---
title: 'Marvel''s Wolverine - Review'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=3EK5uzEpO4w'
video_id: '3EK5uzEpO4w'
date: 2026-09-10
duration_sec: 1049
channel: 'IGN'
---

# Marvel's Wolverine - Review

> Source: [Marvel's Wolverine - Review](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3EK5uzEpO4w)

## Summary

Summary of the video review of Marvel's Wolverine, highlighting its strengths in storytelling and character portrayal, while pointing out its weaknesses in combat variety and level design.

### Key Points

- **Introduction and Violent Gameplay** [00:00] — The video introduces Marvel's Wolverine, emphasizing its violent and gory gameplay mechanics.
- **Narrative and Self-Acceptance** [00:27] — The review notes that the narrative, focusing on self-acceptance, is the strongest part, compensating for repetitive combat.
- **Story and Characters** [01:13] — The plot follows Logan's mission to investigate missing mutants, with decent superhero fare but predictable turns.
- **Combat System** [03:41] — Combat is responsive but simple, relying on a rage bar for critical hits and a unique healing factor for regeneration.
- **Combat Longevity** [04:42] — The initial enjoyment of combat fades midway through the 15-hour campaign due to a lack of progression and variety.
- **Enemy Variation and Encounter Design** [05:25] — Enemy variety is a saving grace, but encounters feel repetitive due to similar arenas and predictable ambushes.
- **Collectibles and Progression** [06:44] — Linear levels contain collectibles like whiskey bottles and material caches, with a simple AP system for upgrades.
- **Nightmare Trials** [07:53] — Optional trials offer combat and movement challenges, rewarding players with memories for extra narrative context.
- **Character Development and World Design** [09:27] — Wolverine's reclusive nature contrasts with Spider-Man's open world, resulting in far less interactive and interesting world design.
- **Pacing and Structure** [10:40] — The game's pacing has two speeds: intense action and introspective calm, but lacks a diverse gameplay variety in between.
- **Overall Verdict** [11:21] — The reviewer concludes that the simple combat and level design carry the game's story, but it is underwhelming compared to other Insomniac titles.
- **Scoring Rationale** [12:14] — The reviewer discusses the 'six' score, explaining the game is rated by subjective feeling and comparing it to other titles like Spider-Man.
- **Platinum Trophy Difficulty** [13:13] — the platinum trophy is relatively easy at 20 hours and mostly involves just collecting items and replaying linear levels.
- **Comparing to Spider-Man** [14:28] — The reviewer compares Wolverine to Spider-Man, highlighting that the game is more old-school, linear, and lacks the engaging open-world gameplay.
- **Character Work Highlight** [16:13] — The story's best moments come from the characters, particularly the relationship between Wolverine and Jean Grey.

## Transcript

Let's get the kill with it. Yeah, that's what I said. I've just spilled enough blood to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools. Thousands are now dead thanks to the adamantium claws given to me by Insomniac Games.
Marvel's Wolverine certainly doesn't skimp when it comes to violence, and gives you plenty of opportunities to enact it with style. But it takes more than blood to get my heart pumping, and it's in Logan's surprisingly nuanced tale of self-acceptance
that I felt most connected to this latest portrayal of most famous of the X-Men. That story does most of the heavy lifting here, with the initially sleek and satisfying combat wearing theme well before its conclusion. But even that solid character work can't quite carry the weight it needs to.
Marvel's Wolverine, much like its lead, is built on a firm skeleton, but what's crafted around it isn't nearly as strong.
My name is Nathaniel Essex. What is your name? This tale starts a few decades after James Logan Howlett first met Nathaniel Essex,
and was taken into his mutant community when he quickly became a crucial member of his class force, Team X. Already an experienced hero, it's clear something sinister is at play when we join him here, and Wolverine is soon sent on a mission to investigate scientist Bolivar Trask
amidst reports of missing mutants. From there, it hops around the globe, taking Logan to new places rife with danger and old haunts that stir up various memories. It's solid superhero fare with a couple of predictable turns along the way,
but with some genuinely fun moments in its closing hours. It struggles to tell this story effectively through the action within missions, though, instead preserving any real moments of confidence for the cutscenes that bookend them.
It makes for an uneven cadence that joltingly stops and starts rather than flows gracefully. I do like this version of Wolverine a lot though, as Liam McIntyre's performance grasped Logan a personality to match his trademark blades, a sharp, surprising hidden depth housed in a bulky,
blunt instrument of a body. He delicately balances the shadows of his past with the future of youth and time, all while managing his gentle and bright nature as animal instincts
sometimes breaks through the compassion he strives to show. But most of all, I like how he bounces off the other cast members. Full of the screaming and bloodshed, it's when things are taken down to a whisper that this campaign tends to shine. Chrissie Abapos in particular is fantastic as
Jean Grey, and enters a lot of the emotional weight of Wolverine's tale, often preventing it from fully veering into run-of-the-mill comic book storytelling. Love you, bye secretly.
Thank you. It is a slight shame then that outside of Logan and Jean, few other characters are given room for their own arcs to develop. They're given little to do outside of briefly crossing Wolverine to hinder him
or offering him a few words of wisdom from the other side of the bar. Though it's a credit to the writing team that these more tender moments don't end up sounding completely out of key, especially when contrasted with the heavy metal violence occurring on screen
whenever the claws come out. Wolverine's basic attacks are well-honed tools that sink smoothly into flesh and steel alike, with devastating combos delivered through rapid presses of the square and triangle bones.
It's incredibly responsive action, with the modern staples like dodges, parries and special attacks to tear through each enemy. It's not a complex system though, and is ultimately quite forgiving. A quick press of triangle will make Logan leap to an enemy within range,
and the more you stay on the front foot, the quicker your rage bar will fill up. Allows for critical hits to rip through foes at ease and the safety blanket of a revive in your back pocket. His healing factor also means that he'll rejuvenate over time while in combat.
A smart and lore appropriate decision that means you never have to scramble around arenas in search of health packs. The animation works is outstanding.
It really feels like after years of making sure Spider-Man didn't let anyone fall to their death, Insomniac just reveled in all the ways Wolverine can end someone's life. Brutal finishes from sliced up limbs to stabs up through jaws are employed with an impressive variety of story outcomes Maybe I should be placed on some sort of watchlist of fame though but I really couldn get enough of them
There's no denying that wielding those claws is slick, punchy and wonderfully bloody from an aesthetic perspective. It's just a shame, then, that halfway through Wolverine's 15-hour string of missions, I felt like I had my fill. The fundamentals are solid, but combat needed
a stronger sense of progression to sustain that sensation over a game of this length. especially when you're asked to cut down hundreds of enemies at a near-rememberless pace. Yes, there are unlockable skills and special abilities to build into your repertoire,
but only a handful, and you'll gain access to them relatively early on. I enjoyed spinning around like a lemon-tinged tornado, slacking up anyone in my path, and booting people off of skyscrapers and cliff edges is a joy that never got old.
But those techniques didn't change my approach to combat in any significant manner. This lack of evolution in Logan's toolset puts the pressure on two other factors in order for the action to remain exciting.
Enemy variation and encounter design. And only one of these is executed somewhat successfully. Whether it be traps, sci-fi forces or the evil ninja followers at the hand, there's a consistent drip feed of new enemy types to sink your claws into.
even if every fight is ultimately a test of the same reflexes. The problem is, although some may take a few more hits to take down, or take two parries to stun instead of one, each fight does pretty much feel the same.
When multiple enemy waves are comprised of these different units, the action can come alive if you learn to prioritize targets to spin out the herd most efficiently. But this balance isn't found anywhere near consistently enough.
More often than not, missions take the form of a series of corridors opening up into arenas where getting ambushed is a predictable probability. These arenas aren't constructed in overly interesting ways either,
mainly involving a large flat area filled with melee-based grunts and a sprinkle of higher platforms around the edge to range troublemakers. Leaping from enemy to enemy and dodging out of the way of projectiles when a red flasher appears takes up most of your time,
and when the locations these battles take place in all seem so similar, enemy variety is the only real saving grace. For the most part, Wolverine wants you to lunge headfirst into the action, but it makes for a rather one-note dance.
Outside of the action, there's not much to shout about either. Each linear level does contain collectibles, including material caches required to unlock new outfits, which have both D-Cups and surface scratches alike when it comes to Wolverine's design history.
Alongside level-up XP for skills, AT is your main resource for progression, unlocking traits that give you a chance to shape a playstyle a little more to your liking. For example, widening parry windows or reducing damage taken.
This can be acquired via two methods, collecting whiskey bottles and completing nightmare trials. The former are much like the caches and just require a sharp eye in order to find them, aside from following Wolverine's keen nose which is prevented as a glowing blue line on screen.
I never really found the puzzles in the Spider-Man games to be overly complex, but at least they threw a welcome bit of variety into the mix and got my brain cells tingling a little. Here, you simply walk up to optional objectives and press the triangle button every time.
It feels like a missed opportunity to elevate them one day. Still, I felt compelled to go back through each level and clean them all up, earning a platinum trophy after just 20 hours. The nightmare trials are a little more interesting, though.
Those are still here. They're a mixture of combat and movement challenges that put your skills to the test if you want to achieve the highest scores and in turn earn more AP. The real reward for completing these trials though is memories taken from Logan's long life
that give extra context to the main story. I mostly found myself simply going through the motions when playing through them, but at least they're a smart way to infuse satisfying challenges with bonus narrative nutrients. Wolverine is built like a brute, a true
powerhouse in combat, but he is also agile outside of it, and it's a shame those skills and never fully put to the test beyond some loose platforming. He's quick across the ground though and charging straight towards Carrick,
hopelessly firing into his deflecting blade, is a fun power trip. A blockbuster scene runs through all of it and occasionally its cinematic ambitions break out into full flung sequences full of enthralling action A similar thing can be said for its boss fights
of which there are surprisingly few. Most are remarkably similar in design, but well executed, like an early face-off with Omega Red, a mutant who's stalked by nightmares as a young child. It made for some lovely payback as I clicked away at the tentacle
terror's sagabar via well-timed parries. On the other hand, there's a sensual showdown that essentially boils down to whacking a metal arm for 15 minutes, which would feel more at home in a middle-of-the-road 3D platformer
than a top-tier action game. It's the sort of boss battle that should have stayed in the early 2000s, where your towering target mostly sits just outside of the arena. I just need a piece of this.
Can I have anything? Yeah. Logan is a naturally reclusive character. Even when out of his suit, he's on the fringes of society, equally happy in solitude as he is reluctantly searching for a connection with those trying to break his walls down.
He's basically made, but much hairier. It's a stark contrast to Spider-Man's open world, which lets you interact with its population as both Peter and his wrestling alter ego, allowing you to develop his character and build a connection to New York.
Logan's lodgings don't provide this same nourishment. Insomniac has intentionally made a very different sort of game here to be fair, with a much more linear structure and less of a focus on exploration in general. But it's still notable that the change in direction it chose is far less interactive,
and as a result, far less interesting. A prime example is an early stretch where you're tasked with coaxing a young mutant called Leek out of the room. He demands a password from you, which Logan finds by slowly walking around Essex's manor as he picks up three crayon-scrawled drawings.
Rather than asking you to then solve the riddles spread across these doodles yourself, Logan does so of his own accord upon returning to the locked door. There's no challenge here, no puzzle to solve. It's like Marvel's Wolverine only had two speeds,
full throttle bloodshed and introspective calm. An occasional middle ground would have been nice to fill out the in-between. That size reflects the scope of its story, though.
Yes, there's a larger threat at play here, but it's very much a personal Wolverine tale at its core, and I appreciate how restrained Insomniac has been in its approach to the wider X-Men ensemble. It serves the few characters it chooses to hone in on well, never running the risk of bloating the cast.
From this perspective, it's a decent first step into a different side of the Marvel Universe. Just like its heroes Adamantium Core, Marvel's Wolverine is built of sturdy stuff.
It just fails to layer something special atop its solid action, which wears thin well before the conclusion, as a result. I wish there was more variety as the combat shows its hand early on and the level design plays its face more often than not. That means this 15 hour campaign is largely carried
by its story which while not revolutionary is an enjoyable tale with good character work at time and a strong portrayal of Edgman's lead. Marvel's Wolverine is okay just a step or two below
Insomniac's other superhero efforts. For these director's comments here just have to tell you a little bit more about his Wolverine review. Some of you don't know, reviewed Marvel's Spider-Man 2 for us, God of War Ragnarok,
most of the Frasier games, I think all since Forbidden West, basically. Let's start off with, you know, recently we've given a couple tens, and we talk about what a ten means to that reviewer, what pushes it into it. Let's talk about that for a six.
Where do you end with a six? How do you start to find that number? Pretty much like you said, to be honest. I do look at the word we associate with the number more than anything, and the game is okay. so it gets a six right I look at the word more than the numbers like I write a review and I go
what is the word ultimately the end of that I feel most associated with it and I couldn't quite stretch to a good for this I don't think this is a good game I think it's an okay game which again doesn't mean it's a bad game I think it's perfectly okay which means like you said I
wouldn't tell people to rush out day one and get this but hey maybe you know later in the year if it's in a sale you might have some fun with this because there is some fun to be had with it and We have numbers for a reason, but yeah, the word, and especially all the words that came before it are important, but yeah.
I would I would to me think yeah this is like you said this is an okay game But despite this you know you did enjoy it enough to platinum it you said in the review So I want to talk about like what was that process like Because despite Mother Spider the platinum was like fairly easy
It sounds like it only took you 20-ish hours here. Yeah. What was that process like? And also, like, why, what made you want to do it? I just kind of, you know, once I finished the story, I'd already got 84% of the trophies. You get a lot of them just by doing the story, frankly.
So, it was only four to five hours of extra stuff, I'd say. and it was mainly, you know, like, collect every material, cash around each level, collect every whiskey bottle, do a certain move a certain amount of times.
Like, there wasn't... That's the thing, you know, in the Spider-Man games, they're quite enjoyable plans. I like Platinum's where they are, like, kind of collect-a-thons. They turn into those games for a bit and just, like, stringing around, maybe put a podcast on, enjoy yourself,
just do some collecting part of the time. But it's enjoyable and I think crucially movement in the Spider-Man games is fun, so just stringing around New York is fun too. it was a less enjoyable platinum this time around so it is mainly just replaying these linear levels
and hoping out of the corner of your eye you see this like blue like sensor going off and oh yeah there's the whiskey bottle I missed on my original playthrough so I wouldn't say it was the most enjoyable platinum in the world but I'm glad I did it and saw everything that Wolverine has to offer
so we've been doing some comparisons to Spider-Man here and you do a little bit of it in the review too but I think Defenders would be quick to say oh well you were just expecting this to be Spider-Man and it's not trying to be Spider-Man And that's not the mindset you're going into.
No. But I also think it's fair that if you're a fan of Insomniac games, you might not be paying super close attention, and you might just say, oh, I want to play the next Insomniac game. It's Marvel's Spider-Man, Marvel's Wolverine.
So, like, do you think the people that are sort of just in that mindset might be a little let down by what they find here, or do you think that the story stuff that was so important in Spider-Man
is enough to carry that crowd here? I will say the storytelling is kind of maybe the closest kind of connected tissue between the two series. Like, the gameplay kind of fundamentally does similar controls there,
but yeah, the move from, you know, this expansive New York to a linear set of levels is a big change, and it is kind of more old school in its approach, and I feel like, I kind of like that there's almost been a slight renaissance of like the old,
almost like, you know, 360 generation of game, and it's kind of fixed in more as that, but I feel like this doesn't bring me enough new stuff to kind of get me excited and I feel like if you were a fan of the stories the Spider-Man games tell
you will get a similar sort of feeling out of this Wolverine one I think they approach the character in a similar way I do like the way the Sony Act have adapted the Marvel Universe and I feel like while the Spider-Men, both of them kind of, the debuts in their games
are quite close to what you'd expect maybe from the comic books the Wolverine here while the fundamentals are kind of similar to what you'd expect from Wolverine's
story you know he's always going to have that trauma he's a very like a traumatized character he's like almost like grown-up part animal like you get a little bit of that here like but they do show the fucker side to him it's always kind of like seeing from Wolverine and
I like the relationship he kind of shares with Jean Grey in the story not to say too much about it it kind of in a clever way I know this will maybe split opinion with some people but it kind
of does borrow a little bit of Cypherlock's character and they kind of merge them into one at times here but I don't know what the future of this series looks like what they're going to do with other characters but I do kind of like that I'm always a fan of adaptations trying something
new with characters and worlds I don't want to see the same thing over and over again so the character work is kind of my favorite part of this game I think especially like I said those central pairing of Gene and Logan, I think, really are the highlight. And if you liked
the characters, if you liked the connections that Pete had with his family and friends in the original Marvel's Spider-Man especially, I think there is enough in this story that you'll enjoy. It just doesn't have any layer near the same gameplay progression that I
find in the Spider-Man games do. Well, Simon, thank you very much for telling us a little bit more about your experience with this game. It's great to go a little deeper on some of this stuff. If you want More from Cardi. Your last review for us was Lego Batman earlier this year, and if you want another action game,
we just gave Oni Mushi away the 4 to 10, so you can check that out. For everything else, stick with Ejira.