“In his fight for the future, Wolverine must team up with fellow mutants across the globe through locations like Canada, Japan, and the Marvel island nation of Madripoor. With the fate of humans and mutants hanging in the balance, Logan knows the world needs a hero; however, they’ll have to settle for Wolverine..” – Sony Store Description

Marvel’s Wolverine puts you in the adamantium bonded skeleton of the iconic titular character. At least, that’s what they will tell you and it’s what you should expect. After all, you’re paying $70 to Insomniac Games and they are the ones holding the cards for all Marvel games at the moment. Insomniac has such an incentive for this game to do well if the internal documents are to be believed. Supposedly, if Wolverine doesn’t well they are greenlit to do a full X-Men game and word on the street is a Daredevil game is coming by 2028.

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Diving In Claws First

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You start off like any good D&D Campaign should, right in the middle of combat. You’re dropped onto an island to get in and rescue the leader of your team. You’re introduced to enemies and basic combat in the jungle. There’s some high action cutscenes and things you’d come to expect from Sony games these days. It looks good, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it feels like they just wanted to make a movie. As you learn your combat basics you’re introduced to enemies with more tactics, parry-able attacks, unblockable attacks, etc. You basically learn to be Wolverine, and you can collect experience for combat as well as in colored jugs I affectionately named Gatorade. I don’t know why the Gatorade gives Wolverine experience to level up or even why we need to level up in the first place, but we do and Sony said this is an RPG-lite now.

You meet some familiar faces in the Marvel universe and start to help friends, former foes, and unknown mutants alike. The game is mission based so you have very clear lines between each mission but they are blended with introduction cutscenes. It’s not like you’re seeing a Mission Complete screen with a score at the end or anything jarring like that. As you progress through the game you start to piece together more of Logan’s past through interactables and dialogue with the characters. I would love to rant more about this story because I have feelings but I am trying to keep this spoiler free so I will hold off. There are some plot holes and the story isn’t very nuanced but it does get you from A to B in a neat cinematic way.

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Stopping to Smell the Roses

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As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the game is linear. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that not every game needs to be some sprawling open world collect-a-thon. Some games should let me get into a mission, sprint enemy to enemy and throw myself at them claws first, swinging wildly, until ribbons remain. Wolverine should have been that game.

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However despite the levels being linear and having invisible walls (or very real metal walls in a few of the warehouse levels) you are still hand held a pretty great deal. There are 3 things to collect in your missions. Those are Whisky bottles, Supply Crates, and Nightmare Doors. Though, I suppose you don’t really collect the doors as they are side content. In any case, you go through your glorified hallways but when you get close to one of those collectibles Wolverine’s “Smell-o-vision” (shoutout Freakazoid!) will activate and you can follow it to get that collectible.

Insomniac was getting dragged online for their scent trail so in a patch they did lessen the effect to make it less in your face. I think the scent trail is stupid but sure Wolverine has used his sniffer in media for eons and eons so that’s all whatever, but what ISN’T whatever is why on God’s green Earth are there enemies who can go invisible and I can only smell their footprints. I’m not daredevil, I’m not listening for footfalls.

I don’t want to keep droning on about the hand holding in the game, but even the crates are illuminated like this across the map. It just feels like a lot for no reason. In Japan the levels were a little more open and you had to look down side streets for the crates, but there is a list in the pause menu that tells you:

Even if you missed one, you could go back and repeat any mission from the Main Menu. The developers seemed to be terrified of letting players fail or play the game.

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Looking the Part

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Insomniac Games is no stranger to adding costumes to their superhero games. Spider-man and Spider-man 2 both had costumes with nods to the comics they were first seen in that you could unlock. Wolverine is no different, aside from certain missions where you cannot customize Logan’s look, you can drip yourself out in whatever costume you’ve unlocked. There are 32 costumes in total, 27 to be unlocked in game and 5 that are Deluxe Edition exclusive. The clear winner here is the Marvel Tokon skin, but I just wish you didn’t glow in the dark with it.

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• Graphics– A real mixed bag. Sometimes it looks great other times it looks like it belongs in 2011.
• Gameplay– Gameplay is mixed too. Sometimes the game has the training wheels on you and it feels bad. But other times? You have full rage and you’re pouncing and executing and eviscerating your enemies left and right and it feels amazing. It feels like wolverine. Afterwards though you’re back to paper thin Logan and you’re just reminded of how fun it was keeping your rage machine going.
• Sound– Sound design was ALSO a mixed bag. The combat sounds were great but sound mixing of being too close or too far away with NPCs is something that developers can’t seem to get right.
• Controls– The controls are fine. Combat is mostly one button with a few dips into touching a shoulder button for a special, or tapping parry. A lot of the traversing is done by just holding the direction you’re moving and the game takes care of the rest.
• Story– The entire story of this game hinges on you not knowing who Mr. Sinister is. If you do, from frame one of the opening game you know exactly where this is going. The entire time I held out that my expectation was going to be subverted. It wasn’t. Even without me being a comic nerd there were some glaring pacing issues that I can’t discuss without heavily spoilering things, but I will say that how do you go from a prototype of something never before seen to mass produced in the period of like 10 days.