Review: Marvel's Wolverine Fails to Slice Through Sky-High Expectations
Marvel’s Wolverine is here! For many fans of Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man series, this game has been highly anticipated since its 2021 reveal. Now, 6 years later, does this X-Men entry stack up.
Back in 2018, Marvel’s Spider-Man took the world by storm, revolutionizing the super-hero video game with unforgettable gameplay, gorgeous open-world exploration, and the heart and excitement found in Marvel’s mightiest stories. Since then, Insomniac Games has brought fans back into the world of Spider-Man with two additional games: Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2. In between those two games, Insomniac surprised fans in September of 2021 with the reveal of Wolverine. Nearly 3 years after the release of Spider-Man 2, Wolverine has sliced its way to gaming monitors and TVs around the globe.
Right off the bat, Marvel’s Wolverine has a very different ambience to it. Gone is the cheeky banter of Peter and Miles, which has been replaced with a grittier, high-stakes script. Wolverine is immediately thrown into battle against an army working for Bolvar Trask without much time to think. The dark forested environment requires sneaking around to take down groups of humans decked out with armor and weapons. With Mystique and Sabortooth on your side, what could go wrong? Well, Trask, while on his mission to destroy mutantkind, has recruited his own super strong mutant: Omega Red. In an attempt to save Nathanial Essex, Wolverine is required to infiltrate Trask’s prison and eventually take down Omega Red on his own before returning to Essex’s lab. And this is just the beginning!
Wolverine is beautiful, which is no surprise based on the Spider-Man games and the concept artwork/gameplay shared by Insomniac. I did immediately notice that this game was lacking the same charm found in Spider-Man. The question I immediately asked myself was whether it was my own character bias or the game. And while I did some mental gymnastics to try and justify my initial disappointment, I determined Wolverine just fails to personalize its characters as quickly as Spider-Man. Spider-Man was a game I didn’t anticipate loving as much as I did, it had to prove itself. Wolverine, even riding the coattails of Spider-Man, didn’t quite feel as amazing.
Another issue I have with Wolverine is it strays away from exploration towards a clear cut story objective. While I am aware that I only played the first few hours of the game, and it may loosen its grip on players later in the story, Wolverine kept me on a pretty tight leash. But the story is compelling enough! As you slowly trail out of the tutorials into your first handful of conflicts, these cutscenes kept me invested even if the gameplay left some to be desired.
So, does Marvel’s Wolverine live up to the hype? Not quite. In the way that Spider-Man became a console seller for Sony, Wolverine’s claws aren’t sharp enough to slice through the shadow of Insomniac’s super-hero triumphs that came before it. With that being said, it’s still a fun game worth checking out! If I had to give it a rating, I’d say it gets a solid 7 out of 10 claws.
Marvel’s Wolverine is out now, exclusively on PlayStation 5.
Read More Marvel:
- "Daredevil: Born Again" is Coming to an End with Season 3
- Executive Producer Chris Moreno on the Fun and Emotional Lessons of "Marvel’s Spidey and the Avengers Halloween Team Up"
- "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" Comic Sets the Stage for Season Two of the Disney+ Animated Series