Insomniac has had an incredible run taking Marvel’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Men and bringing them to life across a series of titles. Wolverine, arguably Marvel’s next largest multimedia star, is the next title that they’re turning their attention towards. With a world-spanning adventure filled with plenty of known and unknown entities, just how well does their new superhero outing fare?
Marvel’s Wolverine hits the ground running as you’re immediately jumping out of a plane with Sabertooth and Mystique to jailbreak the patron of Team X, Nathaniel Essex. You’re immediately thrown into the deep end, trying to figure out the status quo of the world.
Early banter reveals that in this world Wolverine hasn’t linked up with the X-Men (yet?), and instead has been working as a member of Team X, seeking out and protecting mutants. Immediately opposed to Essex and his team’s ideals are those of Bolivar Trask, a scientist who has created a way to more accurately identify the locations of mutants with the aim of capturing and studying them.
Familiar and Unfamiliar Faces In Marvel’s Wolverine
This attack on mutant kind takes Wolverine all over the world. From the assault on a group of transient Mutants in Canada – including fan favorites like Jean Grey, Callisto, and Leech – all the way to the fictional city of Madripoor and Tokyo as you investigate anti-mutant groups across the world.
There is a LOT happening in Wolverine’s story, and ultimately it felt like it was simultaneously bloated while also being very surface-level. The core story is of the Anti-Mutant vs Pro-Mutant ideologies of Trask and Essex, and how the line between Pro-Mutant and Anti-Human can blur. The game also creates a new ‘origin’ story for Logan while also setting up a number of conflicts to face based on the history that Logan doesn’t remember due to his Amnesia. Topping it all off, you’re also peppered with major hints and teases to what the future, or yet-to-be-revealed past, holds in store.
There are a multitude of great Wolverine, Jean Grey, and greater X-Men plot points layered on top of each other through this game. Wolverine’s amnesia and origins, Logan’s history catching up to him, and a few more that I won’t spoil. The difficulty with layering so many of these in is that none of them truly get a chance to breathe. There’s a lot of implied worldbuilding where you’re forced to accept “I guess there’s some extra information there”, but more often than not I’d be thinking “I want to know more about this.”
The overcrowding managed to make me feel like I had been very busy, but then looking back at the story beats, I was surprised by just how little I had actually managed to get done at any time.
Something that I did appreciate was the variety of characters included in the story, from time-honored favorites like Jean Grey and Mystique, to the deeper cuts like Nature Girl. It felt like careful consideration had been put into which characters the general public would know from the movies, which characters might be on the horizon, and which characters fit with the theme and tone of the game.
A Very Full Story With Many Plot Threads
While the overall story left a bit to be desired, the moment-to-moment scenes I had a lot of fun experiencing in Marvel’s Wolverine. I’m looking forward to a potential sequel where, hopefully, after setting up SO MUCH in this game, they’re able to give the world more room to breathe and focus on a single story.
The core of the Wolverine experience is in the combat. There isn’t much in terms of exploration, so the meat of the game is made up of you making your way through the different environments across the world, finding yourself in room after room of cyborgs, ninjas, robots, and more. At the beginning of the game the combat is quite simplistic. You really have a light/heavy attack and the ability to lunge and shove.
As you progress through the game, obtaining story upgrades as well as leveling up and unlocking new skills, your arsenal is outfitted with a few additional powers but mostly stays true to just different ways to slash an enemy.
For combat in Wolverine, you get out of it what you put in. I completely believe you could get through this game with the standard attack, but it would be a long, slow, and likely more difficult process. Engaging in creating a combo that you are a fan of, investing in interesting abilities earlier, and really leaning into learning enemy patterns will make the experience feel more fulfilling.
You Get Out Of Wolverine’s Combat What You Put In
That being said, as you progress further and further into the game of defeating the same handful of enemies in a room time and time again, the whole process did begin to outstay its welcome. Some really good late-game encounters included objectives alongside the standard killing of enemies. Having to tackle waves of robots while also keeping an eye out to close a portal.
Ultimately, I feel this boils down more to the character of Wolverine, quite well known for going into a rage and killing, and how it’s far harder to create a lot of gameplay variety around that. Taking on wave after wave of enemies, I was reminded of some of the classic God of War games from the PlayStation 2. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the combat, but it also doesn’t do anything particularly fresh or interesting.
Nothing screamed 2000s era action hack-and-slash title more than when Wolverine’s upgrades were essentially elemental claws that could be activated by different criteria. Turning the standard attack up a notch in terms of damage and flair.
The boss fights in Wolverine managed to be both a highlight and lowlight of the combat experience for me. Facing powerful enemies like Omega Red and the Sentinel Prototype, the fights themselves would be a flashy spectacle, and it would take a short amount of time to understand the patterns of the enemies. After that, though, it just felt like you were hitting a wet sponge. Even breaking out all of your combos, perfect parries, and more, the boss fights would drag on. Never becoming overly difficult, but almost a rhythm game while doing slight chip damage.
Another aspect of gameplay that Wolverine’s skillset didn’t particularly support him in was the stealth sections. Logan automatically crouches when approaching enemies that haven’t detected him yet, and can attack with a close kill or leap towards an enemy. There is very little variety here, making being detected very easy to happen.
Stealth Is Not Logan’s Strong Suit…
I found myself far more inclined to just run into any of these rooms and draw everyone’s attention as the ability to attack multiple people with a special ability is normally a faster approach to dealing with enemies than trying to awkwardly pick them off one by one.
It would have been interesting to give Wolverine a way to claw into a wall and hold in place (Just to perch, and not move around), or even a whistle to draw different enemies closer.
Outside of the campaign, there are also Nightmare Missions, challenges that you can encounter through your exploration of the world. These include wave-based combat, challenges to meet certain criteria like Critical Strike kills, and traversal challenges. Of these, my favorite was the wave-based combat. Every few rounds, a modifier can be picked to allow for some variation in the combat that might be feeling repetitive. This forces you to shake up your ability loadout or favorite combo and play the game in a new way.
Visually, Marvel’s Wolverine was really quite good. While in cutscenes or standing still, some of the character models would get a little bit uncanny valley when the world was in motion, it was fantastic.
Sheathing and unsheathing your claws, Logan’s crouched stance getting ready for combat, and the heavy leap he would make towards an enemy had a lot of great weight to them. For Logan specifically, the level of detail on his model’s wear as you’d get more and more beat up in combat was entertaining to see. You’d know he really went through hell in a cutscene when he’d roll over and you could see the glint of a revealed adamantium ribcage on his side.
Each of the different worldly locations you travel to does a great job of really selling the environment to you. From the broken buildings and wilderness of Canada to the packed South Asian streets of Madripool, where every corner has a food cart, you immediately got a sense of the place as soon as you spawned in.
Perhaps most importantly for the visuals was just how legible all of the enemies and their actions were. In a game that wants you to constantly be parrying and dodging, there were a variety of great visual effects to indicate when you were about to be attacked, and the enemies would have revealing enough tells that you could confidently block most of them, and if you didn’t, then you had no one to blame but yourself.
Marvel’s Wolverine Review | Final Thoughts
I think across the board, Marvel’s Wolverine manages to deliver on the promise of letting you be Wolverine, and while none of the elements of the game blew me away, the complete package was fun from start to finish.
Wolverine has a competent story that unfortunately suffers from bloat. Combat is fun, even if it leans a bit into the simplistic. As you progress through the game, there is more combat variety, which is great, but it’s counterweighed by repetitive encounters and spongy boss fights.
Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing how Insomniac can take what works and what doesn’t work for a character like Wolverine into a sequel to see how they can not only hone in on what makes the character the character more, but also to find ways to add positive variety.
Marvel’s Wolverine was reviewed on PlayStation 5 with a copy purchased by the reviewer over the course of 14 hours – all screenshots were taken during the course of the review.
