In Spider-man Miles Morales, the latest Spider-man game from longtime PlayStation darling developer Insomniac, we have a new hero for a new [console] generation.

Regular Spider-man [Peter Parker] has headed off on holiday with Mary Jane so Miles Morales is left in charge and has to protect New York city from the bad people – and guess what? Bad people come a-knocking in the guise of renegade revolutionaries the Underground and shady corporate figurehead Simon Krieger and his energy company Roxxon.

Miles was in Insomniac’s last Spider-man game and is the star of Netflix’s rather excellent Spider-man Into the Spiderverse animated movie and there’s a nice “Previously” feature at the beginning of the game that fills you in just in case you haven’t played the original game – or just plain forgot.

Right off the bat, Miles Morales looks fantastic on the PlayStation 5, with a much busier and detailed New York than the original Spider-man on PlayStation 4 [which has, incidentally, been remastered for the PlayStation 5, by the way]. Texture work is just insane on Miles and his spidey suits and Insomniac really have nailed, again, the swinging through the city streets mechanic.

The biggest thing that has impressed with with Miles Morales, though, is the super quick load times off the PS5 SSD. From pressing “continue” on the game’s menu screen to being in-game, it’s a scant four seconds. Four seconds. I know it’s four seconds because I counted every single time I played just to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming.

The PS5 version comes with two visual modes: Fidelity, which runs at 30PFS, 4K with all the graphical bells and whistles [impressive ray tracing, particle effects] and Performance which drops the resolution down [a bit] and removes the ray tracing and other things that will impact on high frame rates, delivering a pretty solid 60 frames per second.

With my eyes, I found it visually really hard to tell the difference between the two modes when I was zipping around New York. Sure, the fidelity mode looks a little bit prettier, especially with its ray tracing, but I played mostly in performance mode as movement just feels so much smoother as does combat which feels slower when dropping back to 30FPS. In fact, it’s quite jarring going back to 30 FPS with the fidelity mode, which I did sometimes only because I wanted to take some neat photos with the sweet ray tracing action.

As is the norm these days, Miles Morales has a pretty robust photo mode – although getting to it is a bit of a pain, especially when you’re mid-swing [You have to hit the pause button then scroll down to photo mode]. There must be a better way of accessing it that I don’t know about. All the photos in this review were taken from the game’s photo mode.

Spider-man Miles Morales is the game to show off to your friends and family just what the PS5 can do in terms of graphical grunt and speedy load times. It’s also a game that shows off what a talent development studio like Insomniac can do: I can only imagine what the company will be releasing with a few more years PS5 development experience under it’s already impressive belt.

I wait in anticipation.