Marvel’s Wolverine is finally here. It’s been a long road since the game’s first reveal back in 2021, and anticipation has been huge ever since, largely off the back of the success of the first Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4, back in 2018. Gamers felt the Marvel characters were in safe hands with the team at Insomniac.
Unfortunately, in the weeks and months leading up to launch, online sentiment among a small but vocal cohort of gamers turned negative, at times borderline toxic, around aspects of the game teased and revealed throughout the marketing campaign. Now that the game is almost in players’ hands, and having spent the last few weeks finishing it ourselves, here are our honest thoughts on Insomniac Games’ Wolverine.
Gameplay
Gameplay is gritty, visceral and addictive. Upgrading and honing your play style is genuinely engaging and rewarding, with plenty of options for how you want to take on the Reavers and the various other enemies thrown at you through the story.
The linear structure for story progression is a notable shift in expectations if you’re coming from Insomniac’s previous Spider-Man titles and their open world design, but it works well for Wolverine’s more focused, character-driven narrative.
Progression comes through building XP, whether by taking down enemies, finding energy reserve tanks scattered around locations, or completing story sequences. This unlocks what the game calls Techniques, which let you upgrade your fighting abilities and assign special moves to the Circle, Square, Triangle or X buttons, triggered by holding L2.
As you progress, these techniques get increasingly visceral and bloody, and unlocking each one just to see how maniacally Logan can dismember, impale and destroy enemies is genuinely enjoyable.
At various points, dream-like doorways called Nightmare Doors appear, leading into timed or task-focused Nightmare Trial sequences. Completing these quickly, or hitting the top score, rewards you with AP to raise your Adaptation Level and unlock additional strands in your DNA for your chosen adaptations.
It’s a welcome RPG layer with a good amount of variability for different play styles. The Nightmare Gauntlet sequences in particular, where you face increasingly difficult waves of enemies with the option to pick up buffs between waves, are probably the most fun, and the most intense, of the Nightmare Trials on offer.
Completing a trial also unlocks wooden sculptures you can interact with to hear a memory from Logan’s past. The anecdotes themselves are interesting, but I do wish they were presented visually rather than as a simple voiceover while you stare at what is, frankly, a fairly unremarkable woodcarving.
The cabin housing these trials also doubles as your mission select hub, and the menu design offers a witty nod to the famous “Wolverine lovingly holding a picture frame” meme.
Collectibles come mainly in the form of whiskey bottles, Logan’s drink of choice, which also feed into your AP total. You’ll also find chests scattered through the levels containing vague, unspecified materials that go toward unlocking new suits and claws in the gear tab. 
Worth noting, these are purely cosmetic. Changing them doesn’t alter your abilities or stats beyond a boost to your overall health once you unlock a certain amount, which feels like a missed opportunity to build in some deeper RPG elements.
One standout moment worth mentioning is a surprisingly poignant round of “never have I ever” partway through the story. It’ll make more sense when you reach it, but it’s a sequence that stopped me in my tracks with how well the dialogue, animation and pacing came together.
Story
The setup finds Logan three years removed from Team X, having walked out on the group, before circumstances drag him back in. Bolivar Trask is behind a wave of mutant kidnappings, fuelled by his belief in human superiority, and Logan is the one left to do something about it. It’s a fairly familiar “reluctant hero pulled back in” premise on paper, but what makes it work is how grounded the team dynamics feel around it.
The development of relationships between Logan and his fellow team members is handled well, adding real emotional weight to the narrative without giving away too much of what’s already been shown in trailers and gameplay reveals.
The story also takes you well beyond New York, through Canada, Japan and the island nation of Madripoor, and it’s easy to imagine the team at Insomniac enjoying the chance to work outside the five boroughs for a change. It gives the game a different texture to the Spider-Man titles, less about a city you know intimately and more about following Logan into unfamiliar territory alongside him.
Liam McIntyre’s take on the character is well portrayed, and while it inevitably invites comparison to Hugh Jackman’s big screen version, Liam brings just a touch more nuance and vulnerability, which is a welcome addition. Troy Baker, as Nathaniel Essex, is becoming a familiar face in gaming voice work, but his performance here is still one of the strongest in an already strong cast.
Visuals
The visuals are superb, particularly on PS5 Pro in Fidelity Pro mode, with advanced ray tracing bringing full render resolution reflections, improved ambient occlusion and screen-space global illumination bounce.
If you’d rather prioritise frame rate, (which I know is the norm, but I’m a happy outlier!) Performance Pro mode still includes the advanced ray tracing features, just without all the visual extras of Fidelity Pro. VRR and a 120Hz display mode are supported too, in line with previous Insomniac titles, and both chromatic aberration and film grain can be disabled, which picture quality purists like myself will appreciate.
Some competing AAA titles now pushing advanced ray traced lighting and more sophisticated level of detail loading may have a slight visual edge, and Sony first party studios like Insomniac and Guerrilla Games, while still among the best stylistically, will need to keep developing their in-house rendering tech to stay level with what recent and upcoming Unreal and Anvil-powered titles are now capable of.
On the more questionable side, Insomniac has leaned heavily on a dirty lens filter throughout gameplay and cutscenes, adding faux screen blemishes and imperfections. I appreciate the intent, adding grit to the visuals, but it becomes distracting in certain sequences, and there’s no dedicated option to turn it off, from what I could see. The film grain intensity slider doesn’t touch it either.
One thing Insomniac Games always nails is its Photo Mode and Marvel’s Wolverine is no different. There is a fantastic variety of options and settings with the below image of the main man himself captured using the photo mode with an additional virtual spotlight positioned in front to really ‘highlight’ the rage in his expression.
DualSense Controller Implementation
DualSense vibration integration is fantastic here, with a huge range of variation across different facets of gameplay. Unsurprisingly, Sony’s first party titles continue to set a high bar for accessibility features across the board, and Wolverine is no exception.
Conclusion
Marvel’s Wolverine delivers a gritty, focused superhero experience that trades Insomniac’s usual open world sprawl for something tighter and more character-driven.
The combat and progression systems are genuinely addictive, the performances are strong, and the visuals hold up well even if a few stylistic choices, like that dirty lens filter, overstay their welcome.
Despite the noise online in the run up to launch, this is a confident, well-crafted entry that earns its place alongside Insomniac’s other Marvel work.
Marvel’s Wolverine Pricing & Availability
Marvel’s Wolverine is available from Tuesday, September 15th. Smyths is offering the physical edition for €72.99, while the standard digital edition is available on the PlayStation Store from €79.99.
REVIEW: Marvel's Wolverine (PS5 Pro)
- Gameplay
- Story
- Visuals
Summary
Marvel’s Wolverine delivers a gritty, focused superhero experience that trades Insomniac’s usual open world sprawl for something tighter and more character-driven.
