Released in 2018, Marvel's Spider-Man stands as one of the most impressive games of the PlayStation 4 generation. With a huge, detailed environment, gloriously detailed characters and top-tier post processing effects, in combination with superb, well-balanced gameplay, Insomniac demonstrated once again why it's one of the most talented, ambitious studios around. And somehow, with Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the developer not only has to top it, but to provide a next-generation vision for PlayStation 5, while at the same time also delivering a PlayStation 4 rendition of the game. The odds seem insurmountable - but rest assured, Miles Morales delivers.
It begins with the simple act of launching the game. Once you clear menu screen animations, loading times are a mere four seconds - an astonishingly short space of time. In fact, the UI transition adds three seconds further to the count. This is so fast that it rivals any cartridge-based system from the past. We've had optical discs and spinning platter drives limiting the speed of consoles for more than two decades, but with the arrival of a fast SSD in the PS5, we're witnessing the end of waiting - or at least, that's the hope, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales highlights what's possible. By comparison, the original PS4 Spider-Man took over 30 seconds to load.
It's not just the fact that SSD technology has been added to the mix, though - the new hardware decompression blocks integrated into PS5's SoC also free up valuable CPU time, aiding performance elsewhere. So what we're looking at here is a combination of super-fast storage and decompression in conjunction with Insomniac's own streaming technology that helps make these remarkable loading times possible. And once the game has completed its initial load, the first glimpse of Miles himself reveals further next-gen enhancements. The level of detail on the character is certainly eye catching, but what's new?