Spider-Man 2 Made Me Hate Quick Time Events

I finished Spider-Man 2 on New Year’s Eve, mak💖ing it only the second video game I played to completion i♋n 2023. Of course, there were plenty of incredible games I wish I’d finished this yea🌃r, but the perfect storm of factors came together all at once: I started the game during the holiday season, had days off with nothing better to do, and I didn’t bounce off it immediately.

When I write it out like that, I realise the ‘perfe𒊎♓ct storm’ is just having free time. Oops.

It was a fun time an🌟d an extremely self-conscious improvement on the preceding game, but Spider-Man 2 isn’t one of the most interesting or innovative games I’ve played from last year’s releases. Traversal, as always, felt great, and the boss battles were dynamic and never got old, even when I was getting my butt kicked. The story was… fine. I didn’t experience any real friction with the game or areas in which I felt like quitting, which helped me speed through it in a matter of dayꦑs despite working through the Christmas to New Year period.

It is not, after all, the kind of game where you have to problem-solve an awful lot, which is the main reason I bounce off games – I can’t f𒀰igure out the s🌱olution to something and I’m too annoyed to google it, so I quit, and I never go back.

My mother did raise a quitter, unfortunately.

At most, some of the side missions frustrated me (the ones where you have to chase the robot hawks drove me nuts), but they’r🀅e side missions, so I didn’t have to do them at all if I didn’t want to.

The only thing that I found really grating by the end was the quick time events. Throughout the game, even from the introductory sequence, Spider-Man 2 has you mashing buttons and pushing triggers during cutscenes to make things happen. These weren’t so annoying that I wanted to qu💖it the game because of them – that would be silly, considering they are extraordinarily easy to get past, with most of them being extremel🔯y generous with time limits so as not to frustrate players – but they sucked in terms of gameplay.

Pushing a button at the right time is not gameplay. It is boring and does the bare minimum to keep players engaged during cutscenes. If the intent is to make these long cutscenes more immersive, it’s not working. It’s especially egregious in certain boss battles where you’re getting long shots of Miles and Peter beating the crap out of a villain without actually doing any of the beating. It could be argued that taking those QTEs out of the cutscene would essentialꦆly♚ make part of the boss battles a movie, but in that case, the fight needs to be paced better.

I’ve never been annoyed at QTEs bef🅷ore, but seeing how Spider-Man 2𝔍 uses them as a crutch to replace better game design has made me staunchly QTE-phobic. Nobody wants to be watching a cinematic and pressing buttons occasionally. It’s the worst part of Spider-Man 2’s gameplay and the games industry needs to move past it altogether.