Please, Spider-Man games, stop making me play Mary Jane stealth missions

polygon.com:

For the majority of my adult life, I have been a journalist. Interviewing, reporting, researching, watching the best Dragon Ball Z fights on YouTube while I procrastinate on a deadline — I’ve done it all. Or maybe I haven’t. Because, in Spider-Man 2, being a journalist almost exclusively involves sneaking around and zapping mercenaries with a sci-fi stun gun. This is something I have never, ever done.

Of the many revisions that Insomniac Games’ 2018 Spider-Man made to comics lore, making Mary Jane Watson a journalist is one of my favorites. It gave the character an organic reason to intersect with Spidey’s adventure, untangling the machinations of Martin Li/Mr. Negative via shoe-leather investigation while her super-powered partner took on crooks with webs and bad jokes. What I didn’t love was how this was expressed in gameplay: stealth missions.

Spider-Man 2 continues this trend, and boy, do I hate it. This is partially a matter of preference — I’m of the mind that stealth should either be the primary focus of a game, or an optional way to engage with an encounter. There are few things that annoy me more than an action game that grinds to a halt in order to force the player to do stealth for a bit. Intellectually, I understand why it could be a good idea — it’s nice to break up the pacing rhythm, to broaden the range of experiences a player will have in a game — but in practice? I almost always find it a drag.

Stealth sections are also a poor way to engage with Mary Jane’s role in Spider-Man 2’s story. MJ is a journalist, and while that can involve being a snoop, it’s not particularly novel or engaging, especially when just about every one of Sony’s big marquee games leans on this rickety crutch. There aren’t even