Marvel's Wolverine Review

This week, I have mainly been playing Marvel’s Wolverine on the PS5, and enjoying it immensely. At least, at first. Later in my playthrough I found myself stuck in some anonymous steel corridor, hacking through a squad of Reavers with their cybernetic limbs flying off every which way after I’d laid a superlative attack onto them. My adamantium claws were flashing, my parry timings were finally on the money, the gore was cranked right up, and bone-crunching sound effects hammered through my headset. It felt great under the thumbs now my muscle memory had gotten where it needed to be for me to enter a flow state. And yet, somewhere between the fiftieth dismemberment and the five-hundredth, a very quiet, very persistent thought popped into my head: hang on a sec, haven’t I already played this?

Now, Wolverine is cool, and that’s a fact. He just is. Even without twenty-odd years of Hugh Jackman scowling on the big screen, Logan has always been proper S-tier royalty. Handing that pitch to Insomniac Games felt like an open goal. They know the PS5 inside out. They made swinging through Manhattan feel like second nature in Marvel's Spider-Man. Putting them in charge of a vicious, grounded action romp starring Logan sounded like a guaranteed win.

What we’ve ended up with, though, is a bit of an odd one. It’s a very solid, brilliantly polished, properly violent game that does nearly everything well. But it’s also built around a design template that feels like it’s the culmination of the last twenty-something years of third-person action adventures – and it never quite gets around to doing anything genuinely new.

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"What I do best isn’t very nice"

Let’s talk about the fighting mechanics since it’s the core gameplay and the most obvious allure to Wolverine. The setup will be second nature to anyone who’s touched a pad since Resident Evil 4 popularised the over-the-shoulder camera. Logan moves with nice, heavy heft. He walks, sprints, leaps, scrambles over ledges, and can take an ungodly amount of punishment – he does have healing powers, after all. When you run into a room full of baddies, the loop is straightforward. Smashing the Square button dishes out your basic claw swipes. Triangle delivers the heavier combo enders. You suss out the rhythm fairly quickly: time your parry when you spot the blue or gold flash, dive out of the way when you see the unblockable red tell, and keep the pressure on. Rinse and repeat. Get a decent run going and you can trigger wild combo finishers – including one particularly ridiculous move where Logan delivers an E. Honda-style hundred-hand slap directly to an enemy’s chest with his razor-sharp claws, not unlike something you'd pull off in Street Fighter.

On top of these skills there’s a Rage Meter to fill. Carve up enough enemies and you build up through three tiers of fury, letting you pop off Special Techniques via shoulder-button modifiers (L2 and a face button, or clicking both sticks for the proper showstoppers). When you’re in the thick of a big scrap, dodging bullets, parrying a machete strike, and chopping someone cleanly in half at the waist, it’s genuine, cathartic fun. I love using Street Fighter 6’s Super Arts and Critical Arts to finish opponents off; Wolverine’s equivalents are less elaborate, but just as satisfying to execute.

The audio design deserves a massive shout-out here. The slice of the adamantium, the snap of breaking limbs, and the sheer oomph behind every blow give the fighting an incredible crunch. And yes, it’s intensely gory. Insomniac didn't pull their punches on the dismemberment front (though if you’ve got kids pottering around the living room, you can dial down the claret and severed limbs via the expanded accessibility menus, which is a welcome touch). When you’re fully in the zone, with gore turned on and audio ramped up to eleven, it’s especially satisfying. But, once the muscle memory sets in, the challenge largely evaporates and so does the fun. 

There’s an entire RPG-lite progression system, too. You earn XP to unlock new Techniques on a skill tree. You hunt down hidden whisky bottles and tick off side challenges to bag ‘Adaptation Points’, which you then plug into Logan’s DNA slots to activate passive mutant Adaptations ,like a boosted critical hit chance or the ability to absorb more damage. You can also gather materials throughout the game enabling you to craft different suits and tweak your claws. It’s fun and exciting at first, like the gameplay itself. In practice, though, I barely noticed the difference. You don’t slot in an Adaptation and suddenly go, "Crikey, that is something else!” You just become that little bit better, like when you know you’re getting older but don’t notice the change. Things have changed but each individual step is imperceptible. The game also throws tougher enemies into the next room to balance the books, matching your uptick in skills and abilities with a challenge curve. It’s busywork dressed up as player agency. After the opening tutorial, I rarely felt any pressing need to switch up my tactics. It works, but by hour twelve, your hands are on autopilot while your brain is asking: what next? Sure, you use the new skills and moves but it’s all just a variation of the same thing.

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"They stripped away what was human, until I was just an animal"

Outside of pure brawling, Marvel’s Wolverine tries to break up the pace with some light detective work and traversal. Unfortunately, this is where the seams really start to show. Logan has his heightened animal senses, triggered with a click of R3. This instantly reminded me of Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham series. The difference is that in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Detective Vision felt like an integral part of being the world's greatest detective. You used it to survey gargoyles, spot structural weaknesses, and methodically take apart a predator room.

Here? It’s essentially a floating arrow pointing at the next door, or a blue odorous gas hanging in the air. Logan doesn’t investigate things because he’s an inquisitive chap; he sniffs the air because the devs needed a way to herd you through a room without you getting turned around. Which, given the game is fairly linear, is something.

The motorbike set-pieces suffer from an even worse case of hand-holding. Every so often, Logan hops onto two wheels for a high-speed chase. It looks like a proper blockbuster, with bullets pinging off the chassis and explosions rocking the tarmac. But it’s practically on rails. You aren’t really driving in any meaningful sense; the road never ends, and you can’t meaningfully fail unless you put the pad down. You’re simply steering within an invisible channel until the next cutscene. It breaks up the fighting, sure, and is fun if you let yourself get swept up in it, but it never feels like a real test of skill.

Given the core gameplay is good but repetitive, and the additional aspects are less than well done, then the narrative has to fill quite a hole. The story takes place before mutants become widely known and before the X-Men formally assemble. Three years after walking out, Logan reluctantly rejoins Team X, a covert mutant task force founded by Nathaniel Essex, played with a certain je ne sais quoi by Troy Baker. Essex took in a feral Logan thirty years ago and helped piece together his shattered mind, but Logan’s memories were lost. Operating alongside surviving squad mates like Victor Creed’s Sabretooth and Raven Darkholme’s Mystique, Logan is pulled into an escalating war against Bolivar Trask, his mutant-hunting Reavers, and bruising enforcers like Omega Red. Liam McIntyre (Spartacus) does an excellent job voicing Logan, bringing genuine grit and weary cynicism to the role without simply doing a tribute version of Hugh Jackman.

The problem is how the game chooses to dish out Logan's backstory. Dotted throughout the campaign are blocked memories. To unlock them, the game literally slams the brakes on the story and shunts you into a standalone 'Nightmare Trial'. You’re dumped into an abstract obstacle course or a timed combat arena, where you must reach an exit or hit a tier-three Rage quota to earn a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Adamantium medal. I loathe this kind of thing. It made me think back to the hallucinatory dream sequences in the original Max Payne from twenty-odd years ago – the ones I dreaded because they ground the actual game and all the bullet-time fun to a screeching halt. If you want to reveal Logan’s past, bake it into the campaign. Don't introduce what are effectively dream sequences to make me jump through glowing hoops for a shiny virtual medal just so I can read up a little about who this version of Logan used to be. It feels lazy, and wrecks the narrative momentum.

"You can't outrun your past, bub"

Visually and technically, Wolverine is impressive. Insomniac clearly knows how to get the best out of the PS5. Environments are detailed – from the frosted Canadian wilderness to the island world of Madripoor and the narrow streets of Tokyo – and the transition from cutscene to brutal combat is practically instantaneous. That said, there were parts of cutscenes which really should have been the player’s to control (for example during one early boss fight, after defeating the enemy Wolverine jumps onto him and does two to three remaining attacks, each of which I saw coming and pressed the appropriate buttons yet it was all a non-interactive cutscene), and of course quick-time events which you may or may not love, or hate.

What they haven’t built, however, is a game that feels original. Think back over recent third-person action games. Think of the aforementioned Batman games, God of War, Uncharted, Sucker Punch’s work on Ghost of Tsushima / Ghost of Yōtei, or Insomniac’s own Marvel's Spider-Man. Each brought its own identity, whether through traversal, combat or the rhythm of its storytelling. Even something like 007: First Light mixed investigative stealth, climbing, and gunplay in a way that felt diverse and bespoke to James Bond.

Marvel’s Wolverine doesn't do that. It takes the established Sony third-person action template, dresses it up in a variety of Wolverine skins, and executes it with clinical precision. You’ll have fun with it. You’ll slice up hundreds of bad guys, admire the graphical fidelity, absorb the sound effects and enjoy the spectacle. But when the credits roll, you won’t be itching to jump straight back in, and you certainly won't feel like you’ve witnessed the next evolution of action games. It’s a very decent, very bloody, but ultimately slightly safe crowd-pleaser. And for a character as wildly feral as Wolverine, safe is not what you expect it to be.