Marvel's Wolverine: Yearning for a Better Game

Claws Out, Balls Missing

Marvel's Wolverine is the best Wolverine game ever made. That bar was underground, and Insomniac barely cleared it.

This game is fun for about six hours. The combat is bloody, the claws feel good, and there's a primal satisfaction to ripping through rooms full of Trask soldiers and Hand ninjas. Then hour seven hits and you realize that's all there is. No meaningful progression, no real evolution in your toolkit. You've got claws, a rage meter, and a handful of unlockable abilities that don't change how you play. Insomniac gave Spider-Man a whole city to swing through between fights. They gave Wolverine hallways.

The story is predictable from start to finish. If you know even the basics of X-Men lore, you'll call every beat before it happens. The found family stuff, the anti-mutant military angle, the inevitable betrayals. None of it lands with any real weight because the game never slows down long enough to earn it. When it does slow down, you get walk-and-talk sections on rails that kill whatever momentum the combat built up. Jean Grey is supposed to be the emotional anchor, but her relationship with Logan feels surface-level. They're in front of you constantly, but the game doesn't do the work to make you care. Same goes for the rest of the cast. Everyone gets shortchanged because the story is too busy setting up a trilogy to tell a complete story right now.

Now the elephant in the room. Insomniac's narrative director went on record describing a scene where Sabretooth grabs the back of Logan's head with "longing," and said the two characters "yearn" for each other. "Hate and love are so hand in hand" was the actual quote. After the internet did what the internet does, Insomniac's community director scrambled to clarify it's a "brothers in arms" thing, not romantic. You don't use the word "yearning" to describe two dudes who are just war buddies unless you're trying to plant a seed. You don't have a narrative director describe a scene as "longing" and then act surprised when people read it that way. Whether it's romantic or not in the final product, the intent to blur that line was there. It's part of a pattern in modern entertainment where masculine characters can't just be masculine anymore. Logan is supposed to be a cigar-chomping, whiskey-drinking, cage-fighting animal. Instead, half the emotional beats in this game feel like they were written by someone who thinks vulnerability means making a man soft.

There was also a dust-up about women performing the mocap for Wolverine's combat animations. I don't care who does the mocap if the end result looks right. But when you stack that on top of the yearning dialogue, the watered-down aggression, and a Logan who feels like a passenger in his own story, it paints a picture.

Credit where it's due, this game is gorgeous. One of the best-looking PS5 titles out there, and on PS5 Pro with PSSR 2.0, it's a genuine showcase. The streets of Madripoor, the alleys of Shinjuku, the environmental detail is top shelf. Sony also rolled out QSSR with a post-launch patch that brings some of that Pro-level clarity to the base PS5. On a technical level, Insomniac still knows how to squeeze every drop out of PlayStation hardware. Some launch issues were annoying. A blue "scent trail" that held your hand through the entire game couldn't be turned off at launch, which is the kind of handholding that drives me up a wall. They patched in an opacity slider later.

Marvel's Wolverine is a 15-hour linear action game that peaks in its first act and coasts on spectacle for the rest. The combat is satisfying until it isn't, the story is predictable, and the character work gets sacrificed at the altar of trilogy setup. It looks incredible and the performances are solid, but Insomniac played this one safe when the character demanded something with more teeth. If you're a Wolverine fan, you'll find enough here to enjoy. If you're expecting something on the level of Insomniac's Spider-Man work, temper those expectations. This is a foundation for what could be a great trilogy, but a foundation isn't a finished house. And maybe next time, let the man be a man.