The release of Spider-Man 2 on PC, developed by Nixxes, was initially met with optimism due to its seemingly manageable system requirements. However, the game has launched to a 'mixed' user review rating on Steam, with numerous players voicing concerns over various technical issues. Currently, only 55% of the reviews on Steam are positive, highlighting significant problems that are affecting the gaming experience.
One player equipped with an RTX 4090 GPU and running the latest Nvidia drivers (version 5.66.36) reported frequent crashes, stating, "Despite having a high-end GPU and running the latest Nvidia drivers, the game frequently crashes." Another user found the game "completely unplayable on PC," adding that it "crashes to desktop every five minutes," and has already requested a refund.
The sentiment among some reviewers is to "hold off on buying until they get a couple of stabilization patches out because holy hell." They describe the game's state as "rough," citing issues such as lighting not loading in cutscenes, scenes running at seconds-per-frame, audio desynchronization, freezing, stuttering, and numerous other performance problems. One frustrated player mentioned, "I'm gonna get a refund for now because frankly, there's other stuff I could use $70 for right now."
A common issue reported by users, even those with higher-end PCs, is the frequent crashing of the game's graphics controller. An error message cited by a reviewer reads, "A problem has occurred with your display driver. This can be caused by out of date drivers, using game settings higher than your GPU can handle, an overheating GPU, or an error with the game. Please try updating your graphics drivers, or lowering your in-game settings."
Other complaints include malfunctioning features like DLSS and ray tracing, excessively long loading times, missing textures, and audio issues. Several players have also reported performance stuttering after extended play sessions, eventually resulting in hard crashes. Some speculate that these problems might be due to a memory leak.
Nixxes has acknowledged these issues on the Steam forums, responding to one user with, "Sorry to hear you are experiencing issues. Please refer to the troubleshooting guides on the Nixxes Support website and contact us if the problem persists. Make sure to include your logs and crash dumps as outlined on the support website, so we can troubleshoot as quickly as possible."
Additionally, Nixxes has been made aware of specific bugs during the photo-op missions in Spider-Man 2. They advised, "We are aware of a bug that can occur if your framerate is very low during this scene (below 20 FPS). As a workaround, try lowering your graphics settings and or resolution to pass this point."
