Marvel's Wolverine Has the Claws and the Rage, but Not the Range

Combat is the center of Wolverine, as it should be, and at its best it delivers the fantasy with real weight. The foundation is familiar to anyone who has played a modern action game: light attacks, heavy attacks, a timing-based parry, and dodges that open enemies up. What distinguishes it is the rage mechanic. As you fight, Logan builds toward a berserk state that lets you chain executions together, tearing through enemies in brutal, uninterrupted succession and leaving the kind of carnage the character has always implied but games have rarely been allowed to show. When it clicks, it feels authentically savage in a way few licensed brawlers manage.

The problem is that the system reaches its ceiling early. The core verbs do not expand enough over the length of the game, and once you have internalized the parry windows and the rhythm of building and spending rage, encounters start to blur. Enemy variety does not push back hard enough to force you to rethink the approach, so the loop that feels ferocious in the first hours settles into something closer to routine by the midgame. The violence is still satisfying on a visceral level; it is the strategic texture around it that thins out.

Structurally, this is a far tighter and more linear game than Spider-Man, and that choice is a double-edged blade. The focus suits the character: Logan is not a man who glides over a city, and keeping him grounded in confined, deliberately staged spaces is a defensible design instinct. But the linearity does not buy back enough in return. Spider-Man used its open world to vary the texture of play constantly, and without that variety Wolverine leans almost entirely on its combat to carry the hours, which is exactly the system that wears thin. The restricted environments can feel less like a focused design and more like a smaller one.

Pacing is where the two halves collide. The story sequences and set pieces give the game its strongest moments, and the quieter character beats are genuinely effective, but between them the connective tissue is often another arena of the same enemies and the same escalating-rage dance. Quality-of-life is solid and the game is readable and responsive moment to moment, so the friction is rarely mechanical. It is structural. You are rarely frustrated by how Wolverine plays; you are more often simply ahead of it, waiting for the next narrative beat to pull you forward.

There is content here, and the combat can be genuinely thrilling in bursts, but the overall shape is of a game that establishes its best ideas quickly and then runs on them longer than they can comfortably sustain. It is a tightly made action game that mistakes confinement for intensity a little too often.

Where Wolverine rarely wavers is in the sheer brutality of its presentation. This is the most violent game Insomniac has made, and it commits to that fully. Executions are staged with a wince-inducing specificity, the claws catch and tear rather than simply connect, and the berserk state turns the screen into a frenzy that sells Logan's loss of control better than any cutscene could. The animation work on the combat is the game's craft highlight, giving each kill a physical, unglamorous weight that matches the character's reputation.

The art direction is confident and grounded, favoring a grittier, more grounded palette than the bright, swinging color of the Spider-Man games. It suits a story about a blunt instrument of a man, though the more confined spaces mean the game rarely gets to deliver the wide, breathtaking vistas that are a Sony first-party calling card. This is a game of rooms and corridors and close, dangerous spaces, and it is lit and textured to make those spaces feel oppressive rather than grand.

The real surprise is how much the writing and performance elevate the character work. The relationship between Logan and Jean Grey is the element critics singled out most consistently as a bright spot, and the game is at its most alive when it slows down to sit with that dynamic. The voice work carries the weariness and the barely-contained anger that define Logan, and the quieter scenes have a texture the combat loop never quite matches. It is telling that a game about tearing enemies apart is at its best when two people are simply talking.