BeingSpider-Manmeans that you have access to fighting moves hitherto unavailable to earth’s mightiest heroes. You can shoot balls of adhesive goo at your enemies, binding them to the nearest wall. You can web them up to the ceiling while perched unseen in the rafters. And you can turn into a spiky black orb, sticking pointy tendrils into your opponents’ softest bits. As good as those attacks are,Spider-Man 2has one move that feels great every time you do it and is incredibly simple. It doesn’t require a Symbiote suit or even a girder to perch on. All you need is somewhere to stick a web and you’re off to the races.
I’m talking, of course, about the Swing Kick. This move, which Spider-Man can do after launching an enemy into the air, has the webhead jumpup after them, shoot a web into the sky (which presumably attaches to something), put his legs together, then swing both rigid appendages into his still-aloft foe.
This is one of the basic moves in Spidey’s arsenal and has been available in Marvel’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales, too. But I’ve been thinking about it more recently, after I saw an Xbox console warrior post a video in which they tried to pass off Spidey’s Swing Kick as if it were the normal swing he used to get around New York City. The fanboy was trying to make it seem like Spider-Man’s web swinging was always stiff and choppy, and that the game felt bad as a result. I was kind of impressed by the audacity of trying to lie about the most foundational and frequently used mechanic in a game that anyone can go watch footage of with a simple YouTube search.
But I was mostly annoyed because defending the swinging means admitting that the Swing Kick looks bad, and that’s not true. It’s a perfectly good mechanic when you’re using it properly.
One of the things I love about Spider-Man 2 — that it has in common with a lot of stylish action games, a genre it isn’t really a part of, but feels adjacent to — is how easy it is to keep enemies in the air once you get ‘em there. The hardest part is delivering the uppercut to the chin, but once you’ve smashed their mandible or Web Yanked them up to meet you, you’ve got a free ticket to deal out a whole bunch of pain.
Unlike the leads in other character action games, Spider-Man has a ton of cool things he can do to keep himself in the air besides comboing punches. He can shoot a web to zip to another enemy, pull another enemy to him, or toss out an electric grenade that launches all the baddies in the vicinity up to him.
Spider-Man 2 isn’t really a character action game, but if you’re interested,Devil May Cry 5andBayonetta 3are two recent games in the genre.
Of these moves, though, the Swing Kick might be the most satisfying to pull off. Not because it’s especially difficult. It isn’t, I do it multiple times in most fights. But, it is the,ahem,kicker to a combo. You juggle an enemy around, let them fall a little, and then KAPOW, you hit ‘em with the double foot combo. You can also use it on enemies standing on the ground below who haven’t begun to be combo-ed yet. That’s fun, too, because it makes you feel like a bird of prey, swooping down to nail an innocent goon.
Spider-Man 2 is one of the most straightforwardly fun games I’ve played all year, and the game is as exhilarating as it is due to an accumulation of little things that all come together to make wearing the mask feel like a blast. It’s the Web Wings and the Point Zips and the boss fights and the mini games. But, it’s also the Swing Kick. You gotta give it up for the Swing Kick.
