
I couldn't disagree more about the side content involving drones and the bombs; those were agony. At least with the combat and stealth challenges, there's a reason to level up, gain new abilities and come back ready to nail it. The drone sections especially suffer from the same issues I had with the Gravity Rush games, where geometry gets in the way at exactly the worst moments in exactly the worst and most annoying possible ways and it's more difficult than it needs to be to course-correct.
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with this review, except that I wished they'd hept Mr. Negative as the main villain or used someone else as the last boss instead of going so far into famiiar territory with the ending. Also, I was annoyed by the MJ and Miles stealth missions as well (except for the apartment, because it was interesting to explore from a fan service standpoint), but it didn't feel like a whole quarter of the game to me. Maybe 10-15%? Either way, I agree they weren't great, and were extremely linear.
I thought stealth felt VERY similar to Arkham games, though harder to execute without any night vision gadgets and sometimes missions that ask you to use stealth in the open world just don't lend themselves to it.
I thought the combat was very much unique to Spider-Man, which I didn't mind at all, and like you I found a reason to use most every gadget.
As far as traversal, I agree with what everyone has said so far, but I'm just a bit underwhelmed compared to all the glowing reviews of it. This seriously could have been fixed for me by simply making L2 a left swing button. Everything else is pretty much perfect (also I hated those science missions where you plugged water towers, etc. ... even with slowing down, those never feel natural within the game's geometry and how traversal interacts with it).
I actually rode the subway quite a bit ... mostly when I ran out of pictures of NY to take in an area, cause that was one of my favorite things to do. The level of detail is incredible.
Anyway, I'd say it's a pretty good Spider-Man game with more potential, if for completely different reasons than you found to say so. I'm looking forward to the DLC.