Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Sandman boss fight

The launch trailer for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for the PS5 confirmed the Sandman boss fight will take place during the action and as it turns out it’s right out the gates. The 3rd game in the series already had some big-hitting bosses in its line-up, but Sandman is easily the biggest in the series so far, which you can see in the image above and the video below.

You can also check him out in the launch trailer below, and it doesn’t take long to see that he’s as big as some of the New York skyscrapers that Spider-Man swings around from. This probably leads to a lot of questions about how the boss fight work and how to defeat Sandman, but you can see all of the action in the last section of the page.

Up until now, the biggest bosses in the Marvel’s Spider-Man series have been Rhino and Kingpin. They were both brutes, but still single-story or less enemies, which fits well with the combat gameplay mechanics in the game.

We already knew that we’d have to fight a pretty formidable Lizard in Spider-Man 2, and while he’s a little bigger than the previous heavyweight champs, his chin is still ground floor level. You can see more of the Lizard boss fight at the very beginning of the launch trailer, but it’s not too long after that where you get to see the sheer scale of Sandman.

It’s an exciting addition to the game and now that we’ve played the game we now exactly how to defeat the behemoth. As mentioned above, we cover our how the boss fight plays out in the second section, but to start with we’ll talk you through the character in a bit more detail.

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Who is Sandman and what does it mean for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on the PS5?

Most of you will know who Sandman is from the Spider-Man comics, cartoon or movies, but for anyone that needs a refresher, he’s William Baker/Flint Marko. He got his shape-shifting abilities when he accidentally came into contact with experimentally irradiated sand at a nuclear test facility.

In the first comics featuring the Sandman he was an out-and-out villain with no redeeming features. However, later stories have made him more of a tortured soul who is just trying to do what he can to support his family, which was the back story for the character in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man 3 movie.

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Spider-Man 2 PS5 bosses

With both options available to the Marvel’s Spider-Man series, it looks like it will favor the latter if the opening boss fight is anything to go by. He’s clearly not a total villain as there are snippets of the more complex side of his comic book story to discover in the game. It would have been a bit of a waste to make him entirely one dimensional like Rhino, but then there was already a lot going on in Spider-Man 2 with the Symbiote, Harry, Norman and both Pete and Miles in the mix.

The only other thing that we had to go on before playing the game was a minor backpack note in the very first game, which talks about a bottle containing Sandman. From that point on, we’ve always suspected Insomniac Games would include him as a boss fight at some point and with the might of the PS5 it was very impressive.

However, the mention is just that Peter isn’t sure whether or not any of Sandman remains in the bottle and that he was planning on checking on it after the events of Marvel’s Spider-Man. His plan probably got sidelined in Spider-Man Miles Morales when he had to go to Symkaria with Mary Jane.

There are a few options in terms of what this means for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. The first was that Pete simply decided to check on the bottle and that releases Sandman. The second was that it was an accident of some sort, possibly linked to Pete’s connection to the Symbiote.

The final option is that there was more to Sandman than what was in the bottle and from the details in the boss fight it looks like that’s the case in the third game. He appears out of nowhere and Pete doesn’t even mention the bottle, so either he forgot or he always knew that it was more complicated.

How to defeat Sandman

The combat mechanics in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 focus predominantly on close-quarters combat with human-size enemies or stealth. The latter is clearly out of the question for large parts of the boss fight, but there are a couple of things that the game does to give us the ability to defeat Sandman, which you can see in full in the video below.

The first is that you have to trigger environmental events to contain and constrain Sandman, which will then trigger fights with him in smaller form. This fits easily into the combat mechanics with similarities to the initial Rhino fight in Spider-Man Miles Morales or the Electro and Vulture fight in the first game.

You start swinging around the monster, firing debris back at Sandman, with some similarities to early God of Wars games when Kratos took on some of the bigger Titans. You’ll need to dodge a few fists as you go, and then you can attack before leading in to the first wave of smaller Sandman enemies, which requires standard combat to defeat.

You get the chance to switch between Miles and Peter to take on Sandman in the boss fight, so this will act as a mini tutorial of using each of them. This is both in the main fight and the mini fights with little versions of the Flint Marko, so you get a chance to get to grips with each of them on the ground and in the air.

You’re definitely going to need some good Spidey swinging skills to set things up and then land solid combos and abilities to deal the damage. Gadgets aren’t massively useful against big Sandman, but they can come in handy to control the crowd of little ones. It’s just a shame there’s no new sprinkler gadget, like FLOOD in Super Mario Sunshine.

You can also see that Miles’ lightning abilities are a big part of how to defeat the tortured villain during the fight, it’s down to Pete to provide the water and Morales to crystalize everything with his Venom attack (which is confusing seeing as Pete has Venom symbiote abilities in the game). It was initially hard to imagine electricity having that much of an impact on sand, but as it turns out it’s pretty effective when you mix in some water.

With the emphasis on web swinging and combos in Spider-Man 2 against Sandman, it’s probably a good idea to focus on those aspects in terms of your skills. The release date for the game is here, so hopefully the notes help you beat the game’s first boss without too many problems. If in doubt, watch all of the action it the video above to see how each of the phases play out.

You can also check out our computer games section to keep tabs on the game. Visit the official Spider-Man PS5 webpage at https://insomniac.games/game/marvels-spider-man-2/ for more details.