Marvel’s Wolverine Is the Biggest Disappointment of the PS5 Era

Getting away from the comparatively light-hearted joy of its critically acclaimed Spider-Man series, developer Insomniac dials up the blood and tears for its heavy take on Wolverine. Brutal battles are punctuated by weepy monologues as Logan reflects on his tortured past. It’s storytelling straight out of Sony’s God of War playbook, almost to the point of self-parody.

Though Insomniac’s instincts are understandable given Sony’s long success with a specific breed of story-driven, single-player action game, Marvel’s Wolverine too often comes across as a forced attempt to engineer an award-winning game. Visceral combat and impressive blockbuster spectacle can’t rescue a melodramatic comic book story that tries to run as many emotional bases as possible in 15 blood-soaked hours.

A mutant’s tale

As Insomniac’s first flirtation with mutantkind, Marvel’s Wolverine takes a lot of liberties with its source material. There are no X-Men here, only Team X: a ragtag team of heroes led by Nathaniel Essex, featuring Wolverine, Sabertooth, and Mystique. It’s a sensible choice considering that Wolverine takes place in a world where the existence of mutants isn’t yet widely known. Instead, Team X holes itself up in an isolated home base in Canada — that is, until the villainous Bolivar Trask starts rounding up mutants. A globe-trotting adventure ensues that takes Wolverine to Japan and Madripoor, a fictional Asian island in the Marvel universe, all while trying to keep his anger in check and confront his traumatic past.

Much of the story sees Insomniac picking up puzzle pieces from comic history and finding new ways to slot them together. Sometimes, it finds success in that experimentation. Sabertooth, for instance, is a great fit for the character-driven story Insomniac tells here. He’s Wolverine taken to the extreme Logan is trying to avoid, a hot-headed killer who’s more animal than man. Jean Grey, the telekinetic mutant who partners up with Logan early on, sits on Wolverine’s other shoulder. She anchors him back to Earth when he’s slipping into his fight-or-flight instincts, creating some genuinely tender moments in an otherwise raucous story.

Other comic book pieces don’t fit together as cleanly. Insomniac tries to juggle a glut of characters in a fairly compact story, an ambitious move considering that Wolverine often feels like it’s meant to be a focused character study before an X-Men game expands the universe. Heroes like Mystique are only developed in passing as the story tightens its focus on Logan and Jean’s relationship, while other underused characters come off as glorified cameos. The disjointed story suffers from balancing so many elements; a second-act war with The Hand, Marvel’s ever-present ninja gang, comes off feeling like a five-hour DLC digression in the middle of Logan’s personal reckoning.

Even with those problems, Insomniac at least excels when bringing comic pages to life. Expressive character animation combines with a vibrant color palette to create a game that doesn’t throw out the illustrative joy of comics in pursuit of cinematic realism. Robotic Sentinels still get to sport their striking blue-and-purple armor. Wolverine’s primary suit is a shade of bright yellow that pops even when he’s dramatically sulking. You can see just about everything Insomniac learned from Spider-Man repeated here in a visually spectacular blockbuster that hardly misses a technical beat amid all its explosions and severed limbs.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

And of course, it comes packed with a bevy of unlockable suits that pay tribute to various looks in Wolverine history. There are a few terrific choices in there (including one excellent work of video game synergy) that remind you that the folks at Insomniac are total superhero nerds that are just having fun getting free rein of a character. Wolverine is at its best when it can convince you to love the hero’s history just as much.

The interchangeable video game hero

You can find a lot of Spider-Man DNA in the structure of Wolverine itself, though it’s dealing with a very different scope. Where Spider-Man turns New York City into an open-world playground full of activities to chase, Wolverine aims for something more focused. Its story plays out in linear chapters, each containing a small handful of collectibles (including whiskey bottles) tucked away in the corners. It’s as if you cut the free-form busy work out of Spider-Man entirely and just left the directed story chapters, a refreshing change of pace for a class of game so frequently bogged down by RPG scope creep. The pacing here is more akin to a 12-issue comic arc that can’t afford to waste a panel.

If that approach winds up being polarizing, it’ll be because Insomniac doesn’t always fill its levels with compelling play. Repetitive combat rooms, slow walk-and-talks, telegraphed parkour chase sequences, and inconsequential quick time events leave Wolverine feeling too rigid. It’s a game built from the scraps of other Sony franchises rather than one shaped around its hero.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Part of that feeling, perhaps, comes from the fact that Wolverine is the ideal video game character. He’s a highly athletic hero with knives for hands; of course he can parry, perform effective stealth backstabs, sniff out a trail, and clamber up walls as well as any modern video game hero! Spider-Man required some more creative flexing to nail down his city-swinging acrobatics and whiz-kid nerdiness. Wolverine, in contrast, more naturally slots into the Assassin’s Creed mold without the need to overthink things.

As practical as it may be, it’s disappointing to see a studio as creative as Insomniac lean so heavily into comfortable cliché. As I played, cutting up enemies and climbing up handholds on walls, I kept thinking about Donkey Kong Bananza of all things. The reason Nintendo’s platformer works as well as it does is because it builds its gameplay around Donkey Kong. What can he do that Mario can’t? Well, he can smash stuff up pretty well, can’t he? A wellspring of inventive gameplay comes from that simple idea as his mighty fists become terrain-shaping tools of destruction. Wolverine’s claws, on the other hand, may as well just be swords. You could slot countless video game characters into his suit and barely have to change a thing to make them fit.

There are some bright ideas tucked between the interchangeable ones. In one early level, Logan has to navigate through a model town and shut down alarms by using his super senses to locate them. The mock houses are largely empty, filled with construction materials and wooden supports that have yet to be turned into walls. When enemy soldiers chase him into one, we get to see his wild side play out as he rips through everything in sight. He can even tear the siding off the outside walls with a swipe, one of many great slashing details. That moment teases a more reckless action game that plays with the fact that Logan has no regard for his environment; everything exists to be chopped up.

Other levels flirt with the idea that he can get the jump on enemies from any angle, thanks to his claws. When I found myself in a construction site filled with Trask henchmen, I discovered a few different routes that I could take through the level based on the powers I have. Did I want to scramble up a telephone pole and hop from roof to roof like an agile mammal? Or did I want to tear through a wooden blockade and get right to the killing? The linear levels can’t play with those dynamics too much, but you can see a more original game built around Logan’s animal nature when you’re not stabbing guys in a round arena.

Rip and tear

The disconnect between the hero and the gameplay comes to a head in the combat, which is Wolverine’s primary focus. On a surface level, it’s a slickly (and sickly) satisfying hack-and-slash game that revels in its ultra-violence. You mostly just spam the square button to slice enemies into pieces, occasionally ripping into their chest with a barrage of stabs or lopping off an arm. Sure, you can parry, dodge, or work in the triangle button to leap towards enemies, but you can mostly get by just by smashing one button and watching the carnage. It’s the same flavor of action that fueled 2017’s Logan, a film that actually considered that the man has knives on his hands, but played with the over-the-top goofiness as a Mortal Kombat game.

No, it’s not terribly deep. Even with a bunch of additional moves that I unlocked as I leveled up, it never felt like my playstyle evolved much past my very first fight. Stab, stab, stab, kill. Insomniac tries to bring some customization to the mix with Adaptations (equippable perks unlocked by gaining AP through Nightmare Door challenges and whiskey bottles) and special powers that operate on cooldowns (of which there are only six to toy with). But the rhythm of battle never really changes — especially due to a very limited variety of enemies who are all functionally the same. Only boss fights really require you to think strategically and parry with purpose.

The only thing that really elevates the combat is the rage system. By pressing a relentless attack, Wolverine builds up his rage meter. When his health is depleted, he can spend a full rage bar segment to regenerate. If he can build it up to three bars, though, he can go into a hyper-aggressive state that increases his damage and lets him pounce towards enemies for a brutal finisher. (It’s God of War’s Spartan Rage, repurposed for a superhero.) The best moments come from trying to continually keep the meter topped off by chaining together kills and seeing how fast you can take down a room, something that’s tested in a set of wave-based high-score challenges.

The action is fun enough, even if it’s too thin to support a full game, but it’s also completely at odds with the story Insomniac struggles to tell. Between all the incomprehensible ninja and robot battles, Wolverine tries to deliver a nuanced character study on Logan himself. Actor Liam McIntyre goes for a multifaceted version of the hero that’s sensitive and vulnerable under his wild exterior. It’s a commendable enough characterization, even if it leaves the hero a little indistinguishable from Joel in The Last of Us.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Computer Entertainment

What’s confounding, though, is that so much of the story is centered around the idea that Logan is a ticking time bomb who is trying desperately to contain his anger. Insomniac tries to play that up in a few key moments where Logan loses his cool during a key story moment and flies into a murderous rage. Great — except he’s always in a murderous rage. The absolutely brutal combat, complete with gooey head-impaling animations, is always cranked up to 10. The moments where Logan supposedly goes berserk aren’t all that different; he’s just killing his foes a little faster.

The entire emotional crux of the story falls apart because the action has to feel fun, fluid, and tantalizingly violent at all times. I never believe that Logan is holding something back, because I as a player never butt up against any friction that encourages me to hold back. What are the consequences of going into a blind rage? It seems like a pretty efficient way to save the day! Details like that build towards an emotionally shallow game that never earns its tears. At times, the overeager attempts to create a serious drama are eye-rolling. Whenever I clear a Nightmare Door, I’m treated to a morose monologue from Logan where he recalls memories from his past. It’s always a melodramatic sob story that uses vague trauma as a stand-in for character depth.

I’m left feeling like Marvel’s Wolverine was born from a directive to make a game like God of War, rather than to make a Wolverine game. Logan was just angry enough to pass the Kratos audition.

Marvel’s Wolverine will be released Sept. 15 on PlayStation 5. The game was reviewed on PS5 Pro using a prerelease download code provided by Sony. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.