I went into Marvel’s Wolverine expecting an easy win. Insomniac made the Spider-Man games. I love Wolverine, comic books, and old-fashioned action adventures. I am absolutely the person this game should work for.
And yet, after finishing it, I came away pretty lukewarm.
This is not because it is short or linear. I like a focused, corridor-driven action game. I do not need every superhero game to be a giant map covered in chores. But Wolverine never quite feels like the definitive modern Wolverine game I hoped for. There are cool moments, great visuals, excellent skins, satisfying movement, and plenty of extremely nasty violence. The full package just left me wanting more.
I played through the main story, revisited sequences, cleaned up challenges, and spent some time in photo mode, landing at roughly 18 hours total. The main adventure took me around 15 to 16 hours. This was played on PS5 Pro, and I will keep story specifics as spoiler-free as possible.
Key Takeaways
- Traversal feels fast, heavy, and authentically Wolverine.
- Combat is satisfyingly brutal but grows repetitive in the later hours.
- Costume unlocks are excellent, while optional challenges feel underdeveloped.
- The polished visuals cannot fully make up for a story that never lands.
Table of Contents
- A New Wolverine Story With a Globe-Trotting Setup
- Traversal Is Simple, Stylish, and Very Wolverine
- Combat Is Bloody, Accessible, and Eventually Repetitive
- Optional Challenges Feel Tacked On
- The Wolverine Skins Are Excellent
- It Looks Great, But It Also Holds Your Hand Too Much
- The Story Is the Biggest Disappointment
- Is Marvel’s Wolverine Worth Buying?
A New Wolverine Story With a Globe-Trotting Setup
This is a standalone Wolverine adventure. Logan is a mutant with a powerful healing factor, an adamantium skeleton, claws, and major gaps in his memory. He is working with a version of Team X, alongside characters including Mystique and Sabretooth, carrying out covert missions and protecting mutants.
The opening kicks things off with real energy as Logan gets pulled into an operation involving Jean Grey. From there, the game sends him through the Canadian wilderness, Vancouver, Japan, Madripoor, and other locations.
Structurally, it is a linear game made up of corridors, combat arenas, occasional split paths, and a few story-focused spaces where I could walk around and talk to people. That basic framework is completely fine. Honestly, I appreciated that it was not pretending to be something bigger than it is.
The issue is that, despite the polished presentation and a few genuinely cool comic-book swings, the story never grabbed me. It feels like a downbeat B-side alternate-universe comic rather than a big, confident Wolverine debut from Insomniac.
Traversal Is Simple, Stylish, and Very Wolverine
Traversal is one of the strongest parts of the game. It is not wildly complex, but it absolutely gets the physicality right.
Wolverine runs, jumps, climbs, mantles, and slides with the right mix of stocky aggression and animalistic movement. He can scale walls quickly, clear rooftops with big leaps, and slide under obstacles with his claws dragging behind him and throwing sparks. It all has a good sense of momentum.
Insomniac clearly understands how to make movement feel immediately readable and satisfying. I liked using traversal to chase targets, close the gap on enemies, and move through the environments. It feels authentic to Logan without trying too hard to turn him into a superhero acrobat.
There are a few stealth opportunities, including hiding in grass and taking out isolated enemies. They are very basic, though. Wolverine is at his best when he stops trying to be sneaky and starts tearing through a room.
Combat Is Bloody, Accessible, and Eventually Repetitive
Combat is exactly as brutal as you would hope. There is a lot of gore, a lot of slashing, and slick animations involving severed limbs, smashed faces, and generally horrible outcomes for anybody who decides to fight Wolverine.
The fundamentals are straightforward:
- Triangle launches Wolverine at an enemy to rapidly close distance.
- Square delivers the main string of claw strikes.
- Holding Square lets Logan kick opponents into each other, off ledges, or into environmental objects to stun them.
- Parries create openings for rapid stabs and counterattacks.
- Combo enders using Triangle add damage and help build rage.
When an enemy is stunned, I can choose between a fast series of stabs that builds rage or a different attack that restores some health. That choice is simple, but it creates a decent push and pull in the middle of a fight. Do I lean into aggression or recover a little breathing room?
Rage is the core of the system. Build enough of it and Logan enters berserker mode, changing the screen’s colour treatment and making him far more dangerous. Finishers become even easier to access and even nastier to look at. It is classic videogame stuff, but it works.
As long as I have at least one rage bar, Wolverine can also get back up after losing all his health. Between that, his regeneration, lunges, parries, and finishers, he is built to stay in the middle of chaos.
Enemy Signals and Special Attacks
Enemy attacks use familiar visual cues. A red flash means dodge. A yellow flash means there is an opportunity for a powerful parry. Certain opponents can leave swords lodged in Wolverine, temporarily limiting health regeneration until he performs a finisher to pull the weapon free and put it to violent use.
Those little character-specific touches are some of the best ideas in the combat. They help the action feel like Wolverine rather than just a generic melee game with claws.
There are also special cooldown attacks activated with a trigger and face-button combination. These include moves like a tornado spin, drill claw, and a grab-and-charge attack. They are useful in a pinch, but they are not especially tactical or exciting.
Levelling up unlocks skill points for new moves and stronger abilities. Later on, I could charge a lunge and swap special face-button abilities. The combat does gradually gain a few more options, which helps, but not enough to prevent the repetition from setting in.
The Mutation Strands Never Become Essential
Alongside the skill tree, Wolverine has mutation strands. These are equippable passive bonuses that can be stacked as more slots become available.
On paper, it sounds like a flexible character-build system. In practice, I mostly equipped what worked and forgot about it. There is not much incentive to constantly switch things around or create wildly different builds. I did not need a super-deep RPG system here, but this one feels too passive to matter much.
The bigger combat problem is enemy crowding and late-game repetition. Some encounters become surprisingly challenging, which I liked, but fights can turn messy when seven or eight enemies attack at once. Individual strikes need individual parries, so it is possible to get overwhelmed and pushed into a corner without much room to respond.
Wolverine is tough enough to survive this, but it can feel more chaotic than satisfying.
By the final hours, I was also doing the same few combos over and over. The last enemy type is interesting, but they are damage sponges, so fights start to feel like a repeated cycle of Square strings, rage-building, finishers, and more Square strings. I was getting bored at the exact point the game should have been building momentum.
Optional Challenges Feel Tacked On
Throughout the adventure, optional doors appear as portals into Wolverine’s memories. Entering one takes Logan to his cabin, where I can check collectibles, read memory-related text, and start a new challenge.
These challenges are generally one of two things:
- Combat encounters with modifiers
- Traversal races built around reaching the finish quickly
They are not awful, but they are extremely uneventful. They mostly remix mechanics I had already seen in the main story, and the traversal ones are generally too easy to be memorable. The rewards are usually more skill-tree currency or mutation strand upgrades, which are not compelling enough to motivate repeated runs.
Worse, these portals can appear at awkward times and interrupt the story’s pacing. They feel included because a modern action game is expected to have extra activities, not because the adventure needed them.
Some of the more difficult challenges are worth pushing through if you want cosmetic unlocks, though.
The Wolverine Skins Are Excellent
The cosmetics absolutely deliver.
If you were hoping for the same kind of broad costume representation that Insomniac gave Spider-Man, you get it here. Wolverine’s looks across decades of comic history are well represented, and unlocking skins also gives access to different cosmetic claw sets.
This is a subtle thing for some people, but if you are a Wolverine fan, it matters. The costume selection is one of the game’s clearest wins and provides a good reason to engage with the tougher optional content.
It Looks Great, But It Also Holds Your Hand Too Much
Visually, Marvel’s Wolverine is impressive. Environments are detailed, the colour palette is bold and varied, and the gore on Wolverine’s body is rendered with an almost absurd level of attention. The lighting, suit design, destructible spaces, and facial animation all show real production quality.
Characters are expressive in motion, even if Wolverine’s huge puppy-dog eyes can be a little uncanny at times.
Unfortunately, the game also leans hard into some modern design habits that I find frustrating. The game is already linear and straightforward, but it still loves to point out the obvious. When there is one hallway directly in front of me, it may throw up a giant scent trail telling me to go down that exact hallway.
Collectibles are similarly over-signposted with sounds and visual indicators. They are often sitting just down a nearby side path, but I barely need to look for them. Even some quick-time events seem happy to keep going if I do not press the required buttons.
It all makes the experience feel overly automated. A game can be simple without constantly treating me like I need directions for every door, ladder, and glowing object.
The Story Is the Biggest Disappointment
This is the part that got me the most.
The game has the ingredients for a great Wolverine story. It has a beautiful presentation, committed performances, interesting Easter eggs, familiar mutant characters, and a version of Logan with plenty of unresolved baggage. But it rarely turns those pieces into an adventure that feels essential.
Instead, it often feels like a remix for the sake of a remix. I am completely open to alternate interpretations of comic-book characters. Some of my favourite superhero stories are strange, unexpected takes on established people and worlds. This one just does not feel like it has enough to say about Wolverine.
It is mostly a downer, and not in a way that feels especially meaningful or dramatically satisfying. It revisits ideas that these characters have explored before, but without matching the better versions of those stories.
I struggled to connect with this Logan during several key moments. Jean Grey is also handled in a way that falls into familiar romance clichés, and I came away feeling like the character deserved better.
There are bright spots. Troy Baker is a standout and gives a nuanced performance that makes his character more interesting than I expected. There are also a couple of weird, very comic-book moments that I genuinely enjoyed as someone who loves the ridiculousness of 1990s Marvel.
But none of it adds up to a story I particularly care to revisit or continue. When the credits rolled, my reaction was basically, “Okay.” That is not where I wanted to land with a big-budget Wolverine game.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine Worth Buying?
Marvel’s Wolverine is a solid but disappointing action adventure.
I had fun with the movement, enjoyed the violent combat in shorter bursts, loved the costume selection, and appreciated the game’s polished visual presentation. It does not overstay its welcome, either. A main story around 15 to 16 hours is perfectly reasonable for this kind of game.
But the combat becomes repetitive, optional challenges are thin, progression is too easy to ignore, the guidance systems are overbearing, and the story never delivers the emotional or character-driven payoff I wanted.
If you are a hardcore Wolverine fan with an open mind, there is enough here to make it worth considering. You may have a better time with its story than I did, and that part is always subjective. I am not telling anybody to avoid it entirely.
Still, for me, this did not feel like a full-price, must-play superhero event in the way Insomniac’s best work has before. I wanted to be over the moon about it. Instead, I finished it feeling unfulfilled.
Sometimes you have to be the bearer of bad news, even when you are exactly the target audience.
Marvel’s Wolverine FAQ
How long is Marvel’s Wolverine?
The main story took me roughly 15 to 16 hours. Completing extra challenges, replaying sequences, and spending time with photo mode brought my total closer to 18 hours.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine open world?
No. It is a linear action adventure built around corridors, combat spaces, occasional split paths, and a handful of explorable story sections.
Does Marvel’s Wolverine have stealth gameplay?
There are limited stealth opportunities, such as hiding in grass and performing stealth takedowns, but they are simple. The game is much more focused on direct melee combat.
Are the Wolverine costumes worth unlocking?
Yes. The costume selection is one of the game’s strongest features, representing Wolverine looks from across the character’s comic-book history and including cosmetic claw variations.
