The initial media scores for Marvel's Wolverine are out, with IGN and GameSpot both giving it 6/10. With 111 reviews collected, Metacritic shows an average score of 78, making it the lowest-rated Insomniac game of the past decade. For comparison, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 received a 9/10.
IGN: 6/10
GameSpot: 6/10
TheGamer: 8/10
Screen Rant: 7/10
WCCF: 8.5/10
Game Informer: 8.5/10
The Gamer: 8/10
Shacknews: 8/10
Gameblog.fr: 8/10
Jeuxvideo.com: 8/10
GamesRadar+: 6/10
Eurogamer Germany: 6/10
VGC: 6/10
Eurogamer: 6/10
Giant Bomb: 5/10
IGN Review Summary:
Like the Adamantium in the protagonist's body, Marvel's Wolverine has a solid foundation—but it fails to layer anything special on top of its initially satisfying action gameplay. As a result, the combat system reveals all its tricks early on, starting to feel tedious long before completion, while the level design mostly plays it safe, lacking sufficient variety.
I wish the game offered more varied experiences. As it stands, this roughly 15-hour campaign relies heavily on its story. While the narrative isn't particularly revolutionary, it's engaging overall, with some well-developed characters and excellent portrayals of the X-Men protagonists. Marvel's Wolverine is a decent title, but it falls a notch or two below Insomniac's other superhero games.
GameSpot Review Summary:
Pros
- The combat system has a solid foundation
- Appealing visual style and strong cinematic presentation
- Strong character performances and a mostly engaging story
Cons
- Fails to bring much new to the table beyond basic gameplay
- Combat lacks weight, fluidity, and challenge
- Fails to fully leverage Insomniac's strengths
Marvel's Wolverine is an elusive game. As I've repeatedly emphasized, it has no obvious flaws or shortcomings. It offers a genuine and highly playable Wolverine experience. I don't regret playing it; in fact, I even hope for a sequel to continue where this one left off. But at the same time, this sense of being "harmless" stems from it being an extremely bare-bones third-person action game, crafted plainly without any real surprises.
At best, it's an enjoyable but forgettable game that can kill a few hours. At worst, it proves that just because you can make a great superhero game with one character, it doesn't mean you can do the same with any character. Insomniac Games is a talented developer, but they truly excel at designing characters that allow them to fully showcase their craftsmanship. Wolverine may be the best in his field, but his achievements haven't made Insomniac's developers the best in theirs.
Giant Bomb: 5/10
Once you've accumulated enough points to unlock various skills, the game feels complete and, more importantly, endlessly fun. Passive skills can reduce the cooldown of special abilities by performing specific combos or basic attacks, turning initial cooldown limitations into an engaging goal. If I want to sweep through a wave of enemies with a powerful Cyclone Slash, I must first take down enough foes to finish its cooldown. If I want to trigger a temporary healing boost, I need to dodge enough heavy attacks. You can customize your Wolverine build by remapping which buttons trigger special skills and their cooldown-reduction conditions. Once you have a set of favorite attack moves and passive skills that enhance them, combat becomes very satisfying. Unfortunately, reaching this point takes about a third of the game's runtime (approximately 12 hours total).
Marvel's Wolverine perfectly illustrates why skill trees becoming an industry standard across almost all game genres isn't necessarily a good thing. For RPGs focused on character growth, this is understandable. But for games that pursue ultimate power from the start, linear progression systems often become a hindrance. The best solution for action games is either to provide a large number of moves from the beginning or, like Capcom, allow players to purchase moves via a menu at the end of each level. This allows players to find their preferred playstyle as soon as possible. However, the skill tree shown here ties interesting and engaging moves to an XP system. Even if you have enough skill points, your fun is limited by level caps, as the number of enemies and obtainable rewards in each chapter is finite.
I always felt that the primary goal during development was to forcibly adapt the Spider-Man game framework to Wolverine's abilities, rather than building a new game from scratch, purely for efficiency. This "shortcut" ultimately damaged the final product significantly. Cutting large parts of the original framework and scattering player rewards into a more linear game felt chaotic and incoherent. Removing exploration elements made it difficult for Insomniac's signature narrative and combat systems to support the game's vision. Marvel's Wolverine occasionally sparks with fun, but its otherwise decent combat system is constantly dragged down by mediocre storytelling, poor pacing, and disappointing player agency, often leaving me bored.
Polygon Review Summary:
The disconnect between the hero character and the gameplay is most evident in the combat system, which is the core of Marvel's Wolverine. On the surface, it's a smooth-action game that feels good to slash through, indulging in extreme aesthetic violence. Most of the time, you just keep pressing the square button to chop enemies into pieces, occasionally stabbing them in the chest or slicing off an arm. Sure, you can parry, dodge, or press triangle to pounce on enemies, but basically, just mashing one button and enjoying the bloody spectacle is enough to handle most fights. This action style mirrors the 2017 film Logan, which truly considered the fact that this man has claws on his hands, except the game turns this exaggeration into Mortal Kombat-style absurdity.
The combat isn't very deep. Even after unlocking many new moves through leveling up, I never felt my fighting style evolved much beyond the first battle. Stab, stab, stab, then kill the enemy. Insomniac tried to add some customization through "Adaptations" and special abilities. The former are equippable buffs unlocked by completing "Nightmare Gate" challenges and collecting whiskey bottles for AP; the latter are special skills with cooldowns, though there are only six to try. But the pace of combat never really changes, especially since enemy types are very limited and mostly similar. Only boss fights truly require strategic thinking and deliberate parrying.
The only mechanic that truly elevates the combat system is "Rage." Wolverine builds up Rage by continuously attacking. When his health is depleted, he can consume one full Rage bar to restore health. If he fills three bars, he enters a state of extreme berserk fury: damage increases, and he can pounce on enemies to perform brutal finishing moves. (This is essentially the superhero version of God of War's Spartan Rage.) The most exciting moments come from trying to keep your Rage meter full: chaining kills to maintain Rage and seeing how quickly you can clear an entire room. This aspect is also tested in a series of wave-based challenges focused on high scores.
The action system itself is interesting enough, but too thin to sustain an entire game. Worse, it completely contradicts the story Insomniac is trying to tell. Amidst bizarre battles against ninjas and robots, Wolverine attempts to present a nuanced character study of Logan himself. Actor Liam McIntyre strives to give the hero multifaceted depth: beneath his wild exterior, he is sensitive and vulnerable. This characterization is commendable, although it also makes the hero somewhat indistinguishable from Joel in The Last of Us.
But puzzlingly, a large part of the story revolves around the premise that Logan is a ticking time bomb, desperately suppressing his anger. Insomniac tries to highlight this at several key moments: Logan loses his cool during important plot points, falling into a killing frenzy. Fine—but the problem is, he's in a killing frenzy the whole time. That extremely brutal combat, including gory head-piercing animations, is cranked up to 10 from start to finish. The moments when Logan goes berserk aren't much different from usual; he just kills enemies slightly faster.
The emotional core of the story collapses because the combat system must remain fun, fluid, and seductively violent at all times. I never truly believed Logan was holding anything back, as a player, I never encountered any resistance that encouraged restraint. What are the consequences of falling into unconscious rage? Apparently, it's an efficient way to save the world! These details combine to create an emotionally shallow game that fails to earn the player's tears. Sometimes, its eagerness to create serious drama is even eye-roll-inducing. Every time I complete a "Nightmare Gate," I hear Logan deliver a low monologue recalling his past. The content is always bland angst, using vague traumatic experiences as a substitute for character depth.
My final impression is that Marvel's Wolverine seems to have been born from a directive to "make a God of War-like game" rather than "make a Wolverine game." Logan is just angry enough to have passed Kratos's audition.
