Midway through Marvel's Wolverine, after just finishing a major battle, Logan finds himself on rare leave. In the Madripoor Lower City, filled with Southeast Asian flair, he gets into an argument with Sabretooth. Frustrated, he decides to talk things over with Jean Grey, whom he recently met, engaging in some unspoken romantic tension typical of adults...
Then, he encountered the first assassination attempt by the Hand.
After taking out a bunch of Hand assassins and picking up a katana bearing their organization's emblem, a blood-stained Logan wears an expression that seems to mix anger, confusion, and exhaustion.
I believe this is a microcosm of Wolverine's story.
From my limited understanding, Wolverine's life before joining the X-Men was almost a tragic Sisyphus cycle—patricide, losing his wife, being used as a weapon in human experiments, etc. Each time his memory is reset, his life enters a new tragic stage. His hundred-plus years of life certainly gave writers ample room to "lay groundwork." He always encounters inexplicable pursuits and relentless nemeses, much like this rebooted story in a different universe in Marvel's Wolverine—just after resolving the "mutant survival crisis" brought by Sentinel robots, he faces a large-scale offensive by the Hand with unclear motives.
Putting myself in his shoes, I feel Logan would definitely curse, "Where the hell did these come from?"
But by this point, my reaction was more like, "Finally, some damn new stuff."
And this difference is a microcosm of the game.
In recent years, Insomniac Games brought Marvel IP adaptations back to the stage of high-spec action games through its series of Spider-Man titles, making "Marvel" one of the symbols of Sony's new generation of cinematic game industry. On the other hand, since the movie tie-in game X-Men Origins: Wolverine published by Activision over a decade ago, there hasn't been a 3D action game starring Wolverine. As another top-tier popular character under the Marvel banner, many hoped that the power of the new generation's cinematic game industry would allow Wolverine to replicate the next "boom" in the mainstream gaming world.
These prerequisites built the halo around Marvel's Wolverine and secured the baseline of its experience. Indeed, as many expected, supported by Insomniac's stable industrial pipeline, the experience of Marvel's Wolverine is hardly likely to be bad.
Great controls, smooth operations, stable visual performance, and mature camera work—all aspects of the gaming experience supported by industrial strength—hardly disappoint in this title.
But unfortunately, this work might serve as a typical example where industrial prowess does not equate to gameplay fun.
In my view, the key to accepting Marvel's Wolverine lies neither in whether your perception of "Wolverine" equals Hugh Jackman, nor in whether you are a hardcore comic fan—although that is likely part of the target audience. The only factor affecting your enjoyment of the core fun of this game is whether you can accept the repetition of action games from 20 years ago.
I wouldn't say the action gameplay in Marvel's Wolverine has no merits. Throughout the long history of gaming, among the myriad ARPG and ACT titles, one can always piece together a complete action gameplay system. This game indeed establishes a combat loop with certain positive feedback, thanks to its enemy design and rage system.
The way this game generates combat satisfaction is mainly divided into two parts: strategic engagement and frenzied mowing down of enemies.
On normal difficulty, players often face swarms of enemies in most combat encounters. Wolverine, who isn't particularly known for defense or AoE capabilities, struggles to tank this level of aggression. Therefore, players must use parries, dodges, four skills, and stun-and-execute maneuvers to constantly split the battlefield into one-on-one scenarios or break out of encirclements to deal with isolated enemies.
This process involves a considerable amount of intense action strategy, dense enough that even the "Ashina Sword Deflection" technique comes in handy. If you've played Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, you'll find this design of continuously killing enemies to sustain combat amidst sieges familiar. The combat process guided by this design, pitting a powerful figure against fodder, is indeed more rugged and interesting than "Dynasty Warriors-style" mowing down.
On the fictional level, Wolverine's exceptional close-quarters combat skills are effectively showcased through this dense, strategic combat system. Once players familiarize themselves with the combat mechanics, it's not difficult to control the flow of battle through sound decision-making, rarely leaving players feeling helpless when surrounded.
When players accumulate enough rage for Wolverine through a series of correct decisions, the combat takes on a different form. With three stacks of rage, Wolverine can instantly execute low-health enemies. At this stage, the dynamic between player and enemy shifts significantly; the pressure from being surrounded virtually disappears. Players no longer struggle amidst dense attacks and can fully appreciate the varied execution animations designed by Insomniac Games.
The alternating experiences of tense strategic combat and furious brutal kills create a rhythmic ebb and flow in the game's action.
However, once players get the hang of this combat system, they are immediately confronted with the issue of "repetition."
This straightforward combat system has little horizontal or vertical expansion; how it feels at the start is exactly how it feels at the end.
Even worse, apart from combat, Marvel's Wolverine has almost no expanded gameplay capable of supporting the experience.
As a linear level-based action game, this title's gameplay development is even inferior to X-Men Origins: Wolverine from over a decade ago. At least in that game, you could see small designs utilizing Wolverine's own abilities to solve puzzles, such as "Wolverine freezing himself to pass through a laser corridor." In Marvel's Wolverine, from start to finish, all players get is "kill, kill, kill, kill, kill."
Insomniac Games didn't completely neglect expanded gameplay designs. They included some driving levels, added numerous stealth elements, and even attempted to let Wolverine engage in "large-scale 3D parkour." However, these gameplay designs all give off a subjective feeling of being half-hearted—the motorcycle sections are just a super-lite version of Road Rash, where you drive to a designated spot and then get off to fight monsters; the 3D platforming sections are mostly levels where you just hold forward on the stick and press jump a few times; and those "stealth elements" are practically non-existent, with enemy aggro chains across the entire map basically turning any stealth attempt into a "Berserker's Creed" situation after killing just two guards.
As a result, players quickly realize during gameplay that, aside from cutscenes, almost every segment of the game simply throws waves of enemies at you, big and small. This approach, which essentially abandons diverse gameplay design, feels like a throwback to the era when IP-derived games were side-scrolling beat-'em-ups. Even modern action games rarely resort to this kind of "stuffing."
A more serious problem is that after players spend a few hours and basically master the action system, they will quickly discover that without further derived action gameplay, the action experience in this game is simply insufficient to sustain a 15-hour-long action game.
A system ceiling visible at a glance, enemies that are largely indistinguishable from one another... and boss battles barely more interesting than hitting training dummies—Sentinel and Sabretooth easily rank among the most boring bosses of the century—all cause the journey in Marvel's Wolverine to rapidly descend into exhausting repetition.
By the mid-game, I could well understand one source of Logan's anger—these "bad guys" popping out of the ground are truly endless to kill.
But the problem is, in a narrative context, "the emptiness of combat and killing" can be an excellent concept for shaping a character's arc.
However, in an action game, making players feel "the emptiness of combat and killing" leads to a boring abyss.
Of course, as an ARPG, if the presentation and story experience are outstanding enough, the boredom caused by repetitive combat can actually be well mitigated.
So, how is the story in Marvel's Wolverine?
I think it should be described this way:
Although this is an original story, if you are a fan of the comics, the name Nathaniel Essex in the very first mission of the story basically spoils the entire plot.
Under this premise, the development of the entire story presents an extremely standard Marvel movie narrative template, repeated countless times over the past twenty years, with no surprises—especially if you are familiar with Wolverine's settings and story.
So, if you want to get the best experience from this story, you'd better not be a Wolverine fan at all.
As a fan-oriented work, honestly, this is somewhat strange.
In summary, I see Marvel's Wolverine as a title unlikely to replicate the boom of the Marvel's Spider-Man series. It indeed demonstrates decent quality thanks to Insomniac Games' impressive industrial strength, but its core gameplay lacks innovation, resembling comic adaptation games from 20 years ago, and its narrative fails to exceed the upper limits of Insomniac's previous writing capabilities.
Admittedly, it is not a game with a very poor playing experience. The production specifications largely guarantee a baseline quality, but it rarely offers eye-catching game design, making it a very awkward, mediocre work that falls short of excellence.
If one were to make excuses for Insomniac Games, one might say this awkward state was unavoidable for this particular title.
Although Wolverine, like Spider-Man, is an extremely popular hero under the Marvel banner, objectively speaking, there is a huge gap in their potential for gamification. With sufficient industrial support, Spider-Man enjoys thematic advantages incomparable to Wolverine, whether it's the unique experience of web-swinging through a modern metropolis or the variety of clever gadgets.
Wolverine is ultimately an overly "plain" superhero. Both his fighting style and his mutant abilities are things that have been repeated countless times in the gaming world.
Without sufficient creative support, the game modes it could offer essentially reached their limit with X-Men Origins: Wolverine back in the day—which also had the benefit of Hugh Jackman's facial model. Marvel's Wolverine merely repeated this process.
The end result is that Marvel's Wolverine, much like Logan himself, becomes an overly "plain" action game.
However, Wolverine became a super-popular character despite such a "plain" setting due to the personal charm forged by his strong inner core. A "plain" ability set doesn't hinder Wolverine's excellent character portrayal. Fans don't just love an immortal berserker who scratches people with six claws; they love a hero with rich emotions beneath a furious exterior, who remains resilient in the face of crises and setbacks.
The same applies to Marvel's Wolverine. A "plain" thematic foundation shouldn't dictate the quality of the work. To make it a truly outstanding title, the creators undoubtedly needed to transcend the limitations of the source material through gameplay.
Unfortunately, Insomniac Games failed to achieve this.
For this game, it wasn't that Wolverine made or broke it; rather, Everythinggj failed because of Wolverine.