I’ve just spilled enough blood to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools. Thousands are now dead thanks to the adamantium claws given to me by Insomniac Games. Marvel’s Wolverine certainly doesn’t skimp when it comes to violence, and gives you plenty of opportunities to enact it with style. But it takes more than blood to get my heart pumping, and it’s in Logan’s surprisingly nuanced tale of self-acceptance that I felt most connected to this latest portrayal of the most famous of the X-Men. That story is tasked with doing most of the heavy lifting here, with the initially slick and satisfying combat wearing thin well before its conclusion, but even that solid character work can’t quite carry the weight it needs to. Marvel’s Wolverine, much like its lead, is built on a firm skeleton, but what’s crafted around it isn’t nearly as strong.
This tale starts a few decades after James “Logan” Howlett first met Nathaniel Essex and was taken into his mutant community, where he quickly became a crucial member of his task force, Team X. Already an experienced hero, it’s clear something sinister is at play when we join him here, and Wolverine is soon sent on a mission to investigate scientist Bolivar Trask amidst reports of missing mutants. From there, it hops around the globe, taking Logan to new places rife with danger and old haunts that stir up buried memories. It’s standard superhero fare, with a couple of predictable turns along the way and some genuinely fun moments in its closing hours. It struggles to tell this story effectively through the action within missions, though, instead reserving any real moments of consequence for the cutscenes that bookend them. That makes for an uneven cadence that joltingly stops and starts rather than flows gracefully.
I like this version of Wolverine a lot, as Liam McIntyre’s performance grants Logan a personality to match his trademark blades – a sharp, surprising hidden depth, housed in a bulky, blunt instrument of a body. He delicately balances the shadows of his past with the future of mutantkind, all while managing his Jekyll and Hyde nature, as animal instincts sometimes break through the compassion he strives to show. That emotion comes through not just in his voice, but in how he’s been designed and animated. He moves around social spaces with a hunched back that reflects a vulnerability that clashes with his biological makeup – a physical manifestation of a dark past weighing him down. That’s a microcosm of Insomniac’s detailed rendition of Wolverine, which has instantly become one of my favourite depictions of the character.
But most of all, I like how he bounces off the other cast members. For all of the screaming and bloodshed, it’s when things are taken down to a whisper that this campaign tends to shine. I particularly enjoyed reflective moments in a Madripoor bar with Mystique, a snowy cabin rendezvous with Jean Grey, and the tension between Logan and Victor “Sabretooth” Creed. Krizia Bajos in particular is fantastic as Grey, and anchors a lot of the emotional weight of Wolverine’s tale, often preventing it from fully veering into run-of-the-mill comic book storytelling.
It is frustrating, then, that outside of Logan and Jean, few other characters are given room for their own arcs to develop. They have little to do outside of briefly crossing Wolverine to hinder him, or offering him a few words of wisdom from the other side of a bar. Though it is a credit to the writing team that these more tender moments don’t end up sounding completely out of key, especially when contrasted with the heavy-metal violence occurring on screen whenever the claws come out.
Wolverine’s basic attacks are well-honed tools that sink smoothly into flesh and steel alike, with devastating combos delivered through rapid presses of the square and triangle buttons. It’s incredibly responsive action, with the modern staples like dodges, parries, and special attacks to tear through each enemy. It’s not a complex system, though, and is ultimately quite forgiving. A quick press of triangle will make Logan leap to an enemy within range, and the more you stay on the front foot, the quicker your rage bar will fill up, allowing for critical hits to rip through foes with ease and the safety blanket of a revive in your back pocket. His healing factor also means that he’ll regenerate over time while in combat – a smart, and lore-appropriate, decision that means you never have to scramble around arenas in search of health packs.
Again, the animation work is outstanding. It really feels like after years of making sure Spider-Man didn’t let anyone fall to their death, Insomniac has revelled in all the ways Wolverine can end someone’s life. Brutal finishers, from sliced-up limbs to stabs up through jaws, are employed for a variety of gory outcomes. Maybe I should be placed on some sort of watchlist for saying so, but I really couldn’t get enough of them, reveling in each squelchy spine sever and chest-carving cleave. Throw in some slick camerawork and fight choreography when teaming up with the likes of Jean or Sabretooth for tandem kills, and you’ve got an impressive combat flow from an aesthetic perspective.
There’s no denying that wielding those claws is slick, punchy, and wonderfully bloody. It’s just a shame, then, that halfway through Wolverine’s 15-hour string of missions, I felt like I’d had my fill. The fundamentals are solid, but combat needed a stronger sense of progression to sustain that sensation over a game of this length – especially when you’re asked to cut down hundreds of enemies at a near-relentless pace. Yes, there are unlockable skills and special abilities to build into your repertoire, but only a handful, and you’ll gain access to them relatively early on.
I enjoyed spinning around like a lemon-tinged tornado slicing up anyone in my path, and booting people off of skyscrapers and cliff edges is a joy that never got old, but those techniques didn’t change my approach to combat in any significant manner. This lack of evolution in Logan’s toolset puts the pressure on two other factors in order for the action to remain exciting: enemy variation and encounter design. Only one of those is executed somewhat successfully.
Whether it be Trask’s sci-fi forces or the evil ninja followers of The Hand, there’s a consistent drip-feed of new enemy types to sink your claws into, even if every fight is ultimately a test of the same reflexes. These vary from sharp-shooting snipers you’ll have to scurry your way toward to hard-hitting brutes with cybernetic embellishments. The problem is, although some may require a few more hits to tear apart or demand two parries to stun instead of one, each fight does pretty much feel the same. When multiple enemy waves are comprised of different units, the action can come alive as you learn to prioritise targets to thin out the herd most efficiently. But this balance isn’t found anywhere near consistently enough.
More often than not, missions take the form of a series of corridors opening up into arenas where getting ambushed is a predictable probability. These arenas aren’t constructed in overly interesting ways either, mainly involving a large flat area filled with melee-based grunts and a sprinkle of higher platforms around the edge for ranged troublemakers. Leaping from enemy to enemy and dodging out of the way of projectiles when a red flash appears takes up most of your time, so the locations these battles take place in quickly start to blend together. For the most part, Wolverine wants you to lunge headfirst into the action and bloody those claws, but it makes for a rather one-note dance.
Outside of the action, there’s not too much to shout about, either. Each linear level does contain collectibles, including material caches required to unlock new outfits, which have both deep cuts and surface scratchers alike when it comes to Wolverine’s design history. I particularly enjoy how you can mix and match the over 30 different suits and claws to create your own fantasy Weapon X. Alongside level-up XP for skills, AP is your main resource for progression, unlocking skills that give you a chance to shape a playstyle a little more to your liking – widening parry windows or reducing damage taken, for example. This can be acquired via two methods: collecting whisky bottles and completing nightmare trials.
The former are much like the caches and just require a sharp eye in order to find them, aside from following Wolverine’s keen nose, which is presented as a glowing blue scent line on screen. I never really found the puzzles in the Spider-Man games to be overly complex, but at least they threw a welcome bit of variety into the mix and got my brain cells tingling a little. Here, you simply walk up to optional collectibles and press the triangle button every time. It feels like a missed opportunity to elevate the mundane. Still, I felt compelled to go back through each level to clean them all up, earning a platinum trophy after just 20 hours.
The nightmare trials are a little more interesting, though. They are a mixture of combat and movement challenges that put your skills to the test if you want to achieve the highest scores and, in turn, earn more AP. Of the small selection, I found reasonable enjoyment in the gauntlet variant, which sends waves of enemies your way in a dreamlike world while offering a choice of buffs and nerfs every few rounds. It’s another example of a PlayStation studio adding roguelike elements to a prestige single-player story game, and at least it hasn’t been delivered in the form of DLC this time around. The real reward for completing these trials, though, is memories taken from Logan’s long life that give extra context to the main story. I mostly found myself simply going through the motions while playing through them, but they’re at least a smart way to infuse challenges with bonus narrative nutrients.
Wolverine is built like a brute, a true powerhouse in combat – but he is also agile outside of it, and it’s a shame those skills are never fully put to the test beyond some loose platforming. He’s quick across the ground, though, and charging straight towards turrets hopelessly firing into his deflecting blades is a fun power trip. A blockbuster sheen runs through all of it, and occasionally its cinematic ambitions break out into full-flung sequences full of enthralling action. One chase that took me across the moon-lit rooftops of Tokyo and through its neon-soaked streets is a real spectacle, but while this sort of scripted cinematic affair is thrilling, they come around too infrequently, all boiling down to holding the right trigger to sprint as fireworks go off around you.
A similar thing can be said for its boss fights, of which there are surprisingly few. Most are remarkably similar in design but executed well enough, like an early face-off with Omega Red – a mutant who stalked my nightmares as a young child. It made for some lovely payback as I chipped away at the tentacled terror’s stagger bar via well-timed parries. Similarly, while I won’t spoil anything, the final boss battle is a real spectacle that puts all of your skills to the test. On the other hand, there’s a Sentinel showdown that essentially boils down to whacking a metal arm for 15 minutes, which would feel more at home in a middle-of-the-road 3D platformer than a top-tier action game. It’s the sort of boss battle that should’ve stayed in the early 2000s, where your towering target mostly sits just outside of the arena.
Logan is a naturally reclusive character. Even when out of his suit, he’s on the fringes of society, equally happy in solitude as he is reluctantly searching for a connection with those trying to break his walls down. He’s basically me, but much hairier. It’s a stark contrast to Spider-Man’s open world, which lets you interact with its population as both Peter and his web-slinging alter ego, allowing you to develop his character and build a connection to the city. Logan’s lodgings don’t provide this same nourishment. Insomniac has intentionally made a very different sort of game here, to be fair, with a much more linear structure and less of a focus on exploration in general – but it’s still notable that the change in direction it chose is far less interactive, and as a result, far less interesting.
When the story is told through handsomely sculpted cutscenes, it holds my attention completely, but the smaller areas that glue all those bigger moments together are reduced to meandering through spaces at a walking pace to inspect photo frames and audio logs. They’re largely ponderous sequences that just feel like needless bloat in a not overly long adventure. I can’t help but feel more could’ve been done here in terms of interactivity.
A prime example is an early stretch where you’re tasked with coaxing a young mutant called Leech out of a room. He demands a password from you, which Logan finds by slowly walking around Essex’s manor as he picks up three crayon-scrawled drawings. Rather than asking you to then solve the riddle spread across these doodles yourself, Logan does so of his own accord upon returning to the locked door. There’s no challenge here, no puzzle to solve. It’s like Marvel’s Wolverine only has two speeds: full-throttle bloodshed and introspective calm. An occasional middle ground would’ve been nice to fill out the in-betweens.
There’s no denying each of its globe-spanning locations is beautifully rendered, and when you’re not spending time in stretches of brown underground caverns and grey facility hallways, they really feel visually alive. You’ll occasionally be let loose to explore the streets, but don’t expect open areas full of surprises; these are much more limited spaces restricted to a few blocks. That size reflects the scope of its story, though. Yes, there’s a larger threat at play here, but it’s very much a personal Wolverine tale at its core, and I appreciate how restrained Insomniac has been in its approach to the wider X-Men ensemble. It serves the few characters it chooses to hone in on well, never running the risk of bloating the cast. From this perspective, it’s a decent first step into a different side of the Marvel Universe.
