Marvel’s Wolverine Review – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Marvel’s Wolverine is a difficult game to discuss in a vacuum. It’s a title that comes after a series of successful, open-world games, and an established studio known for creative, immersive gameplay experiences. Following Marvel’s Spider-Man, the Miles Morales spin-off, and its even bigger sequel, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Insomniac Games shifted gears to another Marvel character. 

However, following up a mechanically rich and engaging game with a linear action game was always going to be a challenge. In their efforts to diversify gameplay and focus on another beloved superhero, they landed on Marvel’s Wolverine. 

Wolverine, or Logan, is a physical fighter with sharp claws and fast healing. This makes him a much simpler hero than Spider-Man, but also more approachable from a gameplay perspective. How did Insomniac Games translate his character, moveset, and the wider X-Men story into an interactive medium? Let’s find out.

TL;DR

Marvel’s Wolverine is a cinematic, linear action game with a 15-20 hour runtime. It pairs Wolverine’s combat brutality with simplistic, approachable gameplay. While it can be a fun time for Marvel fans, there’s very little substance or replayability to be found here.

Story – An Outcast With a Hidden Past

Marvel’s Wolverine follows Logan before joining the X-Men. Here, he is part of Team X, a group of mutants working to make the world a better place for their kind. At the start of the game, Logan reluctantly returns to the group to help rescue its leader and his mentor. Logan’s past is shrouded in mystery due to repressed and forgotten memories, but as the story progresses, they start bubbling up. 

Insomniac Games did a great job characterizing Logan as someone who has lived for a long time and has a lot of friends and enemies everywhere, even if he doesn’t necessarily remember them. Paired with a cast of characters including Mystique, Sabertooth, Jean Grey, and others, Marvel’s Wolverine doesn’t lack superheroes. 

Mutants at the Heart of the Story

To avoid spoilers and let you experience the story for yourself, it’s worth noting that the game tackles a lot of issues we heard about in real life. Mutants are a repressed minority and a group hunted for their special abilities. 

They’re scared, on the run, and seen as a threat by default. Insomniac Games carefully wove the thread of mutants being misunderstood individuals who just want to live their lives. Unfortunately, that’s impossible when powerful groups want to misuse their abilities or eliminate them. 

Swap a few keywords around, and Marvel’s Wolverine’s story applies to the world around us despite being fictional. It’s one of the strongest aspects of X-Men in the comics, and the studio has successfully managed to translate those vibes into a video game format. 

Gameplay – An R-Rated Action Game

At its surface, Marvel’s Wolverine is a linear game where you play as Logan, a mutant with metal claws. Unfortunately, the ‘at its surface’ commentary mostly applies to the game as a whole. Contrary to Marvel’s Spider-Man games, which were also open-world games, this is an R-rated title. 

True to Wolverine’s nature, it doesn’t shy away from letting you slice and dice anything and everything in your path in grizzly detail. Despite a great damage model that lets you cut clothes, armor, and body parts, the game is very simple in execution. Logan doesn’t have any weapons or gadgets to speak of. 

Changing suits or claws only affects their appearance and doesn’t translate into gameplay in any way. In every mechanical way, Marvel’s Wolverine is a step back from Marvel’s Spider-Man due to Logan simply being a simpler character. Having the ability to brutally eliminate enemies is a visual treat, but it’s visual only, and doesn’t make up for the lack of diverse ways to do that.

Painfully Linear Level Design

Marvel’s Wolverine is linear to a fault. To give the game some credit, let’s look at it without taking Marvel’s Spider-Man into account. It’s a game with invisible walls and corridor-like levels with a few collectables to find. You’re always on a linear path forward without any backtracking or exploration to speak of. 

At worst, you’ll also get warning messages to not go backwards and return to the mission area immediately. This makes Marvel’s Wolverine a cinematic action game that doesn’t warrant replayability or immersion. The feeling is compounded by the fact that the game always keeps you moving forward with a blue trail, mimicking Logan’s scent ability. 

That blue trail also has mission markers for you to follow, in addition to character commentary on where to go next. Its excessive hand-holding is a great fit for casual gamers or first-time players who enjoy Marvel movies but don’t necessarily play games. However, if someone played the previous three Spider-Man games and then jumped into Marvel’s Wolverine, they’ll experience whiplash due to how different the game’s design is compared to the previous titles.

Surface-Level Customization

Suit customization was a fan favourite in Marvel’s Spider-Man. Having the ability to switch Peter’s suit on the go and get a special ability for doing so was a cherry on top of an otherwise great gameplay loop. This feature got removed in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and it’s also absent in Marvel’s Wolverine. 

Removing it for a game with two characters and dozens of suits for each made sense, but it doesn’t make sense here as it’s now purely cosmetic. It makes even less sense when you consider you can customize Logan’s claws separately from his suit, only for the claws to look almost identical to one another between different skins. 

Skin customization is present as a nod to Logan’s fans, with various comic-accurate suits unlocking as you play the game and collect hidden caches. But apart from an homage to certain X-Men storylines (and the recently-released Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls), there’s not much reason to switch from the story-accurate suits the game switches between.

Visuals – The World of X-Men Comes to Life

Marvel’s Wolverine doesn’t lack in visual spectacle. Building off the foundations set with Marvel’s Spider-Man games, this title fires on all cylinders when it comes to graphical showcase. We tested the game on the base PlayStation 5, where it features two modes: Performance and Fidelity. The Performance mode runs at 60 FPS with a lower resolution, while the Fidelity mode runs at 30 FPS and 1800p. 

As this is a fast-paced action game, we recommend playing it in Performance mode. Whichever mode you choose, Marvel’s Wolverine will shine equally, especially if you have a 120Hz or VRR display. The game allows you to customize your visual experience so that you can get the most out of it depending on your display. 

In terms of graphics themselves, the game features a wide variety of locations and biomes around the globe. Contrary to Marvel’s Spider-Man, Marvel’s Wolverine is a globe-trotting game, so you’ll move from one place to another every few levels. 

Each X-Men character also features great design that brings them to life, paired with high-quality cutscene direction akin to other PlayStation Studio games. Overall, there’s very little to fault with Marvel’s Wolverine’s visuals, with production quality that can stand shoulder to shoulder with any AAA game out there.

Graphical Issues Plague the Experience

Now and then, Marvel’s Wolverine will break your immersion with a visual bug. It may be an NPC that phases through a wall or an item floating in the air, missing the item that should be right below it. These may seem like small nitpicks, but in a linear game, they’re very noticeable. 

PlayStation has a history of linear, single-player, story-driven games spanning all the way to the days of PlayStation 2. Insomniac Games themselves have built their reputation on Ratchet & Clank, a series of sci-fi adventure games which were mostly linear with optional backtracking. 

The technical artefacts present in Marvel’s Wolverine could be fixed with future patches, but it’s the first impressions that matter the most. Thankfully, the game never crashed during our testing, and the experience remained stable from that aspect.

Audio – Crunchy Sound Design and Great Voice Acting

Marvel’s Wolverine features a lineup of professional voice actors who bring its characters to life. Logan is played by Liam McIntyre (Spartacus), while another notable addition to the cast comes in the form of Troy Baker (The Last of Us), an industry veteran, as Nathaniel Essex. They’re joined by Krizia Bajos playing Jean Grey, Nicole Pacent as Mystique, and Brett Gipson as Sabertooth, among others. 

Thanks to amazing direction and talent involved in capturing their performance, Marvel’s Wolverine’s voice acting always feels believable. These feel like characters who share histories, like or dislike each other, and have personal motivations for doing what they do. 

Likewise, Insomniac Games has done a great job of making sure Logan sounds like a brutal fighter. From clever use of DualSense haptic feedback to the sound design of his claws, you’ll feel like Wolverine when fighting his enemies. 

In terms of music, it’s serviceable and does a good job of filling in the silence, but it’s nothing to write home about. The one notable exception is the memorable main menu music, which represents Logan’s theme song.

Conclusion – Should You Play Marvel’s Wolverine?

Marvel’s Wolverine isn’t easy to recommend. It comes on the heels of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and video game development logic would dictate that it’s bigger and more ambitious than what came before. It’s neither of those things. 

This is a straightforward action game akin to those we enjoyed two generations ago on the PlayStation 3. Whether that’s a dealbreaker or not will be a personal preference. Many gamers have expressed fatigue over open-world games, and Marvel’s Wolverine is the polar opposite. 

On the other hand, there’s not enough substance here to warrant replays, exploration, or anything that would substantially extend its playtime. Players who are looking for a 15-20 hour action game starring a new Marvel character will have fun and then move on to other titles. 

Those who wanted a bigger and more expansive version of Marvel’s Spider-Man will be left wanting. Only time will tell how Marvel’s Wolverine will be perceived in the grander pantheon of Insomniac Games’ catalogue. For now, it’s just another good action game.

Marvel’s Wolverine is now available exclusively on the PlayStation 5.

Big thanks to PlayStation Greece for providing us with the review copy!