There is a moment about ninety minutes into Marvel's Wolverine where everything Insomniac Games has been promising for three years finally arrives at once. Logan is cornered in a stairwell by six Reavers, the Rage meter is sitting in its top tier, and the game hands over control of a berserker state that turns the screen into a monochrome slaughterhouse lifted straight out of Marvel's Black, White & Blood books. Claws go in. Limbs come off. The camera does not cut away. It is, without exaggeration, the best any game has ever made it feel to be this character.
The problem is that the fiftieth time it happens, it feels exactly the same as the first.
That sentence is the whole review, and it is also, in various phrasings, most of the reviews that went up on September 10. Marvel's Wolverine is a technically superb, beautifully acted, genuinely violent action game built on a combat system that peaks in its opening hours and a campaign structure that spends the next sixteen leading you down a corridor while explaining the corridor to you. It is good. It is not the leap Insomniac's Spider-Man games were, and the gap between "good" and "great" here is not subtle.
We scored it 70.
Note: the above is Sony's live-action trailer, which is the only official Wolverine trailer PlayStation has left embeddable. The gameplay and launch trailers are locked to YouTube's own site.
The claws are the best thing in it, and they are genuinely excellent
Start with the part Insomniac got right, because it got it very right.
Wolverine is a difficult character to build a game around for a boring structural reason: he is functionally unkillable and he kills everything he touches. Most action games resolve that by pretending otherwise — giving him a health bar that behaves like everyone else's and enemies who politely survive being stabbed. Insomniac's solution is Rage, and it is the single smartest design decision in the game.
Rage is not a meter you fill and dump. It is a three-tiered pool of adrenaline that governs, in ascending order, survivability, resilience and fury. The lower tiers are what keep Logan upright when a fight has gone badly — the healing factor rendered as a resource you have to keep earning rather than a bar that refills when you hide behind cover. The top tier is the berserk state, and you sustain it by continuing to kill. Stop killing, and it drains. It is a system that makes the correct Wolverine decision — keep going forward, never disengage — also the mechanically optimal one, and it means the game never has to ask you to play cautiously as a character who has no reason to be cautious.
Underneath that sits a layer that is more conventional than it first appears. Claws, kicks, barrages and critical strikes form the base. Techniques are unlocked upgrades to moves you already have. Special Techniques are the rechargeable heavy hitters, and you can have four equipped at once rather than committing to one ultimate — Tornado Spin for clearing space when you are surrounded, Knee Breaker for single targets, Spiral Strike for drilling through. On paper that is an action-RPG loadout. In practice it is four cooldowns you cycle in roughly the same order every fight.
The gore deserves its own paragraph, because it is doing a lot of load-bearing work. This is a hard M-rated game and it does not flinch. Critical strikes are dismemberments. Enemies scream. Blood stays on Logan's suit between encounters and his healing factor visibly knits shut wounds you watched open thirty seconds earlier. Insomniac's own developers reportedly worried they had gone too far, and having played it, you can see why the conversation happened. It works. It is the thing that separates this from a Spider-Man reskin more than any mechanic does.
Then it stops growing
Here is where our score and the high scores part company.
By roughly the four-hour mark, you have seen the combat system. Not most of it — effectively all of it. The Reavers come in four or five varieties: the ones who rush you, the ones who shield, the ones who shoot from range, the heavies who need a parry, and later a cybernetic variant that is the same as the heavy with a different silhouette. Encounter design consists of dropping combinations of those five into an arena and closing the exits. Twelve hours later, it is still doing that.
The progression systems are supposed to counteract this, and they do not. Adaptations — the modifier layer Insomniac says numbers in the dozens — are almost entirely passive percentage tweaks: absorb more bullets, extend the parry window, make Rage more effective, occasionally add a terror effect that causes enemies to break off. None of them change what you do. Compare that to Spider-Man's gadgets, where a Web Bomb and a Trip Mine genuinely produce different encounters, and you can feel exactly what was lost in translation. Suits unlock health upgrades and new claw types — bone, notched, curved, reflective, angled — and it is a nice touch that Logan's most iconic feature is a gear slot, but a curved claw does not fight differently from a straight one.
IGN's Simon Cardy put it more economically than we can: the combat "wears thin well before its conclusion, so much so that even its strong character work can't quite save it from being anything more than okay." CGMagazine, which also landed on a 7, called it "a combat system that never grows past its opening hours." That is not a minority view among the low scores; it is present in the high ones too. Wccftech gave the game an 8.5 and still wrote that it wished some maps were larger. PlayStation Universe gave it a 9 and described the combat as "satisfying, if not especially inventive."
When a game's defenders and its critics agree on the diagnosis and disagree only on how much it matters, the diagnosis is usually correct.
The corridor problem
Insomniac made a deliberate, defensible choice here: after three open-world Marvel games, Wolverine is linear. Missions move you from set piece to set piece. There is no city to swing across, no radio tower to climb, no map full of icons. Several reviewers treated that as a virtue, and there is a real argument for it — this is a tight twenty-hour game in a year of hundred-hour ones, and it does not waste your time with busywork.
But linear and restrictive are not the same word, and Wolverine is frequently the second one. The levels are not so much corridors as tubes. Doors lock behind you. Ledges you can obviously reach are invisible-walled because the encounter has not finished. Optional content exists — Nightmare Doors are combat and traversal challenges you sniff out, and collectible whisky bottles unlock fragments of Logan's lost memories, which is a genuinely elegant way to hang amnesia lore on a pickup rather than a codex — but they sit in small side pockets off a path that otherwise never branches.
Giant Bomb's Shawn McDowell named the cost precisely: "an underwhelming amount of player agency left me very bored far too often." Even Push Square, in an 8/10 review that is broadly a rave, conceded that "the campaign structured around it can be overly restrictive." Eurogamer, at 3/5, called the whole thing "an underwhelming, old-school romp that reminds us how far action games have come" — which is harsh, but not unfair. The level design here would have been unremarkable in 2012.
To the game's credit, the locations themselves vary more than the structure does. There is a snowbound stretch in the Canadian wilderness, a Madripoor-flavoured urban section, an industrial Trask facility, and a highway motorcycle sequence that is the single most memorable set piece in the campaign. Insomniac's art department is not the problem. The encounter designers working inside those spaces had their hands tied.
The boss fights are where it briefly remembers what it could have been
If the standard encounters are the game's weakest structural element, the bosses are its strongest — and the gap between them is instructive.
The named villains all fight on completely different terms, and each one forces you to use the Rage system in a way the trash mobs never do. Sabretooth is the obvious highlight: he is faster than you, he heals like you, and the fight is built around the fact that neither of you can actually die, so it becomes an attrition contest over who can sustain the top Rage tier longer. It is the one encounter in the game where the healing factor is a genuine mechanical conversation rather than a safety net. Lady Deathstrike inverts it — her adamantium talons out-range your claws, so the fight is about closing distance and eating damage to do it. Omega Red is an arena fight with environmental hazards that punishes the aggression the rest of the game rewards.
The motorcycle highway sequence deserves specific mention too, because it is the most purely enjoyable twenty minutes in the campaign: vehicle-to-vehicle combat at speed, with Logan leaping between trucks and shredding tyres, staged with the kind of confidence Insomniac has been building since the first Spider-Man's chase sequences. It is also, tellingly, completely non-repeatable. There is one of it.
That is the frustrating shape of the whole game. Every time Wolverine designs something specific — a boss with its own rules, a set piece with its own verbs — it is very good. Every time it drops you into another room of Reavers with the doors locked, it is filler. The ratio is roughly one to six, and the six is what you spend most of twenty hours doing.
The hand-holding is relentless
This is the complaint that will decide whether you enjoy the game or grind your teeth through it, and it is the one that bothered us most.
Marvel's Wolverine does not trust you for a second. Objective markers are permanently on. Characters narrate the solution to environmental puzzles roughly four seconds after the puzzle appears, and often before you have finished looking at it. Logan's enhanced-senses mode highlights the one interactable object in the room in glowing orange, and the game will suggest you use it if you spend more than a moment not using it. New enemy types are introduced with a freeze-frame and a text box explaining the counter. Tutorial prompts for mechanics you learned in hour one are still appearing in hour twelve.
None of these are individually unusual. Big-budget action games have been doing this for fifteen years. What makes it grating here is the density and the fact that it never tapers. Most games front-load their tutorialising and then back off once they trust you to have learned. Wolverine never backs off. There is no option to turn most of it down, either — the accessibility menu is genuinely enormous, with over a hundred options including High Contrast visuals, English audio description, a Global Game Speed slider and Strong Haptic Signals, and it deserves real credit for that. But a "stop telling me things" toggle is not in there.
One example, because it is representative rather than exceptional. Midway through the campaign there is a section in a flooded Trask sub-level where you need to cut power to a door. There are exactly two objects in the room: a breaker box, glowing orange, and the door. Logan says "there's gotta be a breaker around here." Jean says, over comms, "try cutting the power." A tutorial card appears explaining that you can use your claws on electrical panels — a thing you have been doing since the prologue. A waypoint marker then attaches itself to the breaker box. The puzzle, such as it is, has been solved for you four separate times before you have taken a step.
The effect is that a game whose entire thematic pitch is you are an unstoppable animal acting on instinct spends twenty hours checking whether you have understood the instructions. It undercuts the fantasy more than any mechanical shortcoming does. And it compounds the repetition problem, because a game that refuses to let you work anything out for yourself has removed the one renewable source of novelty it had left.
The story gives itself away
The setup is decent. Three years after walking out on Team X, Logan is pulled back in. Mutants are being hunted by the Reavers, a cybernetic militia funded by billionaire Bolivar Trask, whose anti-mutant politics are the engine of the plot. There are too few mutants left to form safe havens or organised teams — a convenient justification for a solo Wolverine game and, to be fair, a legitimately bleak premise for one. Jean Grey is the emotional centre. Sabretooth, Omega Red and Lady Deathstrike turn up to fight you.
The writing at the character level is the best thing about the narrative. Liam McIntyre's Logan is a real performance rather than a Hugh Jackman impression — wearier, meaner, funnier in the gaps. The Logan-and-Jean relationship is handled with restraint, and the whisky-bottle memory fragments do more for Logan's interiority than the main plot does. TheGamer, at 4/5, built its entire positive review on this, calling the story "memorable, emotional, and high-stakes."
We did not find it so. The plot telegraphs every turn a chapter early. A betrayal that the game treats as a third-act revelation is visible from the moment the character is introduced. Trask is a one-note corporate villain in a story that keeps insisting he is more complicated than he is. And the pacing sags badly in the middle third, where four or five consecutive missions amount to "go to facility, kill everyone in facility, learn a thing you already guessed."
Again, this is not a contrarian position. Push Square's 8/10 called the story "quite dull." Giant Bomb cited "mediocre storytelling, poor pacing." GameSpot's Tamoor Hussain, at 6/10, summarised it as "a fun but forgettable experience." CGMagazine described "a story that keeps giving away its own secrets." The consensus on the narrative is considerably more negative than the aggregate score suggests, because the outlets that loved the game loved it for the combat and the presentation and were willing to forgive the plot.
It looks incredible, and that is not a consolation prize
Whatever else is true, Marvel's Wolverine is one of the best-looking games on PS5.
The character work is the standout. Facial capture is at the level where you read micro-expressions rather than broad emotion, and the lighting on skin and hair — particularly Sabretooth's mane, which is doing an absurd amount of rendering work — is exceptional. Insomniac's material work on Logan's suits is fantastic; the Battle Reborn design in particular picks up grime, blood and scorch marks across a mission and carries them into cutscenes. Environments are dense and hand-placed rather than procedurally padded, which is one of the genuine payoffs of dropping the open world.
Performance is solid across both modes, and we saw no crashes or progression-blocking bugs in our playthrough. Audio is a highlight too — the snikt is a genuinely great sound, mixed loud, and the game knows it.
Push Square called it "the best visuals possible in 2026." That is a stretch, but not an enormous one. The presentation is not the thing holding this game back.
What is in the box after the credits
The endgame hub is Logan's Nightmare Cabin, which houses New Game Plus with exclusive Techniques and raised level caps, a Mission Replay mode for revisiting story beats, and Nightmare Challenges for score chasing. Photo Mode arrives in a day-one patch rather than on the disc.
Whether any of that matters depends on how you felt about the twenty hours preceding it. New Game Plus in a game whose combat plateaued in hour four is a hard sell, and Nightmare Challenges are score attack on the same encounter templates you have already run. If you loved the fighting, there is more of it. If you were tired of it by the end of the campaign, the endgame will not change your mind.
The suit list, at least, is genuine fan service done well. Alongside Insomniac's original Battle Reborn design there are outfits inspired by Weapon X, Old Man Logan, Ultimate Wolverine and Patch, plus civilian options down to a tank top and a leather jacket, with cowls and hats toggleable independently. And you can pop the claws any time outside combat by holding L2 and R2, for no reason at all, which is the correct feature to have included.
Where this sits against the rest of the press
This is one of the most genuinely split review reactions of the year, and it is worth laying out plainly.
At the aggregate level, Marvel's Wolverine sits around 79 on OpenCritic and 77 on Metacritic — Insomniac's lowest-scored Marvel game by a wide margin. Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 both hit 88; Miles Morales landed on 85. It is currently among the lowest-rated PlayStation Studios exclusives of the generation.
But that aggregate is hiding a bimodal distribution rather than describing a consensus. The scores cluster at two poles:
- The 6s: IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, Eurogamer and VGC all landed on 6/10, with Giant Bomb lower still. Their complaints are the ones in this review: repetition, restriction, a story that does not land.
- The 7s: CGMagazine, PlayStation LifeStyle and MMORPG.com. This is where we sit, and it is the cluster that acknowledges both the quality of the moment-to-moment violence and the fact that it stops developing.
- The 8s and above: Push Square (8), TheSixthAxis (8), GameRant (8), Gameblog (8), Wccftech (8.5), DualShockers (8.5), Game Informer (8.5), PlayStation Universe (9), and perfect scores from Hardcore Gamer and COGconnected. These reviews largely concede the same weaknesses and weigh them differently — the linearity is framed as focus, the repetition as consistency.
ACG's verdict was "Wait for Sale," which is a reasonable position for a £70 game that is twenty hours long and does not change much across them.
What almost nobody disputes: the visuals are outstanding, the performances are outstanding, the gore is effective, and the combat is excellent for its first several hours. What the split comes down to is how much you need an action game to keep giving you something new after that.
The Spider-Man comparison is unavoidable, and it explains the gap
It is slightly unfair to review a game against a different game, but Insomniac invited this one. This is the fourth Marvel title from the same studio in eight years, marketed with the same visual language, and the comparison is the first thing every reviewer reached for.
What made the Spider-Man games work was not the open world — it was that the toolkit kept opening up. Sixty hours into Spider-Man 2 you were still finding new combinations of gadget, traversal and environment, because the systems were designed to interact with each other. Webs stick things to walls. Walls are everywhere. Swinging is both movement and positioning. The city was not content; it was the surface those systems played across.
Wolverine has none of that interaction. His claws do damage. His Rage keeps him alive. His Special Techniques do more damage in different shapes. Nothing in the kit talks to anything else in the kit, and the environments are backdrops rather than participants — there is no equivalent of yanking a manhole cover off the ground and throwing it. Strip out the open world and you are left with the systems, and the systems here are thin.
That is not an argument that Wolverine should have been open-world. Push Square is right that the linearity gives the game a propulsion the Spider-Man titles sometimes lacked, and twenty focused hours beats sixty padded ones. It is an argument that when you remove the structure that was hiding a combat system's limits, the combat system needs to be deeper than this one is.
Should you buy it at launch?
At £70 / $69.99 for roughly twenty hours, this is a harder recommendation than the aggregate score makes it sound, and where you land depends on a fairly simple question: do you specifically want to play as Wolverine?
If yes — if the appeal is the character, the violence, the snikt, and seeing Insomniac's art team render Logan and Sabretooth at this level — buy it now. It delivers that completely, it is the best version of that fantasy anyone has shipped, and no amount of structural criticism changes how good the first four hours feel.
If you are looking for a great action game that happens to star Wolverine, wait. The combat ceiling is low, the campaign is on rails, and this is a title that will be meaningfully discounted inside six months — ACG's "Wait for Sale" is not a dismissal, it is a straightforward read of the value proposition. There is no live-service tail here, no seasonal content, nothing that rewards being early.
Worth noting for the sequel conversation: several reviewers, TheSixthAxis among them, framed this as foundation-laying — the studio establishing a character and a combat identity it can build on. That is a reasonable read, and it is also how the first Spider-Man was received before Miles Morales and the sequel deepened it. The bones here are good. What is built on them next is the interesting question.
Verdict
Marvel's Wolverine is the best any game has made it feel to be Wolverine, and it runs out of ideas about a quarter of the way through. The Rage system is a smart solution to a genuinely hard design problem, the violence has real weight, and Insomniac's presentation is as reliably premium as ever — this is a beautiful, well-acted, technically clean game. It is also a linear corridor that never trusts you to walk down it unassisted, built on a combat system that reaches its ceiling in hour four and a story that hands you its twists before it turns them.
If what you want is twenty hours of gorgeous, brutal, undemanding superhero action and you are not going to be annoyed by a game explaining itself to you, this will land closer to an 8 for you than a 7, and the reviews at that end of the spectrum are not wrong to feel that way. If you came in hoping Insomniac would do for Logan what it did for Peter Parker — build a system deep enough to keep surprising you sixty hours in — this is not that game, and pretending otherwise does nobody a favour.
Good. Frequently great in short bursts. Not the one Sony needed it to be.
Marvel's Wolverine launches September 15, 2026, exclusively on PlayStation 5. Reviewed on PS5.
