Marvel's Wolverine Is a Terrible Game That Should Have Been a Great One

Marvel's Wolverine Is a Terrible Game That Should Have Been a Great One

Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine launched today, and it's a perfect case study in everything that's wrong with modern big-budget game development. The critical score is the studio's lowest in years, sitting at a 77 on Metacritic, while the official PlayStation Store page is flooded with suspiciously glowing five-star ratings — 92% of over 15,000 player reviews currently sit at five stars. That disconnect should tell you everything. They can delete the honest reviews, but they can't delete the truth you see on screen. This isn't the Wolverine I grew up with in comics, cartoons, or even the old games. This is a hollow, agenda-driven shell.

The gameplay itself is shallow and repetitive. The combat system looks flashy on the surface, but there's just not much to it once the novelty wears off. The "Rage" mechanic — a three-tier resource built by damaging enemies, performing Barrages, and parrying attacks — becomes monotonous fast. Even the "Stagger Leap" technique you unlock at Level 6 feels like a band-aid on a fundamentally thin design. Each chapter hands you 15-20 XP Caches to grind through, but the skill trees they feed into feel like afterthoughts. Ricky Berwick demonstrated it best when he memed this game to shreds, showing just how little player input is actually needed to progress through entire sequences. When a guy can expose your "action game" as a glorified walking simulator, you've got a problem.

But that's not even the real betrayal. The character himself has been completely neutered. This version of Logan has the most feminine features and mannerisms imaginable. He's a complete soy boy that completely betrays the gruff, weathered, and masculine icon we all know. Even Jean Grey has a better jawline than Wolverine does. They've pushed a not-so-subtle gay narrative between him and Sabretooth through forced, awkward interactions that feel less like character development and more like someone's weird fan fiction. It's not creative. It's vandalism.

The "blue trail" mechanic — that intrusive, constant visual guide players keep complaining about — sums up the whole philosophy behind this game. It's patronizing, hand-holding design that treats you like a child. Combine that with frustratingly closed-off environments and combat that eventually feels like running through a loop of identical enemy types, and you've got something that barely qualifies as a game at all.

This is the exact bait-and-switch we want to warn people about here. The marketing sells you on the power fantasy of being Wolverine, but a few hours in — just past that Steam refund window, as always — you're stuck with a walking simulator wrapped in forced wokeness. Insomniac is already out there saying they're "acting on criticisms," but you can't patch out a fundamentally broken vision. This isn't Wolverine. It's not who he is. It's not who we've come to know from decades of comics, cartoons, and past games. This is what happens when agenda pushers who aren't capable of originality get their hands on something beloved and twist it into their own image.

Don't buy it. Save your money for games made by people who still respect the players and the characters they're handling. This isn't just a bad game. It's an insult to everything Wolverine stands for.