You can’t fault Sony for continuing to expand its video game-specific take on the Marvel Universe.
Its Marvel’s Spider-Man games for the PlayStation consoles, by veteran in-house studio Insomniac Games, have been some of the platform’s best-selling and reviewed games and indeed some of the most successful open-world games over the past decade.
Now, they’re following up with Marvel’s Wolverine, a more grizzled take on their original continuity starring the Canadian(ish) antihero James Logan Howlett.
The result is a relentlessly paced action game that eschews an open world for constant forward momentum — and may initially shock players with the bloodiest combat seen in a modern comic book adaptation other than Ryan Reynolds’s R-rated Deadpool films.
A linear story with a rapid pace
Marvel’s Wolverine nominally takes place in the same world as Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, but you won’t see any shocking crossovers here — appropriate, as we’re telling a very different story.
The X-Men as we know them don’t exist in this story; instead, we join the grumpy mutant with metal claws and a healing ability as part of Team X, a small commando group also including shapeshifter Mystique and Sabretooth (like Logan but bigger and angrier) under the mentorship of Nathaniel Essex, who instantly gives off vibes of a more sinister analog to Professor X.
You’ll run into antagonists like Bolivar Trask, the scientist behind the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, and Lady Deathstrike — Logan’s sometimes-girlfriend, sometimes rival — here leading the Hand order of ninjas.
Instead of Spider-Man’s open-world facsimile of Manhattan, Wolverine takes you more or less in a straight line through multiple locations including Tokyo and Marvel’s fictional Southeast Asian nightlife town of Madripoor.
It will take most players roughly 12 to 15 hours to complete, whereas players could feasibly stretch the Spider-Man games to nearly double that. This game feels more like a globetrotting action film, or a comic book miniseries with a new location or villain subplot for each chapter.
It’s bloody … very bloody
Unlike the Spider-Man games’ teen-rated combat, Wolverine uses his claws to full effect, earning the game’s Mature rating and then some.
With just a few button presses, Logan eviscerates, dismembers and impales humanoid enemies with breathtaking speed and savagery, fountains of blood splattering the landscape and his uniform alike.
Combat is fluid and mostly intuitive to the player, with most attacks mapped to the square and triangle face buttons; combining the controller’s triggers and other buttons activates powered-up moves like spinning Logan’s claws in a cyclone, or launching himself like a flying drill.
Most important is maintaining momentum; by continuously leaping at enemies and parrying incoming attacks you’ll build up a rage meter that increases your damage and unlocks critical strikes that dispatch most low-level goons in one hit. Slow down your approach and you’ll lose most of the bonuses, making things harder in the long run.
You’ll break up the fighting with quieter moments like exploring Team X’s headquarters or mingling with mutants at the Princess bar in Madripoor, but don’t expect complex multilayered espionage like in the recent 007 First Light. They’re mostly just there to give you a breather before you’re thrown into yet another wave of enemies to eviscerate.
This is a Jean Grey story, too
Anyone familiar with Wolverine’s lore across the screen and pages will know that he’s often caught in a love triangle with fellow X-Men Cyclops and Jean Grey.
Jean, the uber-powerful user of telepathy and telekinesis, is the most important supporting character of this saga, while Cyclops is completely absent.
That makes way for a love story with more complexity than usual between Logan and Jean that slowly becomes the centrepiece of the game’s narrative.
Jean will also accompany Logan through much of the back half of the game, levitating rubble to make traversable paths or aiding the player in combat by trapping enemies in place for you to attack, for example.
Canada in the (brief) spotlight
Most versions of Wolverine are nominally Canadian, having been born in Alberta and serving as part of the country’s secret Weapon X program and crossing paths with Alpha Flight — the Canadian equivalent to the Avengers.
None of that history is relevant here, but we do spend some time in the Canadian North, where Team X’s secret headquarters is based. You’ll also take a walk in the snow before downing some off-brand Canadian rye whisky in Logan’s log cabin, and first meet Jean in Vancouver before leaping into a motorcycle chase sequence along the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
Insomniac’s art directors went to great lengths to make sure the landscape was accurately portrayed, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim (Squamish language) on highway signs.
The action moves so fast and furiously in this sequence, though, that you likely won’t notice them as you leap from truck to truck and fling enemies to their deaths.
The new Marvel’s Wolverine video game features B.C. landmarks and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim, the Squamish Nation’s language, on highway signs. Senior art director Gavin Goulden explains why including the language was important for authentically representing the region.
A narrative that outpaces the gameplay
Insomniac’s Spider-Man games stood out for their stories that remixed well-known characters’ origins in a way that can surprise even the most well-read comic book fan, and Wolverine is no different.
(While review spoiler guidelines prevent a full account of the story, it does some novel things with Jean’s background that X-Men fans will either find intriguing or infuriating.)
It’s easy to get sucked into the game’s final chapters and narrative crescendo — to the point that when the non-interactable cutscenes end and you’re thrown back into control, it can feel like an obligation or a chore.
It doesn’t help that some boss fights, while visually spectacular, aren’t mechanically different enough from other fights; they just take longer to pummel into submission.
It’s a credit to Insomniac’s visuals and direction team that I found myself thinking about the actors’ performances as much as I have for any other narrative-heavy game.
Most of the main characters’ faces are based at least somewhat on their performance actors’ real-life likenesses. They’re animated with impressive realism — Liam McIntyre’s Wolverine in particular emotes with convincing rage and puppy-dog empathy alike, especially opposite Krizia Bajos’s Jean Grey.
They impart a whiff of the uncanny valley, though, as the rest of the world feels ripped from the more stylized pages of a modern comic book.
Despite the shorter run time and narrower scope, Insomniac did not water down the experience for its first X-Men foray. Indeed, Marvel’s Wolverine might be the purest distillation of the character’s gnarliest comic book appearances — heavy on the uncensored violence but also the yearning soap opera at the core of many X-stories.
If you have a PlayStation 5 — and the stomach for a bloodier outing than most — it’s not one to miss.
Marvel’s Wolverine is available exclusively for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro on Sept. 15.
