One of my favourite PlayStation properties is Spider-Man. Everything about it works; the combat is tight, the web-swinging is tighter, and it's all wrapped in a well-written, well-produced package. On top of that, all three Spider-Man games are running on a very technically impressive engine, capable of running at well over 60fps on base PS5 hardware under the right conditions. To beat a dead cliché, it really does makes you feel like Spider-Man.
So then, given it's pedigree, why does Wolverine fail so absolutely to reach the same highs?
As they did with Peter Parker and Miles Morales, Insomniac has opted to draw upon the vast history of Wolverine as a character, picking and choosing which events and themes to adapt and put their own spin on. Wolverine opens to find the titular character working for Team X with Mystique and Sabretooth, under the leadership of their mysterious benefactor, Nathaniel Essex. If you know your X-Men lore even a little bit, you'll immediately have a pretty good idea how this story is going to go, but in the beginning, these characters are framed together as having a tenuous but workable found-family dynamic. All of these characters have demons, and none of them could be considered heroes in the traditional sense. They're working together toward the common goal of saving as many mutants as possible from Bolivar Trask's bigotry and mutant-killing robots. As with Spider-Man, none of this is going to feel too out of the ordinary for fans of the character.
Where Logan's first adventure differs from Spidey's, however, is gameplay scope. This is not an open world adventure. This is a linear hack-and-slash game. If you think original God of War trilogy, you're on the right track. Every mission finds you clawing your way from point A to point B, leaving absolute devastation in your wake. There are side missions along the way, and collectibles to find which give you currency to buy new suits or claws, and some of them are easy to miss if you're not paying attention. You'll also gain experience and level up along the course of your journey, allowing you to power up your attacks and skills. Nothing about the gameplay loop reinvents the wheel. Logan violently, bloodily, mercilessly disembowels wave after wave of enemies with reckless abandon as he endeavours to save mutant-kind. The gratuity is initially pretty shocking, and a lot of fun to see, and stands in stark contrast to Spider-Man's clever thwip-thwip web acrobatics. However, there's not a lot of depth to this combat system. There's so little, in fact, that the novelty of seeing Logan rip a guy in half, or shove his claws through a Reaver's chin and out the top of their head, wears off at around the halfway point of the adventure. Not enough is done to give the player tools to keep gameplay fresh for the duration of this game's runtime. But as in every Marvel game, all the different suits and claw variants are lots of fun for knowledgeable fans.
There's also a bit of ludonarrative dissonance inherent in this, or any Wolverine video game. The idea that Logan has to land so many hits on a human enemy to kill them with his adamantium claws is absurd on the surface. I'm not marking the game down for this; you have to balance your video game to be both fun and challenging, and sometimes that means narrative immersion be damned. However, there were a couple of instances where immersion was broken, and most of these were during boss fights. Boss fights in this game are needlessly spongy. It's my opinion that once I've demonstrated dexterity and aptitude in the task expected of me, I should be able to move on from that task without too much effort. However, this game's bosses have so much health that I found myself almost zoning out once I'd learned their patterns. Dodge, parry, combo combo combo, dodge, dodge, parry, combo, scripted cutscene, dodge, parry, and so on. It really hurts the pacing of the adventure. It is not only boring to fight a boss for so long once you understand its patterns and weaknesses, but also potentially infuriating if you do make a mistake and have to start over.
There is one element of the combat system that I found to be unique and interesting, and that's the way Insomniac accounted for Wolverine's healing factor. For the sake of it being a video game, Logan can die in combat if you run out of health. And enemies hit pretty hard in this game; if you're not careful, you'll get overwhelmed and taken down pretty quickly. Logan will slowly heal passively, but if you perform a combo finisher on a stunned enemy, you'll regain a substantial amount of health. This is reflected visually, both in the health bar at the top left and on Logan himself having more or less of his internal organs and adamantium skeleton exposed. (Yuck, but also, cool to see Logan's skin and hair regrow in real time.) In this way, the game encourages you to be as aggressive as possible, get in close and personal for maximum violence, and not be an opportunistic fighter. Logan means well, but he can't help but to shred or blow up absolutely everything in his path, cementing him as an antihero very early on in the adventure. He's a brawler, not a tactician, and the gameplay supports that aspect of the character nicely.
Logan's got a heart of gold underneath the feral exterior, and the game's story makes much ado about it. It's an engaging and emotional story that pulls at any number of threads that pay homage to Wolverine comics and movies through the ages. It's hard to speak too deeply about the story without spoiling things, but Insomniac has really attempted to up the stakes for Wolverine versus the Spider-Man games, to varying degrees of success. Free from the trappings of New York and its boroughs, Insomniac has opted to go global. The player finds themselves in locales both real and fictional; You'll head to fictional places like Telambang and Madripoor, but you'll also find yourself in Tokyo, Yukon Territory in Canada, and more. In particular, my hometown of Vancouver, and the Sea to Sky Highway north of the city, was a special treat to see represented reasonably accurately in video game form.
This adventure is acted out skilfully by its cast. Liam McIntyre (Gears of War 5, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order) in particular brings emotional highs and lows to Logan, who might easily have just been a loud angry monster if not for McIntyre's performance. Instead, in his quieter moments, Wolverine is actually more of a sad, scared little puppy dog, and it does a lot to humanize him. Nearly the entire cast turns in a well acted performance, in fact, but perhaps unsurprisingly, a standout is Troy Baker as the cold and calculating Essex. If I had to call out a negative performance, it would unfortunately have to be the work done for Lady Deathstrike. It's clear that the actress is giving a full-send performance, so no hard feelings there, but I think the material or voice direction lets her down; there's too much screaming about her superiority and power. It's Saturday morning cartoon villain-by-numbers, and it's both grating and boring in the context of this more nuanced take on these characters.
Graphically, Wolverine builds on the already fantastic proprietary engine that Insomniac has been using since 2014's fantastic cult hit Sunset Overdrive. Like the Spider-Man games, this game doesn't break a sweat trying to hit its performance targets. I was able to play on a base PS5, in Fidelity Uncapped mode on my LG C1, with Sony's new Quick Spectral Super Resolution - or QSSR - upscaling technology enabled. I was sat squarely in the 40-50 FPS range, which is right in line with expectations. Briefly switching the game to performance mode gave a rock solid 60 FPS experience. Again, this is all the more impressive when you consider just how pretty these games look. There's special effects and large environments galore. Some standout environments include Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Lowtown in Madripoor, and the Princess Bar, which serves as a bit of a narrative hub between missions. Further to that, the character models are incredibly high fidelity. Cinematic cutscenes in this game are wonderfully composed, and characters are acted and animated fantastically, so you can really see all the emotion and micro-expressions the faces of these characters. It's very easy to become immersed in this narrative, in large part thanks to the audiovisual presentation.
And thank goodness for that. This game's runtime is around 16 hours on the high end, maybe more if you bother to collect everything, and if not for the game's (mostly) well written story, I could definitely understand people bouncing off this game. There were a couple narrative conveyance problems along the way, where I didn't fully understand a character's motivations, but those moments are fleeting in an otherwise well presented and exciting globetrotting tale. Once I was finished, however, I didn't feel any drive to go back and hunt down what I missed along the way. I freely admit that the story was the only thing keeping me going after a certain point - that and the necessity of finishing it for this review. I just didn't find myself drawn to the gameplay mechanics or structure. I found myself consistently disappointed that Logan just doesn't live up to the expectations set by what Peter and Miles have been doing over in Manhattan. Wolverine is clearly trying to differentiate itself, and it does, for better and worse.
I want to be clear: Wolverine is not a bad game. However, it's also doing almost nothing to stand out in its chosen genre. There are myriad more exciting action hack and slash games with deeper more engaging gameplay mechanics. The best I can say is that this is a perfectly competent effort in the gameplay department. It left me with the feeling that Insomniac's heart and passion was elsewhere; maybe it's still back in New York with the Spider Friends. If Wolverine were a movie, I might be inclined to say it's the best there is. The story and the presentation are the top notch stuff you'd expect from Insomniac. But a video game has to be a video game first, and after a full playthrough, I have to conclude that it's just not very nice.