Review: Insomniac’s Wolverine Struggles to Find Its Edge
The pre-release discourse surrounding Marvel’s Wolverine was a battleground. Early reviews were notoriously unkind, but upon release, a vocal contingent of players emerged claiming it was actually a misunderstood great. Social media became a whiplash of creators dunking on broken QTEs and "fart trails," immediately followed by earnest defenses of its fun factor.
As someone who grew up with Wolverine as a foundational favorite—right alongside the rest of my demographic—I had to see for myself.
Unfortunately, the reality leans heavily toward the critics. Wolverine isn't just a flawed action game; it is a fundamental miscalculation of character and storytelling that, frankly, harms Insomniac’s once stellar reputation.
Marvel’s Wolverine bills itself as a third-person action-adventure featuring the titular stab-and-slash guru. “Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does isn't very nice.” That tagline alone highlights the tightrope Insomniac had to walk: balancing a protagonist whose actual deeds are monstrous with the heroic framing required for a blockbuster video game. This isn't Spider-Man, who pulls his punches, and miraculously webs foes before they plummet to their deaths. Wolverine, by his own account, doesn’t do very nice things.
But Insomniac never fully commits to the necessary grit. Instead, they struggle to figure out what makes Wolverine compelling to a modern audience. The character's explosive popularity was cemented in an era where gross-out cartoons and pure edge were not only novel, but heavily marketable to kids. Stripped of that 90s novelty, and forced to step out of Hugh Jackman’s overpowering cinematic shadow, this iteration of Logan feels surprisingly hollow at best, schmaltzy at worst.
Framed properly, and Logan can be as heroic as the best of them. But the storytelling in Wolverine is clumsy. The narrative heavily relies on telling the audience how they should feel rather than earning those emotions through meaningful storytelling weight. Emotional beats routinely fail to land, resulting in a script that feels immature and uneven. Cutscenes drag on to near-Kojima lengths; I found myself genuinely tempted to fire up another game on a second screen to get work done while waiting for the exposition to end.
The voice acting, for me, is a mixed bag. There are some powerful performances, but while the story sometimes does them a disservice, some of the characters didn’t quite hit the mark, either. I was excited to see legendary Troy Baker’s take on Essex (no spoilers here). But it’s maybe one of the most Troy Baker performances of his career. The man is undeniably talented and often considered the best in the industry, but he has a tendency to be a bit of a Brent Spiner in regards to character acting. Sometimes the theatricality works brilliantly, but sometimes it veers into self-indulgence.
The presentation is further hampered by baffling design and gameplay choices. Viral clips of players bypassing danger and ignoring broken prompts are entirely accurate. Hitting “R1” when a flashing “R2” is on the screen isn’t penalized. I personally hate quick time events, and while I’m glad there aren’t any instant fail sequences, having no penalty feels strange. I would argue it’s a type of ludonarrative dissonance.
If a game establishes a strict ludic rule where the Left Trigger (L1) = Left Hand and Right Trigger (R1) = Right Hand, that mapping becomes the narrative language of the character's body. If a prompt tells you to use the left hand, you press L1, but the character on screen moves their right hand, the game has violated its own structural contract. It’s more than immersion breaking, it brings you out of the game completely to try to figure out what’s happening.
This goes for purely storytelling decisions, too. In one particularly egregious set piece, Logan struggles against a massive jet engine, yet the surrounding metal and environment remain entirely unaffected by the physics of the moment. Even the game's structural lore delivery feels disjointed. Players revisit Logan's past through various "doors" that serve as challenge rooms. While they provide necessary lore tidbits, they feel artificially bolted onto the experience rather than woven into the world.
While I’m not wishing for more open-world games, having Wolverine be purely linear was a mistake. I’m not fond of giant, empty worlds filled with arbitrary activities, but I feel like semi-open world maps would have been the best approach. It would have helped highlight Logan’s tracking abilities, and traversal skills.
Paradoxically, Wolverine's combat is both its greatest strength and my biggest point of frustration. While I actually really enjoy the combat in Wolverine, I can’t help but feel like Logan just isn’t as powerful and his claws just aren’t as sharp as they should be. Wolverine’s adamantum claws are supposed to slice through practically anything like butter.
Here, he’s swinging blunt edged butter knives against spongey enemies. I understand, on one hand, how Wolverine can’t just slice through everything and make short work of it. That is, unless he’s fully enraged and can properly one-shot most foes. And while I appreciate the combo minigame of getting him to that enraged state, I can’t help but feel like he should start there as a baseline and work into something more frenzied.Insomniac should have sharpened his claws, allowed players to tear through hordes of basic soldiers effortlessly, and saved the high-health endurance fights for special encounters.
Yet, despite these glaring misgivings, the combat ultimately emerges as the game's strongest pillar—once you understand the underlying rhythm. It borrows the flow of the Arkham and Spider-Man games, but in way that feels appropriate to a character that can take lethal blows and keep moving. I feel like most of the game’s budget was spent on fine tuning the combat. But the real saving grace is the rage meter. When Logan gets mad enough, the combat shifts into an insta-kill mode that finally delivers the frenzied feeling of playing as The Wolverine.. The entire combat loop becomes a frantic, highly enjoyable dance of filling your rage meter and fighting to keep it active.
It is impossible to look at Wolverine without comparing it to Insomniac’s other Marvel properties. If you told me ten years ago that Spider-Man was inherently cooler than Wolverine, I’d not only agree, as a lifeline Spider-Man fan (even when it wasn’t cool) I’d feel vindicated. Insomniac’s Spider-Man isn't just the best game Sony has put out; its version of Peter Parker is arguably better than any live-action cinematic counterpart. While Spider-Man 2 had its pacing issues, it never fumbled the core identity of its hero.
Wolverine does. It lifts story elements that were handled infinitely better in recent Spider-Man films, inviting comparisons that do Logan no favors. Insomniac aimed for a prestige, character-driven blockbuster, but missed the mark, leaving players with a flawed brawler that never quite figures out who its hero is supposed to be.
Comments