Our review of Wolverine, developed by Insomniac Games. Available now for PS5 (reviewed) and PC.

WHAT IS IT?

A AAA action-adventure title starring everyone’s favourite maple-blooded mutant. (No, not you, Deadpool.)

IS IT GOOD?

In fits and bloody spurts it can be fun, but it also plays it safe in ways that will likely disappoint.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Cal Dodd.

X-MAN

Some years ago, I reviewed the PS4-era Avengers action-adventure game, complimenting its combat but severely faulting its overly linear, lootbox- and grind-heavy structure. As I wrote at the time, the worst sin a comic book game can commit is to turn its protagonists into “heroes who are happy to abandon their world-saving quests for the mundane task of opening loot crates.”

Those sins were mostly forgiven when, a few years later, Marvel delivered the thrilling, laugh-out-loud hilarious, Guardians of the Galaxy game, which served up delight after Easter Egg-addled delight for fans of Marvel comics, and Marvel cosmic.

In between, we were blessed with the (mostly) excellent Spider-Man 2, co-starring O.G. webhead Peter Parker alongside relative newbie Miles Morales of Spider-Verse fame. That game, from starry developer Insomniac, saw Peter and Miles take on a veritable rogues’ gallery of classic and modern Spidey villains, with a few brain-devouring detours along the way. It wasn’t a perfect game, but it captured the Spider-spirit, and did so in an open world overflowing with secrets and movement mechanics which made it a joy to explore.

Three years later, and Insomniac is back at it with Wolverine, a game which abandons the open-world structure of its predecessor and throws the ole Canucklehead into a series of tightly scripted missions alongside a relatively small selection of familiar faces, mutant and non-mutant alike.

Wolverine is fun, and there’s no denying the thrill of its brutal, Arkham-like combat system… but it’s also another ^# crate-smashing game with !$#^& restrictive linear design, and a notable misstep for the brand.

HORSEMAN

Wolverine is a third-person action-adventure game set in a brand-new X-Men continuity (albeit the same universe as the Insomniac Spider-Man), freed from the constraints of comic books and movies past.

Riffing on familiar ideas, this Wolverine stars an amnesiac Logan recruited into the secretive mutant strike force “Team X” – not to be confused with Weapon X – under the auspieces of a telepathic Brit (but not that telepathic Brit).

Teaming up with several familiar faces, and engaging in brutal, knock-down, drag-out combat against several more, it’s a story of human supremacists, mutant conspiracies, and at least one giant robot. Embracing Wolverine’s penchant for globetrotting, it also has fun sending the player ping ponging all over the globe, with locations ranging from frigid Canadian mountainsides to the neon streets of Tokyo.

Wolverine gets a lot of things right. The combat is frenetic and meaty. The CanCon is fun – shout-out Squamish! – as are the general connections to X-Men lore. The supporting cast – Mystique (Nicole Pacent), Sabretooth (Brett Gipson), Nathaniel Essex (Troy Baker) – are all good, even if you might wish there was more in the way of X-Men presence. Some of the boss fights are great, and really feel like a comic book page come to life.

But other boss fights are lame – looking at you, giant hand trope Sentinel – and other aspects of the game are lamer still.

Which honestly is what makes Wolverine such a tricky title to review.

On the one hand, the hack-and-slash gameplay, the cinematic setpieces, succeed at putting you in the itty-bitty shoes of Logan in a way we haven’t seen since 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, quite possibly the purest example of a video game tie-in which vastly improves upon the movie it’s tying into.

On the other hand, our new Wolverine often feels hopelessly out of touch with modern gaming, overly simplifying things which do not require simplification, and forcing players to endure repetitive combat which undermines the idea of Wolverine as an unstoppable killing machine.

Its (quickly patched) “fart lines”, which needlessly point players towards places they were already looking, insults the intelligence of its players. Its infamously meaningless QTEs – already covered to death elsewhere – just reinforce the notion that Insomniac lost the plot somewhere along the way. Same goes for the weird refusal to embrace X-Men lore: while it doles out plentiful easter eggs (it is wonderful to see Alpha Flight’s Walter Langowski here, even if he’s basically done dirty by the end), it habitually pulls back right when it would make sense to involve the greater X-universe. (Here we have an Earth where the X-Men do not exist, but there are several hints that they should.)

AVENGER

At the end of the day, I did enjoy my time with Wolverine. Insomniac has obviously been at this a while, and when they’re firing on all cylinders – as in the game’s standout Madripoor sequence – there’s no denying the entertainment value.

While it’s disappointing that after the heights of the recent Spider-games, this pivot to another character, and a different gameplay style, doesn’t quite pay off, it’s still a Canada-set, Canada-embracing action-adventure which just begs to be experienced by every Canucklehead geek.

Claws out, elbows up, everyone.

***

Final score: 7/10 eyepatches.

Visit the official website for Marvel’s Wolverine here.