Strong character writing carries showy combat that loses its edge before the credits roll.
By the time the credits roll, the body count racked up by those adamantium claws could comfortably fill four Olympic swimming pools. Insomniac Games isn’t pulling punches on the violence, handing players an endless buffet of carnage. Yet pure spectacle doesn’t move the needle, and it’s actually Logan’s unexpectedly layered journey toward self-acceptance that lands the hardest emotional hits in this latest take on the X-Men’s iconic loner. The narrative shoulders most of the heavy lifting, because the combat (slick and gratifying as it starts) runs out of steam long before the finish line. Even the sharp character work can’t quite carry the whole load. Much like its protagonist, Marvel’s Wolverine has a solid skeleton, but the flesh built around it doesn’t quite match the frame.
The setup drops players in decades after James “Logan” Howlett first crossed paths with Nathaniel Essex and joined his mutant enclave, rising through the ranks to become a key operative on Team X. Logan is already a battle-hardened veteran when the story picks up, and something dark is brewing behind the scenes. Deployed to investigate scientist Bolivar Trask following a wave of mutant disappearances, Logan embarks on a globe-trotting mission that drags him through fresh hunting grounds and familiar territory that dredges up buried memories. It’s textbook superhero material, complete with telegraphed plot beats and a few genuinely gripping sequences in the back half. The trouble is that action set pieces struggle to advance the story, leaving the heavy lifting to cutscenes wedged between missions. The result is a narrative rhythm that lurches instead of building momentum.
Liam McIntyre’s take on Wolverine is an absolute standout. His performance gives Logan a personality that mirrors the claws themselves: something sharp and unexpectedly complex concealed inside a blunt, brutal shell. He walks the tightrope between the ghosts of his past and the future of mutantkind, wrestling with the beast that keeps clawing its way past the compassion he tries to project. That interior conflict bleeds past the voice acting, too. Watch him in non-combat spaces and you’ll catch a hunched posture that betrays a vulnerability at odds with his physical dominance. It’s a walking symbol of buried trauma, and Insomniac’s rendition instantly ranks among the best Wolverine portrayals in any medium.
What really sells it is how Logan plays off the supporting cast. For all the shouting and gore, this campaign hits its highest notes when the volume drops. Standout beats include a quiet Madripoor bar scene with Mystique, a snowbound cabin meetup with Jean Grey, and the coiled hostility between Logan and Victor “Sabretooth” Creed. Krizia Bajos deserves specific praise as Jean, carrying much of the emotional freight and regularly pulling the story back from generic comic-book territory.
The letdown is that beyond Logan and Jean, hardly anyone else gets meaningful screen time. Most supporting characters exist purely to cross paths with Wolverine, throw an obstacle in his way, or dispense wisdom across a barstool. Credit where it’s due: the writing team keeps these softer exchanges from ringing false, which is no small feat given the heavy-metal savagery playing out the second the claws deploy.
Wolverine’s core moveset consists of finely tuned instruments that carve through flesh and metal with equal ease, chaining brutal combos through fast taps of square and triangle. The action is highly responsive, packing all the modern action-game essentials: dodges, parries, and special attacks that shred enemy ranks. It isn’t especially deep, though, and skews forgiving. A triangle press launches Logan onto any nearby target, while staying aggressive builds the rage meter to unlock critical strikes and a handy revive tucked away as insurance. The healing factor kicks in mid-combat, too, restoring health over time. It’s a smart, lore-faithful choice that spares players from hunting down health packs mid-fight.
The animation deserves another round of applause. After years of carefully keeping Spider-Man from letting anyone plummet to their doom, Insomniac appears to be gleefully cataloging every possible way Wolverine can end a life. Grisly finishers, ranging from severed limbs to jaw-piercing upward stabs, deliver a rotating menu of gory conclusions. A watchlist may be warranted for saying this, but the appeal never fades. Each squelching spinal separation and chest-splitting slash hits the mark. Throw in dynamic camera choreography during tandem takedowns with Jean or Sabretooth, and the combat looks phenomenal from a purely visual standpoint.
The claws feel sharp, weighty, and satisfyingly messy. The problem is that around the midpoint of Wolverine’s 15-hour mission list, the well starts running dry. The mechanics are strong, but combat desperately needed a steeper progression curve to keep that thrill alive across a game this long, especially when the pacing demands cutting down hundreds of enemies with barely a breather. Unlockable skills and special abilities exist, but the pool is limited, and most become available fairly early in the run.
Spinning like a yellow-and-blue cyclone through crowds stays entertaining, and punting enemies off skyscrapers never loses its charm, but none of these tools genuinely reshape how you approach a fight. With Logan’s kit stuck in neutral, the responsibility for keeping encounters interesting falls on two pillars: enemy variety and encounter design. Only one of them actually delivers.
Whether you’re facing Trask’s sci-fi hardware or The Hand’s sinister ninja cult, there’s a steady rollout of new enemy types to shred. The roster ranges from long-range snipers who force you to close distance quickly to armored bruisers packing cybernetic upgrades. The catch is that while some soak up extra hits or require two parries to break their guard, most fights blur together. Mixed enemy waves occasionally pop when you’re forced to prioritize threats on the fly, but that kind of design rarely appears with the consistency the game needs.
Missions typically follow a tired template: linear corridors leading into arena ambushes. These arenas aren’t imaginatively laid out either, mostly consisting of a broad, flat zone stuffed with melee grunts and a scattering of elevated ledges hosting ranged attackers. Because moment-to-moment gameplay boils down to leaping between targets and rolling clear of red-flash warnings, the environments start bleeding together fast. Wolverine wants players charging in and painting the walls red, but it makes for a repetitive rhythm.
Outside combat, the offerings are thin. Linear levels hide collectibles, including material stashes needed to unlock alternate suits pulled from both obscure corners and iconic touchstones of Wolverine’s design lineage. Mixing and matching the 30-plus suits and claw variants to build a personal Weapon X fantasy is a genuine highlight. Alongside skill XP, AP serves as the main progression currency, funding upgrades like wider parry windows or reduced incoming damage. AP flows in from two channels: whisky bottle hunts and nightmare trials.
Whisky bottles work like the material caches, rewarding sharp eyes and Logan’s tracking nose, which is rendered as a glowing blue scent trail. The Spider-Man environmental puzzles were never brain-melters, but they added texture and got the mental gears turning. Here, the ritual is walking up to an object and tapping triangle. Every single time. It reads as a squandered opportunity to break up the routine, though the pull to sweep each level clean was still strong enough to net me the platinum at the 20-hour mark.
The nightmare trials have a bit more meat on them. They blend combat and traversal challenges that push player skills for high scores and AP payouts. Among the limited selection, the gauntlet mode stands out, throwing enemy waves at players inside a dreamscape while offering buff-or-nerf choices between rounds. It’s another example of a PlayStation studio bolting roguelike mechanics onto a prestige single-player release, though at least this one isn’t locked behind DLC. The real prize for clearing trials is memory fragments from Logan’s past, adding context to the main plot. Playing through them felt like going through the motions, but they’re a clever way of stapling extra narrative payload onto skill challenges.
Wolverine is engineered like a wrecking ball in combat, but he’s remarkably nimble outside it, making it a letdown that his agility never gets a serious workout past basic platforming. He books it across terrain fast, and sprinting headfirst at turrets that helplessly plink off his deflecting blades delivers a solid power fantasy. Blockbuster polish coats everything, and now and then the cinematic swings blow out into full showpieces. A chase across Tokyo’s moonlit rooftops and neon-drenched streets is a genuine spectacle, though these scripted set pieces appear too rarely and mostly reduce to holding the right trigger while pyrotechnics erupt in the background.
The same critique applies to the boss encounters, of which there are surprisingly few. Most are cut from similar cloth but executed competently, like an early clash with Omega Red, a mutant who terrorized many childhood nightmares. Chipping down the tentacled menace’s stagger gauge via clean parries makes for satisfying retribution. Without spoiling anything, the final showdown is a genuine spectacle that pushes every skill in your toolkit. On the flip side, a Sentinel fight essentially reduces to whaling on a metal arm for 15 minutes, feeling more at home in a mediocre 2000s 3D platformer than a modern marquee title.
Logan is a naturally isolated character. Even out of the suit, he lingers on society’s edge, as comfortable in solitude as he is grudgingly seeking connection with those trying to pry his defenses open. He’s basically me, just significantly hairier. It’s a jarring contrast with Spider-Man’s open world, which constantly invites players to interact with the city. Logan’s environments don’t feed players the same way. Insomniac has deliberately built a more linear, less exploration-heavy game, but the pivot feels noticeably less interactive, and by extension, less engaging.
When the story unfolds through beautifully staged cutscenes, it commands full attention. But the smaller connective spaces between big beats devolve into wandering at a crawl to examine picture frames and audio logs. These sluggish stretches feel like padding stapled into a campaign that isn’t especially bloated to begin with.
A prime offender is an early segment where the objective is coaxing a young mutant named Leech out of a room. He demands a password, which Logan retrieves by slowly ambling around Essex’s manor collecting three crayon drawings. Instead of letting players work out the riddle scattered across the doodles, Logan just solves it himself the moment he returns to the door. No challenge, no puzzle. Marvel’s Wolverine seems to operate at only two speeds: all-out bloodshed or contemplative quiet. A middle gear would have bridged the gap nicely.
Still, each globe-hopping locale is gorgeously realized. When the tour isn’t stuck in brown underground tunnels or grey facility corridors, environments genuinely come alive. Hubs occasionally open up for exploration, though nothing resembling a full open world awaits; these are compact zones capped to a few blocks. That tighter footprint matches the story’s scale, though. While a larger threat lurks in the background, this is an intensely personal Wolverine story at heart, and Insomniac’s restraint with the broader X-Men roster is welcome. The narrow focus serves its core cast well without cramming the ensemble past capacity, making it a respectable opening chapter for a fresh corner of the Marvel Universe.
The game overall doesnt have enough content, good enough gameplay or good enough visuals to be worth almost the same value as games like spiderman 2 as much as i would love for it succeed without major updates or reworks it will not.
Article by PaleShadowGaming
