Insomniac Games, for the past several years, has been known for creating open-world games for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. And rather successfully at that. With an appeal that works for a general audience because of his generally bright and positive attitude. There are also activities that can be mixed in as he leads a double-triple of being a physics student, a journalist, and a crime fighter. He also has many relationships to manage between friends, enemies and lovers. Along with the alternate characters that can be involved with him on several layers. It’s because of his down-to-earth personality
Wolverine is, in some ways, the diametric opposite of Spider-Man. You’d more likely find him alone in a cabin on some mountain rather than in a bustling city. Wolverine is also a much edgier character, not afraid to get his hands dirty, which could require a higher age rating for his own game. I’d say he’s closer to Kratos rather than Spider-Man, so I think Insomniac’s approach should be entirely different, as the open world format just doesn’t work with Logan’s character.
Spider-Man was all about being your friendly neighborhood hero, so wandering the streets of New York, dropping in to help citizens who need saving from crime, disasters, or supervillains aligned perfectly well for the open-world format.
Wolverine’s story stems from the X-Men, which involves a lot of the public really not liking the appearance of mutants around the world. A world at the brink of some pretty dark things happening, so being out in the open doesn’t really work. It has to be more personal, with only a few characters involved, and stories that should mostly play out away from the public eye. So a Wolverine game can’t be an open world, at least not in the same way they built Spider-Man’s New York. And in response to these differences, Insomniac has decided to go in pretty much the opposite direction.
What we have here is a linear action game with some narrative elements. Because do we really need a lot of story when there are bad guys to rip apart? Anyway, I’ve rolled credits on this one, and it’s usually a good sign when I don’t feel tired of the game after the opening hours. So if you want to hear more about this game as we cut into the finer details of how it works, strap in!
Production (4.5 / 5)
There’s no doubt about the work they put into designing their worlds and characters. Settings can set the tone; the action is well-animated and visceral. But there can be issues with the art direction. Personally, I do like most of the character designs here, except for a few (you’ll know it when you see it). I understand that they’re trying to ground the character designs to make them feel more real. But some characters look like mythical creatures or feature monsters from a sci-fi movie and some others look like people doing cosplay from the 80s. In my opinion, if you’re going to go one way, go all the way. Sabertooth is a gargantuan man who almost looks like a lion; Omega Red looks completely out of this world. Heck, Trask looks like he’d be running a late-night talk show. So why do other characters feel like they’ve been a little too grounded compared to the others? They tend to stick out and distract from the story because of that. In a world where you can be up against cyborgs, giant robots, ninjas, and other mutants in some hidden lair, I’m fairly sure that realism has been knocked a few places down the totem pole. So people bothering with character designs being so heavily tuned to be believable seems like a swing in the wrong place.
That aside, Logan looks pretty phenomenal in his own game. I always thought that making a character with more than the conventional amount of body hair would look awkward on a game model. But the developers seem to have solved that problem entirely. They also, quite early on, made an in-game excuse as to how his clothes can also regenerate. Which is funny one way, but also solves the problem of awkwardly seeing him half-naked from all the battle damage during cutscenes.
By the way, damage registration in this game is pretty amazing. When Wolverine takes a shot or is hit with a blade, you see that it happened. And they made it that way to show that he can regenerate that damage. Which is actually not very exciting to watch; it’s like seeing layers of his original model simply regain opacity. The damage that happens isn’t really gory either; it’s more like lumps of meat getting knocked off the bone. This is probably the choice they made so that they don’t have to go outright into R18 territory, which I think is the best middle ground they can achieve without sacrificing too much of the edginess that the protagonist comes along with. The real highlight here is how, despite everything, no matter what sort of attack Logan has to endure, he simply does. He takes the claws, the bullets, or whatever they have ready for him, gets back up, and finishes the job.
And when he does, these finishers show how feral Logan can get. Driving his claws through his enemies and cutting them into pieces is just about where you expect things to go. Where the finishers themselves have enough variety that I don’t get tired of seeing them too quickly. They also don’t linger around too long, which gets in the way of me wanting to keep playing the game. These variations are helped along when you’re fighting with an ally alongside you, as they actively help whittle down the armies of henchmen you’re tasked to take down. These same allies you get also fight differently; they also have their own combination finishers with you that make these special encounters feel more unique. One of them tries to dominate the entire field, to the point that they sometimes get in the way; another would make use of guerrilla tactics to the point that you’re not sure if they’re actually fighting alongside you, but somehow the enemies are taken down at a faster rate.
The audio dimension for this title also does a great job. Not only does the feedback for slashes and hits sound satisfying, but the audio helps you passively map out what’s happening around you. Mostly, you’ll simply need this to be able to handle incoming shots from blind spots, laser rifles making this charge-up sound, or one of the goons making a callout right before shooting.
The voices behind the characters are also generally great. Perhaps the exception would be when Wolverine turns into Logan and talks like a normal person, which can be off-putting since I’m not used to hearing the character talk like that. I do recognize that this may be necessary since not every conversation requires him to talk like Batman; in fact, those dialogues might come off more as comical if this adjustment wasn’t done. This would completely ruin their attempts to flesh out characters in their more narrative-focused sections. These sections that I have some reservations about, but we’ll come back to that later.
There’s a lot of attention to detail in making the fights viscerally satisfying, and I think that they did this right, from the moments of attacking, defending, and even recovering from taking heavier hits. The performance of the voices behind each character can be rather convincing, though sometimes it’s the script that can throw me off, since how they speak doesn’t quite match the image I have of them from the time I came to be familiar with these characters in the years before. But when it’s time to pop out the claws, I’m never bored of the button mashing, parry timing, and the mini quick time events packaged together.
Mechanics (4.5 / 5)
Wolverine doesn’t veer far from the contemporary action game mechanics popularized by other games. You have your quick and heavy attack, your dodge and parry; it’s kind of a shock that there really isn’t a guard function here. But rather, it rewards you for making the well-timed dodges and blocks.
I believe this is because of how they interpret Wolverine’s fighting style: the Berserker. Making every moment another chance to attack, to never relax on offense, only to stop when nothing else is standing. These ideas lend themselves naturally to the push-forward style of combat. Rather than trying to maintain a flawless run and never taking any damage, getting hit is perfectly acceptable, so long as you’re able to take down whatever’s right in front of you.
So, as per your conventional action game buttons, you have your quick and heavy attack, your dodge, and parry as mentioned before. Now some might find these buttons very familiar, to the point that you think “man, isn’t there anything new?” and we’ll get to that. But let me first say that these commands feel largely responsive. They knew that it would be best that we can cancel standard attacks into dodges and parries was the right way to go, letting me just mash the happy attack button as I wished while simply waiting for times to counter-attack. Pretty much all offense is low-commitment, so you either get away with it or you just shrug off the damage. Which, you know, sounds a lot like how Wolverine would fight.
So aside from that, how else does this feel different from your usual action combat shenanigans? Well, as a berserker, he runs on one simple gauge, and that shows rage. The more rage he has, the stronger he becomes. The rage bar goes up to three tiers, and stronger attacks become accessible as you reach the higher tiers. Upon reaching the maximum tier, Wolverine becomes capable of one-shotting the more generic mobs, but the rage bar begins to decay faster as time goes on. So how do you fill this gauge? By relentlessly attacking and cutting enemies into pieces.
To help you keep that streak up, you get up to 4 skills for you to use, which are, in general. Damage skills meant to make quick takedowns, if not force enemies into stuns. Since they run on cooldown, there’s not much else to think about when using them. If they’re available, consider using. They’re unfortunately not that interesting with the exception of the tornado move, since that one is actually flexible. Ideally, it’s supposed to keep you from getting surrounded, but personally I’ve found it to be quite interesting as a way to get as many free attacks in as possible for beefy bosses and mini-bosses.
What happens when you finally take down the last bad guy is probably the most disappointing part, even if it makes sense lore-wise. Wolverine loses all of his rage and regenerates all of his health. It’s effectively checkpointing after every major encounter. The only thing that actually carries the tension through is the story, where every character is telling you there’s something really urgent you have to get to. Which has zero effect on me because I’m always checking around corners for hidden boxes or collectibles. Like, hold on a few minutes; let me smash these boxes. Because you never know what’s being kept hidden away.
I try to look for these because they help you along in levelling up, which feels more like a ritual than a build choice, since the skills you get to unlock more or less align with the skill points you get as you level up. Nope, you can’t unlock other skills in a different order because they’re level-locked. Enemies and stages also give a fixed amount of experience, so moving along as soon as you’re done is probably the best route along that path. There is some level of customization available in other skills that are more of passives, and these are the mutant adaptations you get to unlock by taking on challenge rooms or actually finding alcohol scattered throughout the game. Yes, Logan becomes more powerful the less sober we keep him. These passives can play quite a part; they can help you be tankier, build up rage faster, become deadlier faster, or let you sniff out alcohol a lot easier- that one I kept on.
Content (4 / 5)
Wolverine’s story is, in my opinion, rather well-paced when I don’t have to sit through cutscenes. They fortunately don’t overstay their welcome, and most of the story happens along with the main gameplay. In other words, I find this game nicely paced, as I didn’t feel like putting the controller down for at least most of the game. They paced things along with challenge rooms, or rather simple tasks that make me think, “ok let’s just see what’s past this point,” and they do this effectively for pretty much the entire playthrough.
There is a section that I found myself stuck and annoyed, and it’s one of those interactive storytelling sections. I understand that this was more for helping me care about the characters more and fleshing out who they are. But if you’re going to ask me to find specific things through a place that I’ll only be walking around in once or twice, where the hints leading to them can be obscured easily? Yeah, that part could’ve been better put together.
The angle of the story they went with here is something that I think would be a prelude to the 90’s X-Men. Mutants were only beginning to be recognized by the world, and Logan and the others were still looking for a place to be. There are some liberties they took with the characters, and I can see where they’re trying to go with this. Let’s just say that they’re clearly putting the pieces in place for a possible sequel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their next big feature title isn’t going to be Wolverine. The movies hint at it, the other game hints at it; I think we know where this is going. The story isn’t really all that compelling to me; rather, it’s a device to get you from one interesting set piece to another. Do I need a reason to storm a fortified hideout, or a factory, or through a city, or up a mountain, or to Japan, to fight ninjas and robots? No, not really. Heck, I’d go to Japan just to see horses. But Insomniac did us a favor by making an excuse plot to get us there, which is appreciated.
Now the developers realized that they can’t just stick to being story-focused and actually had to be a game, so they would sprinkle in some activities for you to check now and then. It could be a challenge room, seeking out collectibles, or simply crushing objects that somehow gave experience points. It kept the game from looking too linear and gave a bit of variety in activities that helped keep me from burning out from the game by doing just one thing all the time. The challenges presented to you can more or less be done in a few minutes, with the exception of the brutal gauntlet, which plays out like a mini-roguelike game. This can take 15 to 20 minutes to clear if you’re being a bit of a completionist, and probably showcases the hardest fights this title can present to you.
For a game that was so focused on Logan’s story, though, they seem to have skimped on showing his past. The idea of the challenge rooms was to help him unlock and remember his past. And while you’ll soon connect the dots about why it’s presented the way it is, having a simple voice-over to tell about his history seems like a way of skimping out on showing that very past you just fought for. I always skipped these in the end.
It was a bit hard to get tired of the combat, though; even when you’ve seen the same finisher animation about 30 times, it’s hard to get tired of taking them down. This is because there’s a rather healthy amount of variety across the enemy bestiary. From mooks you can one-shot, they seem to evolve into stronger, more nimble attackers, to stealthy ambush types, to powerful snipers, to full-on bruisers that are there to take you down if you let them touch you. They can shoot, block, and try to grab you as well, making you have to think a bit more about how you approach them while you keep an eye out for what to watch out for. The level design when they’ve considered while planning out these fights is probably the highlight of Wolverine. It’s quite literally the same fight with different layouts and your occasional gimmick, but thanks to how they’ve layered how enemies come in and how you interact with them. I was just ready for more every time they sent in a new wave of combatants to take down. Except for sentinels. The best way to deal with them was the exact opposite of how you fight everything else; you had to be tactical because once two of them were together, the fight became that much harder. You had to kite them, and that really slowed the game, which I found counterproductive to the visceral combat Insomniac had been putting everything they could into perfecting. But hey, maybe that was intentional; mutants are supposed to hate sentinels, right?
Where the game falls short, I think, would actually be the boss battles. Despite having so much visual flair and events in it, they don’t feel like a huge departure from your regular fights. Is it because the rest of the game is well designed? Is it because they couldn’t think of ways to make boss fights more unique or stand out? I’m not really sure; they’re more of story crescendos to me, and the ones I ended up really remembering are the first one and the fight you have with a half-finished Sentinel. The latter being more because you’re working with a team rather than alone; mechanically, it didn’t feel too inspired. But the moments of teamwork with other mutants made me feel badass and I wanted more of that.
Features (3.5 / 5)
Wolverine the game features a ton of, well, Wolverine skins. Not really a eureka moment for the developers, as this has been a staple of theirs since their Spider-Man games. And while there might be fan favorites here because a lot of these are reproductions of old and alternate costumes from movies and comics, my unironic favorite one is the Tokon version. They’ve honestly done a great job of translating Logan’s aesthetic into the 3D realm, and I actually see most of these alternate skins as a testament to how some of them simply won’t work in the game. There is the small bonus of getting bonus HP if you craft enough of them, so hunting for crafting materials in not-so-hidden-away crates through the stages was the thing to do. So I guess this worked, even if it didn’t really resonate all that well with me.
Wolverine also features quite an extensive photo mode, turning our favorite feral fighter into an action figure, where every fight you get into seems like the perfect place to do a photoshoot for a comic book cover.
NG+ mode is also available if you feel like running through the game one more time, with a few twists. You carry over all of your character progress and start a new game. And by skipping all the cutscenes I’ve already watched, the game obviously feels faster and makes me realize how much of the game I actually had been simply sitting through. Given your boosted stats and skills, it’s more ideal to take on greater difficulties from here, as enemies simply fall apart much faster if played on normal or easier modes. NG+ also gives you access to new adaptations that give you high-risk, high-reward setups. More damage for less defense, more rage for less healing, that sort.
Finally, there are accessibility options like having menus read out to you, subtitles, and more, which have regularly become more standard for Sony triple A titles as the years progress.
Conclusion
There are two ways for me to look at Wolverine, one being quite more cynical. One would be that the developers put their best foot forward and didn’t bother giving much padding in terms of content. The next set piece wasn’t too far off from the one I just went through, and they would present some extra activities here and there to prevent the game from being too monotonous. The other would be seeing this and thinking that they’re throwing as much as they can at me to keep me from getting bored. Since the core of their combat encounters quickly hits its ceiling by the time I’m maybe halfway through the game, they try to keep the game interesting in as many other ways as they can. I’m more of the former take; Insomniac takes their storytelling seriously, even if the plot they cover doesn’t really reveal too much. The characters also reveal themselves to be a bit more complex than their cartoon counterparts, which I think is more of a matter of taste whether you appreciate that or not. I personally liked everyone the way they acted except for maybe Sabretooth, who only needed to be a static character and couldn’t even do that. The developers went to create a total opposite of what they usually make, and I do think the effort is honest and commendable.
Insomniac more or less worked with conventional action game functions and tried to add bells and whistles where they could. They made parrying and dodging more rewarding in certain situations; they allowed you to toss caution to the wind with your last stand; they made aggression rewarding. It’s very visceral rather than tactical, which is at least good for one playthrough, but given the lack of build options or lateral approaches to the same problem, I probably will walk away satisfied after clearing it once. Sure, there are stealth options for Wolverine to use, but are you really going to use them when you hardly have proper tools to pull it off? Besides, stealth? As Wolverine? No, we don’t do that here.
But when the slashing comes, the slashing is good. Even if I’m asked to take on waves and waves of enemies, I’m more than ready to take them on. The story and some character writing may need some work, but I never needed them to become a raging berserker ready to take on an army of cyborgs, robots, and ninjas. Clocking around 20 hours of game for the first playthrough, I think it’s a fine amount of time considering the various situations the game puts you through. You’re at one location for maybe 1-2 hours at a time, and you move on to the next. Even if you say I’m fighting the same enemies over and over again, fighting them is fun, getting to Level 3 rage is fun, and the worst part is you realize it’s over when you take down the last one.
Wolverine is a journey that knows what it needs to be, and doesn’t try to be anything else. Scoring a 4.5 / 5.
Available on the PlayStation 5.