what I look for in games. It's rare for a game to make moving around the map something that engages that part of me but Insomniac has done that here. The movement system is surprisingly deep. It's intuitive and easy to pick up but as you play you get better and better at all the little tricks the game allows. From zipping forward to launching yourself over edges the game lets the player actually play the game even when you're just traveling to another mission. In fact I often just swung around because it was fun in and of itself. There are three basic foundations that make this game great. The movement, combat and story. And the movement is totally perfect. It is incredibly smooth, responsive, beautifully animated and just so so fun. Combat. The quality of simply moving around the map means that playing Miles Morales is already a joy. But to be a really great game combat needs to be at least very good. Insomniac's first Spider-Man game featured great combat that used a combination of gadgets and a surprisingly deep pool of moves and abilities to produce one of the best action combat systems around. I honestly figured that Miles Morales would just be the exact same system but that's not actually the case. Instead Insomniac took a risk by pushing the combat forward making it a bit more complex. Now sometimes adding things to a great system can ruin the careful balance but every addition here improves things so much that Miles Morales is simply a better version of the original game in every way. The addition of new abilities, moves and gadgets only amplifies everything that the game does well. With new tools at the player's disposal there was the risk of the game becoming too easy but that is not the case. Miles Morales is a fairly challenging game when played on hard. It just throws a ton of enemies at you but it keeps the actual enemy types pretty low. Normally I would say this is a problem like in God of War one of my only complaints was a lack of enemy boss variety but Miles Morales is an exceptionally thoughtfully designed game and the limited enemy roster doesn't feel like it's a concession to development time. It feels like it's a matter of careful game balance because this combat is fast paced and hectic so too many enemy types will be frustrating to deal with in a group. Miles has all the abilities that Peter Parker had in the first game. The web slaying, all the moves, juggling, finishers and an active healing system that uses a resource you build up by damaging enemies which is genius by the way. It is a core aspect of the combat. In addition to what was already a surprisingly deep game it adds several new gadgets and a few super powerful abilities. These abilities do massive damage to regular enemies and are required to break the guard and damage several others. This one small change takes the hectic combat of the first game and adds a level of strategy and resource management that's so great I can't say enough great things about it. It also adds things like a gravity vortex and holographic bots that fight for you and the ability to disappear for stealth or to retreat and heal. Even the easy fights feel great because you're constantly competing against yourself to make it as stylish as possible and avoid damage altogether. I played on the hardest difficulty and it's perfect. I'd probably recommend anyone who's into challenging games to play on that. You see, only great combat systems can support real difficulty. When a game is wonky or unresponsive, difficulty often feels like cheap bullshit. But Miles Morales is tight and dying was never frustrating. My deaths were because I screwed up not because an enemy was badly designed or hitboxes were garbage. The game is precise and deep enough that it is perfectly designed to be played on the hardest difficulty a player can manage. I will say that I tried not to use stealth very often because it makes the game too easy and the combat is so perfectly designed that it felt like a waste to not use it every chance I could. Still, I'm glad the stealth stuff is in there because it's just another system to play around with. It's so damn rare I play a game that never bores me. It's really, really rare that I start getting sad that a game is almost over. The combat in Miles Morales is that good. It's fast, responsive, difficult, and allows for mastering improvisation. It's as good as any combat system around and that is quite the achievement. Story Okay, the story in the last game was perfectly fine. I'm not a comic book fan. I don't dislike them or anything, but I just never really got into them. I like Peter Parker as a character and the first game was of a high quality all the way through, but its story was, you know, pretty good. I don't actually recall too much about it. Last year, my daughter asked me to watch the movie Into the Spider-Verse with her and I have to admit, I thought it was amazingly good. It surprised me how good it was. It took me a while to get used to it being like 15 frames per second, but everything about it was great. So I assumed that this game's story would be decent enough to not get in the way. What surprised me is how very good the story in this game actually is. It's so good, I'm not going to spoil it, but Miles Morales is an interesting character. He is relatable and just likable. The voice acting is superb all the way through. What makes the story great though, is that it's more than just a story about Spider-Man fighting a villain. The game is a pretty complex look at relationships, revenge, morality, truth, and all the other important shit like that. Again, I do not want to spoil it at all, but it's the best story I've seen in a AAA game in a good long while. I did not buy this game expecting it to be emotionally powerful, but it really really is, and it includes one of the best and most surprising endings I've seen in a game in years. All the complaints I'm constantly making about the awful stories you get in video games are totally absent this time. It was just uniformly excellent. So good, I would recommend the game on the story alone. Outside of Edith Finch and stuff like that, I just never do that. I am a gameplay guy. If you like stories in your games, Miles Morales is as good as it comes. Wrapping up. So, it's pretty rare a game exceeds my expectations. I did very much enjoy the first Insomniac Spider-Man game, and I remain convinced that this game was actually a DLC for the first game that was pushed back and expanded to be a launch PS5 title. What I wasn't expecting was for it to be a superior game in every way to the already very very good first one. Miles Morales has a wonderful map, and it's possible I love this game so much also because it just reminds me of home. I'm from New York, and swinging about this representation of New York City, it just makes you feel like you're there. It has the perfect vibe of what makes New York so great. In addition to that, it has great campaign story missions, really fun side missions, excellent characters and voice acting, some of the best combat of any recent action game, and a story that is as good as you'll get in any big budget video game. It compares favorably with the Marvel movies. It's better than all of the Spider-Man films, aside from the old Sam Raimi ones. Everything about this game is smooth and polished. It's challenging without being frustrating. It's big without being tedious and boring. It's pretty much a perfect game. Now, it's not a huge masterpiece like The Witcher, and it's not a perfect combat game like Souls. But when it comes to a third-person action game, this is as good as it's possible to make one of these. It's a 10, a legitimate 10. It's smaller in size and length than the last game, and even that works to its favor. It's probably 20 or 25 hours long if you do everything, which you will because everything is great. And that smaller map and runtime isn't a knock. It makes the game better. It never overstays its welcome. If you're waiting for the PS5, don't. The game looks and plays well, even though the frame rate occasionally will drop into the 20s. It's so good it's just not worth waiting. Plus, you get it for free for the PS5 if you pay 10 bucks extra, which is what I did. I haven't been so pleasantly surprised and so totally satisfied with the game and ages. In fact, I can't think of one video where I didn't have at least one serious thing to bitch about. Miles Morales is so good, this video was boring. It's perfect. It is a perfect video game. Alright, I don't know what's up next. I got so many other things. Either another Destiny video talking about how awful Season of the Hunt is, or I'll get to AC Valhalla, or I might actually do the Phoenix Rising thing because man, I really love that game too. It's weird how like the games I'm enjoying most are the ones I just did not expect to. Either way, alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye. Thanks for watching.