Marvel’s Wolverine Review — A Dull Take on One of Marvel’s Most Compelling Heroes

Marvel's Wolverine divided the internet well before launch, starting with its very first trailers. Some players were quick to tear it down, arguing that it looked terrible, while others rushed to defend it. The debate only intensified after release, particularly amid wider frustration with Sony's current strategic direction. While some players are calling the new Wolverine game one of the worst AAA blockbusters of all time, it has received thousands of top ratings on the PlayStation Store. So how good or bad is Marvel's Wolverine, really? As often happens in these situations, the answer lies somewhere in the middle: it isn't an outright terrible game, but it is a disappointing one.

Marvel's Wolverine opens with Logan returning to Team X (not to be confused with the X-Men) to rescue its leader, Nathaniel Essex. Essex once found Wolverine feral and suffering from amnesia, and recruited him into his squad. Logan feels indebted to him, so he sets out to free his friend from a group of anti-mutant fanatics. Mystique and Sabretooth join him on the mission.

The conflict later escalates, and Wolverine meets Jean Grey, joining her and Team X on further missions. Logan visits the exotic streets of Madripoor and travels to Tokyo, fighting cyborg mercenaries, an ancient ninja cult, and robots. Meanwhile, his relationships with Jean Grey and his other companions develop: new alliances form, old friendships fall apart, and Wolverine gradually learns more about his past.

The paradox of Marvel's Wolverine is that, despite its frequent changes of scenery, abundance of spectacular Uncharted-style cinematic sequences, and relatively short 10–12-hour campaign, it feels surprisingly drawn out. There are several reasons for this. For one, its structure is fairly repetitive: you race through linear levels with little room to explore, and every mission follows the same formula. Fight some enemies, jog to the next combat arena while chatting with a companion and examining a couple of objects along the way, fight again, watch a cutscene, then jump into yet another battle.

Marvel's Wolverine devotes plenty of time to dialogue and the relationships between its characters, to the point that they keep talking even during fights. Yet there isn't much depth to these characters, and their dialogue is bland and overwrought, the sort you would expect from a forgettable superhero movie. Again, the real problem is that they never stop talking. Even on the rare occasions when Logan finds himself alone, he is inevitably either chatting with someone over comms or talking to himself.

It's honestly hard to understand how Insomniac's writers managed to take Wolverine, one of Marvel's most beloved and interesting characters, and turn him into an almost entirely generic protagonist. What has always made Logan distinctive is that, yes, he is a hero, but a tragic one, with a darkness inside that he sometimes struggles to contain. That is precisely why he often pushes away his friends and loved ones. Wolverine doesn't quite fit the conventional antihero mold, but he certainly isn't a selfless do-gooder who would be the first to help an old lady across the street. He is a killing machine, a wild animal whose softer side takes some effort to reach.

In the new game, though, Logan's lone-wolf persona is mostly talk. In practice, he rarely clashes with anyone, cracks jokes, and puts up with plenty from Sabretooth, barely even snapping back. I've watched Spartacus with Liam McIntyre, and I recognize that he is a talented actor. In Marvel's Wolverine, however, his Logan spends most of the game looking at everyone with a plaintive expression, rarely showing the gruffness and testosterone-fueled aggression that are essential parts of the character. To be fair, the fault probably lies more with the writing than with the actor: the story doesn't give him the opportunity to fully explore Wolverine's animalistic side.

The facial animation is also questionable. When Logan finally flies into a rage, it does little to convey the sense that you're looking at a monster that has lost all control. You can see that ferocity in McIntyre's performance in the promotional videos, but the execution in the game itself leaves a lot to be desired. This is especially noticeable if, like me, you've recently finished Death Stranding 2, with its impressively lifelike digital faces.

With Wolverine missing his edge and the cliché-ridden dialogue turning into constant background noise, it's easy to lose interest in the story. There are too many dull characters here, despite the entire cast clearly doing its best to elevate the weak material. From a storytelling perspective, the game might have worked much better as a more intimate solo adventure for Logan: a story focused purely on his conflict with the ninja clan, for example, instead of an unfocused quest to save the world.

If you don't expect Marvel's Wolverine to match the writing of Marvel's Spider-Man and instead treat it as a PS3-era popcorn blockbuster with modern graphics, you can overlook plenty of its flaws. As an alternative to an action movie when you want to switch your brain off after school or work, it does the job. But there's a catch: it expects you to switch off completely. How else do you explain just how aggressively Marvel's Wolverine holds your hand?

As mentioned earlier, the levels are extremely linear: essentially a string of combat arenas broken up by basic platforming sections or stretches where you examine objects in the environment. Everything is arranged so that you're almost always just running straight ahead, apart from a few missions in Tokyo and Madripoor with slightly larger maps. Even so, the game constantly tells you exactly where to go. It does this either through white paint splashed across every interactive object or, more explicitly, through a blue trail leading to your objective. Similar trails also guide you to whiskey bottles, the game's collectibles, while chests containing materials for crafting suits pulsate on screen with a blue glow. That's on top of the sound your controller makes when you get close to them.

The game is obsessive about making sure you don't miss a thing. This approach might be somewhat understandable in an open-world game, but this is a linear action game. During my playthrough, the developers even released a patch that toned down the blue trail and pulsing effects, though that does little to address the underlying issue. Even if the hints can eventually be switched off entirely, the level design itself will remain insultingly simple. That's the central problem: Marvel's Wolverine is positioned as a brutal, bloody game for adults, yet it treats its players like small children incapable of doing anything on their own. This is a broader problem with many Sony games, but here it reaches absurd extremes.

The QTEs are particularly baffling. First, many of them can be completed by pressing a completely different button from the one shown on screen. Second, you usually don't need to press anything at all: wait a moment, and the QTE completes itself. The game is packed with expensive cinematic cutscenes, and it's understandable that creating failure animations for every one of them would add to the cost. But that raises a question: why include the mechanic at all if you're not prepared to implement it properly?

Combat is the best part of Marvel's Wolverine, but even that comes with caveats. It resembles the combat in Insomniac Games' Spider-Man titles or the Batman series. The fundamentals are the same: fight a crowd of enemies, leap from one opponent to another, dodge or parry attacks, and periodically use special moves as they come off cooldown. Here, though, it's all accompanied by impressive animations as Logan turns his enemies into bloody pulp. The action looks particularly good when Wolverine's rage meter fills up, allowing him to dispatch regular enemies with quick finishers. Each movement flows smoothly into the next, making the whole scene look choreographed even though it all unfolds dynamically.

But that's the visual side. In terms of gameplay variety, combat is somewhat monotonous: there aren't many special moves, and there aren't enough enemy types for a game that consists of fighting roughly 70% of the time. The developers occasionally introduce new twists, such as enemy blades that lodge in Logan's body and slow his regeneration. By and large, though, Marvel's Wolverine's combat system barely evolves over the course of the campaign: you're doing the same things in the finale that you were in the opening hours. In small doses, these fights are enjoyable enough, but when one combat arena leads straight into another, then another, all within five to ten minutes, you start rolling your eyes.

Since Insomniac Games chose to include an ensemble of superheroes, it should have given at least a couple of missions to other playable characters. Yes, few people liked the Mary Jane sections in the Spider-Man games, but playing as an ordinary person is one thing; playing as Mystique, Sabretooth, or Jean Grey is quite another. These characters sometimes fight alongside Logan here, but their presence barely affects the gameplay. Being able to take control of them briefly could have added some variety to the campaign.

The developers try to break up the monotony with stealth sections. But Marvel's Wolverine comes nowhere close to the mechanical depth of the best stealth games: you sneak through tall grass and kill enemies from behind with a single strike. It's quicker to deal with a group of enemies in a straightforward fight.

Virtually every aspect of Marvel's Wolverine feels compromised in one way or another. Even the visuals, while generally meeting the standards of a modern AAA blockbuster, somehow look like something from the PS4 era in certain scenes. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Overall, the quality is far too uneven. And yes, if you lower your expectations and pick up Insomniac Games' latest at a steep discount further down the line, you can certainly have a decent time. But you expect more from a Sony title than a game with a weak story and repetitive combat that treats you as if you can't even follow a straight path without guidance.

The formula behind PlayStation's exclusives is clearly wearing thin. If Sony wants to get core fans interested in the PS6, particularly in light of this year's questionable business decisions, it can't afford to keep releasing games built on an outdated template.

Do you still enjoy Sony's familiar blockbuster formula, or are you ready for a change with the next PlayStation generation? Share your thoughts in the comments.