Marvel’s Wolverine – Review

Would you buy a PS5 just for Wolverine?

This year, Sony announced its return to strictly exclusive titles, and Wolverine will never see the light of day in a PC version. It’s an easy pivot to understand, given the rather timid performance of the ports already released, but the entire stake of such a plan hangs on the magnetism a flagship title can generate. How many Marvel fans would buy a PS5, specifically, just for Wolverine?

Well, the answer seemed simple. Hand the veterans behind the most successful superhero video game franchise around three hundred million dollars, an IP that practically sells itself and the longest development cycle in the studio’s history, and there’s no way you can go wrong. It’s like boiling an egg; how hard can it be?

You could do the bare minimum and it would still turn out fine. I should tell you upfront that Wolverine looks, moves and feels like any other triple-A title, and the optimisation is flawless. On my non-Pro PS5, the game never dropped below 60 frames per second, and the models, animations and lighting are everything you’d expect from a production with Insomniac’s pedigree. Add a ladleful of violence and a deluge of blood, and you’ve already completed two-thirds of the mission.

Not so fast, bub.

The story takes place in the same narrative universe as Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. Under the leadership of the mysterious Nathaniel Essex (played by Troy Baker), Logan, Sabretooth and Mystique form this world’s Team X and take on Bolivar Trask, which struck me as a rather generic setup, far below the dozens of story arcs in the comics starring the fearsome mutant.

My patience wore thin after a few hours of insipid dialogue. The actors do all they can with the material, but it’s sometimes beyond saving, despite all the emotion and sweat conveyed through mocap. It’s not the first time Liam McIntyre has arrived late in a role most people identify with another performance, but, as with Spartacus, I felt that by the end of the story he had carved out his own character and earned his stripes, and nothing I have to criticise about this iteration has anything to do with any of the actors’ performances (maybe just Sabretooth, but I’ve always found him an insufferable character, which, I suppose, is the intention).

The problem runs deeper than the surface. Between the ballet of eviscerations that makes up most of the playtime and the chunks of exposition through which we deal with old and new faces from the X-Men universe, there's something missing, that extra spark we'd normally expect from a title with these credentials.

AAA games are built on existing templates, but almost always there's a new gimmick, something that at least remixes the rules laid down by the industry's earlier hits. In Wolverine, I felt more keenly than in almost any other game that the formula is stagnating. It borrows the combat system from Spider-Man in a simpler form, with a cut-down kit and repetitive rotations.

There are challenge rooms, but it's hard not to hit the maximum score on the first or second attempt, and each one has only a couple of objectives. Logan's two centuries of life are explored only through the flavour text on a few collectibles, and the precious time you spend with Jean Grey, Sabretooth or Raven is rarely used to say anything new, interesting or memorable. They're just generic riffs on established relationships and, overall, it's grimmer than Old Man Logan without having the depth or emotional counterweight that Mark Millar's writing provides.

Traversal is slicker and more spectacular, physics-wise, than it needs to be, because the level design gives you only two or three moments to enjoy it other than simply heading forwards. A few stealth sequences are thrown in for variety, but it's a rudimentary, entirely optional system that I felt neither got in the way nor improved the overall experience. But, as I said above, most of the playtime is a string of gauntlet events where you fight two or three types of human enemies and two types of robots.

Boil’em, mash’em, put’em in a QTE…

You get four active abilities (out of six, unlocked as you hit certain levels, up to level 36) and a free-flow system in which you combine two types of attack in a cascade of parries and dodges.

The gore is fun for a few fights, with dismemberments, decapitations and the ultraviolence our lizard brains feast on, but, mechanically speaking, that's pretty much the cerebral level at which the gameplay loop here operates. After four Batman games and three Spider-Man ones, in which I reacted like one of Pavlov's dogs to enemy attack indicators over hundreds of encounters, I found the same formula in Wolverine, only with fewer permutations and almost zero synergies. With no combo counter, you essentially have just two Rage thresholds nudging you to play perfectly for combat perks, but that's a very small-minded way of motivating the player to engage with the mechanics.

As I said, there's a Rage bar that certain abilities depend on, and you fill it through parries, combo finishers and active abilities. I won't lie: the moments when I filled the bar and literally ripped enemies in half were the few occasions when I remembered who I was playing. In cutscenes, and up until the third act of the story, Logan struck me as far too passive and malleable compared with the template I had in my head. Even the origin story here is more soulless than almost any of the source material the developers could have drawn on. Compared with Weapon X, for instance, which is probably the most interesting Wolverine story going, there's no conspiracy or elaborate chain of cause and effect here. The moment you find out the what and the how neither recontextualises nor surprises. The main mission, split between Canada and Madripoor with a stopover in Japan, swings between the frenetic pace of gauntlet events and the drowsy angst of a cutscene disguised as gameplay.

If you like skins (and references), you can spend the resources gained from one of the game's two collectible types to unlock all sorts of versions of Wolverine from a heap of graphic novels and comics. They're only cosmetic changes, sure, but they add a bit of variety and freshness to the general monotony.

Marvel’s Wolverine

At its best, Wolverine is explosive, brutal and tactile. You can trigger cinematic sequences and combos in which you massacre a horde of poor souls, nailing every parry and dodge you need to unleash hell on earth.

To my genuine regret, these moments are the exception in a reboot that gathers together the industry's most self-satisfied bad habits. Although you glimpse now and then what it might have been, the finished product is more cynical than most fans would probably have wished. It's a functional toy, technically well put together, but utterly divorced from imagination and risk.

Thanks to PlayStation Romania for the review code and the chance to play Marvel’s Wolverine.

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Available on: PlayStation 5
Played on: PlayStation 5
Release date: 15 September 2026
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment