Managing this metric of tetchedness is key to staying alive through Wolverine’s numerous self-contained levels: Hitting a new Rage threshold not only makes Logan’s claws hit harder, it also empowers critical strikes, intimidates your foes, and serves as the power source for the character’s famed healing factor, which kicks in whenever you’ve taken supposedly lethal damage. (With more Rage-filled moves, and perks, opening up as the game progresses, allowing for an extremely light character building experience.) Given how much of Wolverine’s combat is otherwise drawn straight out of the Batman: Arkham combat template that Insomniac liberally raided for Spider-Man—complete with the requisite parries, counterstrikes, and bounces between enemies at different levels of threat—managing Rage is the game’s most unique mechanical hook, one that keeps combat genuinely fun, if not terribly rigorous, through about four-fifths of the game’s 14-hour playtime.
Unfortunately, those late hours not only see enemy health values start to massively inflate, but also put an emphasis on boss battles, easily Wolverine’s weakest style of gameplay. It’s not just that these fights are boring and repetitive. (Although they are, inevitably involving learning between three and five attack patterns and how to counter them, then executing that algorithm ad infinitum until enemy health bar gets low enough, or the unavoidable boss banter has stopped playing.) The real problem is that they, and those growing health totals for regular enemies, fundamentally undermine the power fantasy that the game exists to sell. You’re supposed to be playing this thing as Wolverine. Logan! Weapon X! Death on two legs, and a lot of references to loving hockey, whiskey, and beer! Spending 10 minutes hacking away at some schlub just because he has taunts left to spill, or a giant robot’s arm while it listlessly smashes down on your head, is an active attack on the fantasy the game is ostensibly trying to sell. Who wants to play as a Wolverine who feels like he can barely cut his way through a wet paper bag?
These concessions to “gameplay” let down not only that play, but also those moments where Logan’s identity should be most core to what Wolverine is trying to achieve. Because despite stuffing itself with boss fights, motorcycle sections, and other maximalist action game moments, Wolverine is rarely better than when it’s boiled itself back down to the simple thrills of stabbing mutie-haters in the head.
All these gameplay concerns, then, are also forced to live alongside the game’s story, a genuinely strange attempt to make a Wolverine game that is not entirely beholden to the wider X-Men franchise. Insomniac has opted for an odd tack here: Wolverine takes place in a world where the existence of mutants is almost entirely unknown—in part because mutantkind’s most prominent champions, Charles Xavier and Magneto, don’t seem to exist. Instead, a shadow war plays out between the forces of Bolivar “Guy who always winds up making the Sentinels” Trask on the one hand, and Nathaniel “Literally everyone who’s ever read an X-Men comic knows he’s gonna turn out to be Mister Sinister” Essex on the other, with Logan an estranged member of the pro-mutant forces. (Even those folks not versed enough in the lore to recognize Essex and his increasingly pale pallor, meanwhile, will probably clue in that something’s wrong once they clock that Wolverine’s teammates on the paramilitary “Team X” are traditional villains Sabertooth and Mystique.)
As with its combat, Wolverine’s story works better in its earlier, simpler stretches than in its sludgier late game, as the thrill of playing as murderous underdogs for the mutant cause adds a genuine frisson of tension. (Given that mutantkind is credibly presented as being in danger of being smothered in the cradle before humanity as a whole can even have a chance to learn to hate and fear them, Essex and his team’s extreme methods and enthusiastic violence make a surprisingly compelling case for themselves.) As mystical artifacts, obvious twists, and a certain red-headed telepath intrude into the narrative, though, things take on a more traditional tone; as with so many games and other properties more interested in the aesthetics of the X-Men characters than their metaphorical or political weight, Insomniac falls back on the simplicity of cookie-cutter heroism opposing big, obvious villains, as opposed to a more nuanced take on which forces actually deserve getting six adamantium claws sunk into their spines. The meanest thing we can note about the game’s plotting, then, is that, despite working in some namecheck references to Jonathan Hickman’s era-defining House Of X comics, with their themes of mutually assured extinction between the old humanity and the new, Wolverine’s script often feels like it was written by people who’ve read a lot of X-Men comics, but not necessarily thought about them very much.
But this is, perhaps, too harsh for a game that exists primarily to serve as a raw satisfaction machine. Despite quibbles about late-game fights, and a story that inevitably revolves around Insomniac’s pet narrative obsessions with evil mentors and idealism gone to rot, Wolverine is frequently a fun game to pick up and play—including in occasional combat gauntlets that pop up throughout its levels, and which supposedly represent Logan coming to terms with his repressed memories. Finding these, at least, isn’t as onerous as some of the other bits of collect-a-thon gameplay that have clearly been added here to pad out exploration of otherwise linear maps. And while not all of these bonus levels are created equally—with awkward traversal races way less fun than those events focused on the fighting—we did appreciate that they let the player cut loose with their combat toolkit in a way the regular game sometimes doesn’t.
Although it rarely has more to say about Logan as a character than “amnesiac and angry,” Wolverine remains a showcase for Insomniac’s deftness at making characters likable on the screen, and moments where Wolverine lets down his claws with his friends and “family” are often both funny and smartly observed. And on those occasions where Insomniac feels inclined to really show off—as in a recreation of Tokyo’s flashy Kabukichō region that serves as the backdrop for a couple of the game’s best levels—they’re capable of pushing Sony’s hardware to its limits in genuinely jaw-dropping ways, creating a vibrant cityscape that makes you wish less of the game took place in factory tunnels or nondescript wilderness.
Ultimately, then, your time with Wolverine is going to come down to how appealing its core fantasy is to you. If you’re just looking to slash a lot of guys to pieces in suitably acrobatic fashion, while occasionally growling at Sabertooth, flirting with Jean Grey, and wringing your hands about the fate of mutantkind, then Insomniac has you covered. It’s not an especially robust fantasy—and one that falls apart as the game rounds toward home. But as a workmanlike presentation of a game with Wolverine’s name printed on the cover, its flaws are largely ones of ambition, not execution. Everything within Wolverine will feel recognizable to someone who’s spent much time with either action games, or the X-Men, over the last few years; that’s both its biggest strength, and one of its most glaring flaws.
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