Marvel's Wolverine Review

When I first heard that Insomniac was making Wolverine to continue their string of Marvel superhero games for PlayStation, I had the same thought as a lot of people: “How are they gonna make that work?” Their current house style with Spider-Man revolves around the things that make that hero interesting. It’s all about exploring every nook and cranny of New York through fast, fun web swinging, quietly taking out baddies from the shadows, and frequently getting into street brawls with thugs. If they were going to use that as a template for Wolverine, a character with far fewer tools who isn’t associated with the big city, how would that make sense? Turns out, it often doesn’t.

With no open world to explore, Wolverine feels incredibly linear. That’s normal for a character action game, but I make the comparison to Insomniac’s past works because it’s painfully obvious that they didn’t know how to make their go-to systems work without a giant city full of small events. Instead, they just shoehorned said encounters into a level-based structure.

There just has to be a skill tree, but how do players get experience points for it? Outside of combat, have them break specific glowing objects, open crates of supplies conveniently hidden down hallways, and sniff at random things. There needs to be optional encounters that unlock skill points and costumes, but where do those get put? Naturally, in the Nightmare Cabin that (literally) sprouts a physical doorway to Logan’s mind at very random times during levels to offer an obstacle course or combat challenge. Hey, you can’t have a big-budget game without stealth in 2026! Logan’s powers don’t really lean into that, so there’s just tall grass everywhere for him to crawl through and Press Square To Stealth Kill.

The greater structure of Wolverine feels like a patchwork quilt of ideas from other PlayStation games that frequently bump against each other. It’s jarring to go from fast-paced combat arenas and boss fights to painfully slow walk-and-talks and strings of cutscenes that can make up the majority of some chapters. Even level traversal and set pieces are too straightforward to be satisfying. Both are driven by one of the worst clichés in modern game design: Hold forward and occasionally tap X to proceed. Gotta make sure you’re still holding that controller, I suppose.

I’m glad that the performances are generally high quality at least, with every actor selling a very mediocre script very well. It’s especially important that the voice acting is good because boy howdy do you have to listen to the characters a lot. If someone is on screen, they’re chattering away. That includes Logan, who constantly talks to himself Aloy-style. Whether it’s combat-driven, directing the player where to go next, or even just commentary on something you just sniffed to earn XP, he always has something to say. His constant quips strike me as a leftover from the Spider-Man template rather than being appropriate for the character, but I’ll let the bigger Marvel fans decide that for themselves. The story itself frequently falls apart and becomes a bit nonsensical, but I was always invested in the characters and wanted to see where the various relationships ended up. Even interactions that start off incredibly awkward like the very rom-com approach to Logan and Jean Grey had me getting emotional by the end.

Something that brings the presentation down a lot, however, is the frequent breakup of visuals. The image is constantly fizzling, especially on fine details. It’s something that could be a non-issue if it were just in the background, but the art direction includes things like a ton of thin hair all over Logan that turns into a mess of pixels and one of the main characters having an outfit with a lot of fishnets that dissolve into her skin and make her model look bizarre. I don’t remember any issues like these in the Spider-Man games, and considering how technically impressive those games could be, I expected more. I wouldn’t normally focus on this in a review, but since Insomniac chose to have a lot of this game focus on you watching Wolverine rather than playing as him, it was hard to not notice. Maybe that gets improved on a PS5 Pro with PSSR, but hey, I played this on a base console, like most people will.

As down as I am on the storytelling and pacing, the other meaty portion of the game, the combat, is much more than just a saving grace... eventually. It feels very inspired by Metal Gear Rising, my personal favorite character action game. Mash square for light attacks, occasionally press triangle for alternate, slower moves, parry almost any attack with L1, and dodge when an enemy flashes red. It's a simple core. Too simple, initially. Unlike Metal Gear Rising, Bayonetta, etc., Wolverine starts with no additional special sauce on top to differentiate it from other games and make it feel special. For the first few hours, all you'll be doing is mashing square, parrying, and dodging. In time, Logan gains a whole slew of fun abilities that complete a full gameplay loop to the combat, but it takes several hours of play to get to that point.

Unlockable special moves all operate on cooldowns, which is initially very frustrating. Sure, Wolverine is a crazy-powerful superhero and there needs to be a gameplay reason he’s not just massacring everyone at the start of every fight, but it feels limiting. During several fights, I would get surrounded by enemies and think "Damn, sure would be nice to use my spinning, area-clearing attack that I poured some skill points into", but I couldn't, because it's still on cooldown! Great. You know that strange urge we all have with RPGs, where you save your best, rarest healing items until the end of the game because "You never know when you'll need it to get you out of a pinch!" and then inevitably never use them? Wolverine gives me that urge with special moves in an action game. I should be chaining all my best moves together constantly, not holding on to them because I don't know when the most optimal time to lay down some crowd control will be!

Once you do have enough points to unlock a variety of abilities, the game feels whole, and more importantly, fun. Passive abilities that reduce the cooldown of special moves by performing specific combos or basic attacks turn the initial cooldown limit into an engaging goal. If I want to mow down an entire wave of enemies using the powerful Tornado Spin, I have to take out enough staggered enemies to bring it off cooldown. If I want to trigger temporary enhanced healing, I have to dodge enough strong attacks. You can mix and match special moves and cooldown reduction conditions by swapping out what face button each move is bound to, letting you create a Wolverine loadout that matches your play style. Once you have a sizable selection of attacks that you enjoy and a set of passives that support using them more, the combat becomes very satisfying. It’s just a shame that it takes about a third of the game’s 12-ish hours to get there.

Wolverine is a perfect example of why skill trees becoming a video game industry standard across nearly every genre is a bad thing. For games where character progression is expected, like RPGs, it makes sense. For games that are power fantasies right out the gate, a linear progression system often just feels like a hindrance. Action games are best served either with a slew of moves available from the get-go, or with moves being purchasable from some kind of menu at the end of each level, Capcom-style. That allows players to lean into their specific play style as quickly as possible. With a skill tree such as the one featured here, fun, engaging moves are bound to an experience point system. Even if you had skill points to spend, your fun is locked behind arbitrary levels that can only be advanced so far each chapter because there's only so many enemies to kill and bonuses to find.

I can’t shake the feeling that when this game was being made, it was decided first and foremost to retrofit the Spider-Man game structure with Wolverine’s set of powers rather than build a bespoke game from the ground up purely out of efficiency. This “shortcut” ended up being massively detrimental to the final product. Ripping out a massive chunk of that established structure and doling out its player rewards piecemeal throughout a much more linear game feels like a very messy, incoherent approach. With exploration removed, the remaining storytelling and combat pillars of Insomniac’s house style struggle to support the studio’s ideas.

Wolverine is a game with momentary sparks of fun, but its mostly-good combat getting constantly dragged down by mediocre storytelling, poor pacing, and an underwhelming amount of player agency left me very bored far too often.