A quick trip through the annals of the internet might give you the impression that Insomniac Games’ latest title isn’t that good. While I respect the diverse opinions of the gaming community, this review is personal to me, especially since Wolverine is, by a huge margin, my favourite Marvel character, and I love a good hack-‘em-up game. So, let’s get this done, bub...
I took my time to review this because I wanted to put some decent hours into the game. Insomniac’s last three titles were all superhits, and I loved playing them. Marvel’s Spider-Man was a revelation that I thought could not be topped. But the Miles Morales edition that followed and the main sequel hit it out of the park—and how!
So, it was quite obvious that the new Wolverine game had some pretty big shoes to fill. Or does it? This is where I diverge from the majority.
Insomniac already proved their mettle with open-world gaming. They also revolutionised superhero traversal, enough to give the other two Marvel mainline titles—Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy—some grief.
So, why do you need a new version of the same Spider-Man game to be happy? In Wolverine, the set pieces are more up close; there is actual interaction that isn’t from miles up in the sky, and the traversal is limited. Isn’t this exactly how Wolverine is supposed to be?
Spider-Man’s story is always a New York story rather than a Peter Parker one. But Wolverine’s case is different. It is all about Logan, a perennially confused but overpowered mutant who is almost practically immortal. This also meant Insomniac could play around with it a bit.
So, they made the game more linear, focused more on the fights and moves, and gave everyone what Wolverine always promised—draw them claws and slash, rip, and shred. Cinematic representation by a four-time Tony Award-winning Hugh Jackman seems to have clouded many on what makes Wolverine unique in the comics. He is feral, he is short and stout, and he is unstoppable. This is exactly what this game feels like.
This crazy brawler, who handles speed and savagery in equal measure, gets a pretty decent skill tree system where an XP system unlocks new skills and an AP system unlocks special attributes. There are cosmetic upgrades in fun suits and claws, but they have no bearing on the gameplay. The real winner is the three-level rage meter, which, at its max, unlocks the beast—our feral, unstoppable rage machine that made me bless my controller with years of Mortal Kombat experience.
So, in short, it was like playing a comic book version of Devil May Cry with my favourite Marvel character.
Now, onto some things that irked me. Most of these happened much earlier in the game. One, if you make a character with metal claws that cut through anything, as a gamer, my first instinct would be to cut through a vehicle. Which I did. Nothing happened. A wall, nothing. A tree, nothing. This is where the Star Wars games got it right with the lightsaber early on, and I felt it was a missed opportunity.
The other irritants were the NPC bugs: Cars blimping and defying physics in cities, characters pushing and sliding Wolverine, and so on. But all these are things that a few patches can fix.
The fact that they put so many good cinematics but couldn’t bother with using them to display the unlocked memories was the major letdown for me.
The one thing I heard from many gamers was that there were restrictions on movement, with invisible walls guiding us back on track. But I see this as a positive. Let me explain...
Big-ticket games, over the past so many years, seem to have abused this open world a bit too much that it gets overwhelming for a new person to pick up a controller. It got to a point where the invisible wall was an entry point that warranted many to just instinctively master camera controls as well as character controls while also focusing on the game.
While seasoned gamers who have put in years might find this point rather alien, I have seen how newcomers get disillusioned so quickly that they don’t even want to attempt another game. And this is exactly the hole that Wolverine plugs.
In fact, Marvel’s Wolverine is one of the games I would recommend to anyone getting into gaming in 2026.
One, the story deserves praise, especially in the way they handled the character of Logan, his PTSD, memory loss, and his anger. The art, setting, and animation all work well. And Liam McIntyre does a stellar job of giving us the feral, flawed, but vulnerable yet violent titular character. His interactions with Jean Grey, Sabretooth, and Mystique are a treat to experience in-game.
Insomniac’s love for the lore and the character is pretty evident in the way they treated this game, and every time I pick up the controller, I am excited for it. Marvel’s Wolverine is a true stress buster, and maybe this was the kind of linear, back-to-basics slasher we needed in a world now filled with super-long, detailed open-map AAA titles. But Insomniac is not CD Projekt Red to get a goodwill pass that they earned with Witcher III—they should have plugged the bugs before the release, especially since they were handling a world-famous IP.
Game: Marvel’s Wolverine
Developer: Insomniac Games
Platform: PlayStation 5
Rating: 3 out of 5 | ★★★☆☆
