REVIEW – Sony has ported another game from PlayStation 5 to PC, but perhaps the company should think about not just ditching the porting work on one team, because in time it leads to a sometimes justifiably criticizable port of a game from a team that usually does a good job. Let’s face it: that’s what happened in this case.

This is not the place to discuss the game. We already did that here. The PC port has already received two patches, and it’s still in a problematic situation…

Peter and Miles’ adventure- *game crashes*

After The Last of Us Part I, we’re back to a problematic port at launch. So Sony couldn’t quite figure out what it would take to get the port right. You have to imagine that even with a nuclear power plant, the game could crash. Immediately after release, there was an error message indicating the temperature of the graphics card and then suggesting that lower graphics settings were worth a try. Well, if you get that while using a GeForce RTX 5090, that’s funny. It’s no use having a configuration on (or under) the desktop that can deliver triple-digit FPS at 1440p (even without upscaling) at maximum graphics settings (even 70-80 in the open world) if the game is unstable, and that’s putting it mildly. MSM2 tends to crash a lot on PC, to put it mildly. (And it should be added here that the rating at the end reflects the CURRENT state of the port.)

It doesn’t matter if you have an AMD or Nvidia card, it doesn’t matter if you use FSR or DLSS for upscaling, it’s all for nothing if the port is unstable. At least the controls are okay: while the keyboard and mouse are a pain to use in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, they’re quite good here. The DualSense is basically the same as on the PlayStation 5. The adaptive triggers can come in handy during QTEs. It’s not the game, make no mistake. It would still easily deserve a 9/10 today. But it is beyond sloppy that it sends even a hefty rig to the gut in a way that is incomprehensible, and it is the use of a particular technology that is to blame. It’s not even that Nixxes overlooked it, it’s just that the studio has only used it in one port so far, and then only at higher graphics settings. We’re talking about another Insomniac Games game, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which could make use of the graphics card that’s ripping through visuals in other ways, but this one can only work with some compromises. Now that the PC port of MSM2 is using it, it can be said that one of Microsoft’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is to blame…

DirectStorage strikes back

DirectStorage is an API that offloads your processor when you’re moving lots of files and assets between your SSD and your graphics card’s VRAM. The processor can multitask, so it doesn’t have to do this one at a time, making more efficient use of our system memory. But Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart game just mentioned uses this by having the GPU decompress the files (they are compressed to fit into a smaller space). Now MSM2 has done the same thing (proven on Twitter). So it’s not the processor that decompresses the files, it’s the graphics card, and it does it with GDeflate. If you have a good GPU performance, that’s fine, but if you overload it to render the game world, the card will struggle and performance will degrade. It’s just that GDeflate, if not used by Nixxes, then the CPU gets tanked, and that’s already being used quite heavily by the game. It’s a hell of a lose-lose situation. Of course, this has nothing to do with the error message mentioned earlier (DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG). But there are a lot of things the port offers.

Texture Quality (up to Very High), Texture Filtering (up to 16x Anisotropic), Shadow Quality (up to Ultra), Depth of Field (up to High), Detail Level (up to Ultra), Traffic Density (up to Very High), Crowd Density (up to Ultra), Hair Quality (up to Very High), Screen Space Reflections (up to High), Weather Particle Quality (up to Very High), ray traced Reflections, Interiors, Shadows and Ambient Occlusion (all up to very high), and then there is Object Range (slider up to 10) and DLSS Ray Reconstruction (Legacy = CNN or Transformer). With these you can make the game look absolutely stunning and make it look better than on the PlayStation 5 Pro. However, the patches seem to cause more crashes (going by what others claim on Steam). It is recommended to uninstall the PlayStation PC SDK Runtime. It installs itself without an option during installation. The game will throw an error message at first, but it is collecting data. Go to Control Panel, uninstall the PlayStation PC SDK, then delete the files PsPcSdkRuntimeInstaller.msi, PsPcSdkRuntimeManager.msi and install_pspc_sdk_runtime.bat from the game folder. It also improves performance a bit…

Wait for it

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 PC CURRENTLY deserves a 7.2/10. If it wasn’t for the crashes, it would be a 9. But with them…? So let’s wait a bit…

-V-

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Insomniac Games,(PlayStation 5)/Nixxes Software (PC)

Style: Action-adventure

Release: October 20, 2023 (PlayStation 5)/January 30, 2025 (PC)