Marvel’s Wolverine Review

Insomniac Games has earned a reputation as the best studio to make Spider-Man games. When they revealed they were making a Wolverine game, expectations were, I believe, deservedly high. The team chose to change up their formula a bit here, with a linear experience and one that has less combat nuance; making for a solid action game, but one that feels very much like it’s missing the secret, or should we say, the “X-factor” we’d expected from Insomniac Games.

Unlike their Spider-Man games, which follow a more traditional approach to the Pete Parker and Miles Morales story, their world of Wolverine and potentially future X-Men games is following a more original and unique narrative.

Logan is found by Nathaniel Essex, feral in the woods, and some ten years later the game begins with Logan, Sabretooth and Mystique teaming up to save Essex after being captured by Trask. That’s right: there’s no Professor Xavier or Magneto to be found here.

Essex has been working on a machine, the ‘Helix Engine’, that can awaken dormant mutants. And although it’s all initially pitched as an excellent way to save the mutant kind, an early mission saving Jean Grey and a small number of other mutants shows signs of Essex caring. If you know anything about Essex, Trask, or a combination of these elements, you can kind of guess where the narrative heads.

The journey itself, though predictable, has a nice surprise at its heart. The relationship between Logan and Jean Grey is genuinely sweet, and Liam McIntyre and Krizia Bajos both write and perform them very well. Logan gets his bite in the necessary moments, and in devastatingly sad ones too, with McIntyre making it nuanced and deeply felt. Jean is found as an on-the-run mutant leader, with Bajos making sure her deep, burning fire for doing what’s right and caring shines bright, and her ability to see the caring man within Logan a highlight and central piece of their relationship.

The moment-to-moment gameplay, much of it Wolverine tearing through a very small, limited pool of enemy types across the campaign, can quickly become a grind.

Wolverine’s combat pool is limited. You’ll mostly smash square, and periodically press L1 to counterattack. It all feels oddly weightless, even when Wolverine enters a “rage mode” after building up a bar. It’s all rather tame and feels un-feral. A different monochrome screen colour, an audio cue, but his moves don’t change up. Then you add finishing moves that are one or two animations, and you don’t really care which of the six L2 + face-button “special attacks” you use because they all seem about as good as one another. The combat becomes mindless. Sure, I was having mindless fun. But I also entered this game lying on my side on the couch, playing because my need to be locked in just wasn’t there. That made it one of the most unengaging combat experiences I can remember in an action game.

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Some confounding decisions along the way also make it even more confusing. You’ll enter these large areas, fight ten enemies and then find maybe a collectible whisky bottle amongst it all. It’s bland and gives little excitement to explore. The only areas that ever feel alive are places like a bar full of mutants or a sequence inside a casino where Logan and Jean sneak inside.
I also found this game’s version of the Taskmaster Trials from Spider-Man, this time ‘Nightmare Doors, ’ to highlight how mundane the combat is, with the trials being a slog rather than a test of ability. There are also zero stealth challenges, even though the game gives you areas to encourage stealth in the campaign, which I never did because it, like a lot of the game, felt like another undercooked element.

Marvel’s Wolverine is such a perfectly okay game from Insomniac that it comes across worse because of the developers’ calibre.

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