You May Want To Hold Off On Playing Spider-Man 2 on Steam Deck - First Impressions

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Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is finally here, and it is exciting. I always get pumped up when I see PlayStation games making their way to the PC, and even more so now that PSN account linking is optional. With it being released now, there have been a lot of questions as to how it will run on the Steam Deck, and while it did seem optimistic, my impressions after an hour or so of playing have not been great.

So, here are our thoughts on how the game is on Steam Deck so far, and why I would not recommend it just yet.

Before I get into the details, I want to mention that these are impressions. I have only played about an hour and a half of the game, just far enough to test out general gameplay after the Sandman boss fight. My thoughts may change as I continue playing for the full review.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on Steam Deck So Far

While it is ultimately really cool that Spider-Man 2 is even running on a Steam Deck, there are a couple of issues that are stopping me from recommending the game on the go. Of course, it should be better on more powerful handhelds like the ROG Ally X, but on the Deck, there are too many compromises to make and still too much to compromise on.

For my time with it so far, I stuck to the lowest possible settings with no TDP or GPU limits and played around with upscaling and Frame Generation, and it was still a bit hard to run. Without upscaling, I found that FSR 3 with a dynamic resolution scaling aiming for 90 FPS was the best for framerate without looking as muddled as the Ultra Performance setting does. The visuals are passable, but 30 FPS would be the most stable way to play, and even still there are going to be some big drops.

The opening of Spider-Man 2 is tough on the system, so I won't dwell too much on it, but bigger fights are going to be very hard to get through. I did play further than that to experience the general gameplay, and it suffers from some similar problems. The worst framerate drops I experienced outside of that was using the Web Wings. Flying through the city would regularly get the framerate down to 19-20 FPS, which made it hard to navigate and maneuver around in the air. Some fights with enemies did drop framerate as well, and gaining speed while falling through the air was guilty of this too, but it would generally stick above 27 FPS. Going to Ultra Performance could improve this, but I found the visuals too blurry to enjoy. XeSS was similar in this aspect, but I preferred FSR 3.

There were also some weird bugs here and there that I found, with one happening almost immediately with a massive slowdown to 1-2 FPS and some random person appearing next to Peter, seemingly sitting on their knees and floating in the air.

Then, I wanted to try Frame Generation, and I highly recommend staying away from this setting. While it may seem nice to have your framerate look like it is in the 40s and 50s, there are some really big problems with it. There is noticeable input lag, which can impact your dodge times, cutscenes will be jittery and awful to watch, and the inconsistent general framerate makes it hard to enjoy the actual game. One second, it could feel smooth-ish, and the next, it would drop into the 30s and get very stuttery.

I have seen a lot of people talk about Frame Generation really boosting framerate and being the optimal way to play some of the harder-to-run games at a higher framerate, but there are some huge caveats that generally aren't mentioned like how floaty controls can feel, input lag, and stuttery or jittery "smoothness" with some slowdowns if the game can't stick to 60 FPS. Of every game I have tested with Frame Generation, there are always some issues that make it less enjoyable than playing without it. We will be publishing an article with more details about this soon.

Overall, I would say Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has too many compromises to enjoy fully on the Steam Deck. It doesn't stick to 30 FPS, and there are a solid amount of visual compromises, while frame generation actively makes the game harder to play with input lag and uneven framerate. There is a bit more to tinker with, and I will be doing that for our full review, but for this impression, it doesn't leave a good taste of what's to come. I commend Nixxes Software for trying their best here, but this title may be too much for the Deck's hardware limitations in the end.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is available on Steam for $59.99.

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