Something I learned on my Spider-Man 2 playthrough: the Mysterio challenges can be a bit of a pain in the backside.

Spider-Man 2 players will first unlock the Mysterio challenges after Pete, MJ and Harry visit Coney Island during the game’s mainline campaign. Each of these challenge rooms is built around a set piece level, in which a specific combat challenge must be completed within a certain timeframe. Your rewards will be meted out for hitting gold, silver, or bronze time brackets. Most of the time, these challenges are a matter of killing X Amount Of Guys As Quickly As You Can. Sometimes, they’re about not getting hit, and some ask you to rack up kills by knocking enemies off the level.

And reader, I was kind of struggling with them. I’d knocked the campaign over and was on clean-up duty, unlocking trophies and clearing icons off the map. I’d run into one room where completing the challenge meant not taking a single hit, and it was driving me batty.

“This sucks,” I fumed to my friend and fellow reviewer Leah Williams at GamesHub. “Why am I struggling so hard with this?”

“Just leave ’em for last and upgrade the hell out of the boys,” Leah said simply. “That’s what I did.”

So, I took her advice. I went about my business, cleared all the icons off the map, and unlocked as many achievements as possible. I did everything except the Mysterio rooms. Then, with an entire game’s worth of resources in my pocket, I upgraded all the gadgets, and all the suit mods, and unlocked every last box on all three of Spider-Man 2‘s skill trees.

And then I went back into the Mysterio rooms and trivially beat every single one of them. I destroyed some of their gold tier times by as much as 40 seconds. I absolutely nuked these challenges from orbit.

So, if you too find yourself frustrated by a Mysterio room in Spider-Man 2, there’s your move, and fairly obvious, to be honest. Just upgrade your Spiders-Men to the absolute maximum and come back. You’ll make it much, much easier for yourself.

Image: PlayStation