Wolverine Game Review: A Disappointingly Average Experience | Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Break yourself, we got another containment breach. The dog is off the leash. SCP Turbo Gaming Specimen Florida Swamp Man has once again broken containment from the gaming channel and leaking over to main.

[00:13] Typically I do my gaming reviews on the gaming channel. But for Wolverine, I'm going to make an exception because this one has been a fiery topic for weeks now.

[00:25] And I just finished it so I want to vomit out my thoughts. obviously there's a lot of strong emotions at play surrounding this game. Wolverine became like the Kingsman frequency, turning everyone violent. It's been fucking brutal.

[00:38] You have people that are super desperate to defend it, as if Sony gives a shit if you're fighting their PR battles for them, but there's people there that are like in the trenches. No, this is actually the best game ever made.

[00:50] Just kiss. It's a masterpiece. Everyone's wrong. You're wrong. It's a baseless hate campaign built up on lies. these fibs, and then there's people that are extremely desperate to find every single possible

[01:02] nitpick imaginable for why it's the worst game ever made. It's been a wild war zone here. Mangled Corpse is all over the place here. So I want to give you my thoughts after finishing it.

[01:16] It's not very good. This is about as mediocre as a big budget game gets. Now, it's definitely not the worst game of the year, like a lot of people are chirping up to say,

[01:28] but it is definitely a bottom three insomniac game that they've ever made. I think that's for damn sure, unfortunately. It really is just turbo mid.

[01:40] Now, before I really, you know, get into the minutiae here, I want to make a mention of the best soap and best deodorant ever made, and that's Cheeky. Go to usecheeky.com. Best soap and best deodorant there is. But anyway, Wolverine, I don't know how this is $300 million.

[01:57] I genuinely couldn't fathom where that money went. It's a pretty looking game, but there's also things in it that aren't pretty looking. Like, there are a lot of corners that were cut here.

[02:10] So that reported budget of $300 million clams got me really digging into my skull, scratching it confused, wondering how the fuck that was possible here. But anyway, let's really dive into the tuna melt sandwich that got served up.

[02:25] The worst part of Wolverine, to me, is its story. The story at no point ever hooked me. I think the vocal performances here, like the character performances from the voice actors, were really strong.

[02:37] I actually thought they did a great job. They had such terrible material to work with, there was no salvaging it through the performance. The best example for the level of writing that you'll find in Wolverine can be found in the superstar Sabretooth cringe Redditor, bro.

[02:52] He is an endless factory of just, like, every time he speaks, it's like I just sucked on a fucking linen, dude. It's like, ugh. Like, one of his lines during a really intense moment where a big betrayal is being revealed to Wolverine and Jean,

[03:09] and Sabretooth is starting to be alerted to it, he just goes, cry more! Maybe that'll make me care. He used to cry more. And, like, I think his iconic

[03:21] line that people will take away from this game is how he keeps saying to Logan, that's my Wolverine. He just, he says it, like, fucking two or three times or something at, like, just random moments. He's like,

[03:33] you missed this, didn't ya? He's like, no. Ah. That's my Wolverine. And then there's another one, like, in a bar during, like, an illusion, and we're going up the stairs right by him,

[03:45] and Sabretooth's just like, ah, that's my Wolverine. Like, multiple times, like, pretty much every one of Sabretooth's lines feels like it was written by one of the writer's 15-year-olds.

[03:57] Like, it's so bad, man, it's so bad. Sabretooth, I think, gets by far the worst treatment here, but the writing across the board is not good. That's the problem. The story's not good, and the writing in particular really sticks out as a glaring issue that needed some more workshopping.

[04:17] And it also feels like they didn't know where they wanted to go sometimes and got backed into a corner, so in order to progress, the way that they get to the next step is by having all the characters all at once get hit by the fucking orb of confusion,

[04:30] especially Jean. So there's a segment where Walter gets kidnapped by the Hand, and Logan's chasing their fart fumes through the city. I'll get to the scent trails here in a minute,

[04:42] but you're going through this chase trying to get Walter back from the Hand. We're a little too slow. He gets taken in a boat, and Wolverine's washing the boat, you know, fail away out there, speeding off, and then Gene flies in.

[04:55] And Gene just watches the boat go too. Gene can fly. Jean can lift Walter out of that boat if she wants to. She can fucking crush the boat while separating Walter if she wants to. She can fly out there and save him.

[05:08] She chooses not to. She, like, forgets she can do that, even though she spends 90% of this game levitating and flying around. In fact, there's probably only a handful of times throughout the game where she isn't flying. And yet she decides not to do that there at a pivotal moment with one of the beloved characters, Walter.

[05:24] She doesn want to use it to protect him and save him Why And there multiple moments like that throughout the game Jean in particular I think they do a huge disservice to Not only is she nerfed in her abilities

[05:37] which I can kind of understand. Jean is a very powerful character. It'd be hard to, like, balance around like a, you know, full throttle, nuts to butts, phoenix unleashed Jean. I get that'd be tough.

[05:49] But not only is she super nerfed in her power department, she is nerfed in, like, every possible department. For the vast majority of her time on screen in Wolverine, she was reduced to just a damsel in distress that is, like, perpetually frightened

[06:03] and, like, whining out for Wolverine to save her. Like, Wolverine, Logan, please, I need you. Logan, we've got to save these people. I can't do it alone. Logan, get over here now. And that's just such, like, that's insulting

[06:16] to Jean Grey's character, at least I think it is. And this is coming from someone who's not, like, the most well-versed in the lore of these characters, but even I know that Jean Grey wouldn't be the character you see in this game,

[06:29] at the very least. It's just, all of the writing and the story that they tell here is just very lackluster. Especially the ending. The ending devolves into, like, some CW-level hijinks.

[06:43] And it's just, I don't know what they thought they were cooking there. But it's a big whiff. there's a couple of moments sprinkled out throughout the game that I actually thought were kind of hype and this is something I said during the playthrough

[06:56] I think Insomniac had some cool cutscenes like good action in some of the cutscenes but unfortunately all of that good action is surrounded by terrible writing and context

[07:08] that just takes a lot of punch out of it and a lot of the oomph so it doesn't land overly well but in a vacuum some of those moments some of those scenes and set pieces are really well done and really hype.

[07:21] It's just they shot themselves in the foot by having such bad writing and characters around them that are just not written well. So, it's just unfortunate there. Now, I did briefly mention the trails,

[07:35] the hand-holding, which was one of the main complaints from reviewers before the game launched. Yeah, it's super present here. Is it as bad as I thought it would be? not quite, but it is

[07:48] egregious. This is the most hand-holding I've seen in a game. Like, the fart trail, like the synth that you're following, that is there a lot, but it's not there 100% of the time. There's a lot of, like,

[08:00] investigating you do as Logan, and that's when it comes up, and during every chase, it's there as well, and if you're near Whiskey, it's there.

[08:12] So, like, it is there a lot, but not as much as I thought it would be, but yeah, it is very, very present. And I know the co-op is like, well, just turn everything off.

[08:24] And I really don't like that defense because the default experience, the default settings are the ones that are what the majority of people are going to be interacting with. For me, and I've always said this, whatever the game ships at with default settings

[08:38] is how I believe the developer intends the game to be experienced. Otherwise, they wouldn't make it the fucking default. So I haven't really experimented with how deep these toggles are, what I can turn on or off, but the way it shifts is the way I played it. So QTEs, you've heard that QTEs play themselves? Yeah.

[08:59] So if you don't interact with a QTE, in the majority of cases, it will just complete it for you. If you press the wrong button during a QTE, it will also still count it as the correct one in certain cases.

[09:14] The trails, the beefing, the multiple different indicators on your UI, those things are present in the default settings. If you can opt out of them and choose to do so, that's all power to you.

[09:27] I've had no problems with accessibility features. None. Never have any big complaints there. But I do think they should be opt-in instead of opt-out.

[09:39] Like, having all of these, you know, fucking training wheels on your bicycle to keep you in line, like, I think all of those features are fine to be in the game, but only if you decide to turn them on.

[09:51] Like, if you're really fucking struggling to figure out where to go or to find collectibles, then you should be able to turn them on instead of having to turn them off if you don't want all that clutter. But yeah, it is a bit overblown how much they're here,

[10:07] but even still, this is one of the most hand-holding games I've ever played. Like Jiminy Christmas, during the first motorcycle segment, I had a hunch that if I just didn't interact with the game, it would just complete itself,

[10:22] and I got a text message, so it was the perfect time to try it. I just replied to a text message for, like, 20 seconds, and the game progressed completely normally and kept me going in the proper direction. There was no real way to, like, super fuck it up.

[10:35] Even with me not even looking at the screen or anything, it was still just getting Logan where he needs to go during the segment. And so, it is a game that treats you like you're a fucking Cro-Magnon idiot.

[10:49] it So again I don know how much can be turned off I played it default It is very hand I do think it is a little overstated how frequently the scents in everything are there but there are tons of scents that are always smelling

[11:06] you in the right direction. Very, very difficult to get lost, even if you wanted to. Now let's move on to what should have been the real meat and potatoes of this experience

[11:20] that should have been just an easy slam dunk, just a fucking windmill honey-dipping slam dunk, which is the gameplay, fucking Wolverine gameplay. It just gets really repetitive,

[11:34] and it never really feels like it gets as deep as I would have expected it to with the skill tree they have here as well as the adaptations. Adaptations are something that, again, was supposed to be gameplay augmenting and changing around how you approach encounters,

[11:48] like changing the threshold for when you can crit enemies with rage or changing things about, like, recharging your specials, stuff like that. But all of it still just feels shallow.

[12:02] Like, the beginning of the game, it's fun. Like, the gameplay felt solid. And, like, jumping from enemy to enemy, you know, where you're leaping across the battlefield to hit a sniper or something or doing, like, a long combo with the finisher.

[12:16] Like, it did feel satisfying, and I thought, like, okay, maybe the reviewers were wrong. I don't really see how this can get super repetitive, but after getting to, like, the two-hour mark, and then the three-hour mark, four-, five-hour mark, it just kept feeling like the same thing every single time,

[12:30] no matter what I was doing with my skills. So, in one playthrough, you can basically get every single technique point allocated to every single thing available. You only get ten strands, which means you get ten adaptations for, like, your build.

[12:43] build, not really the right nomenclature for that, that's not the right term for it, but the way that you, what you put into your strands changes the things, like I mentioned with crits and stuff like that, or you can

[12:55] change, like, you can actually improve your smell-o-vision if you wanted to, I don't know what fucking human being on the planet would have trouble finding things here, but yeah, there's exploration things that you can put points into

[13:07] for your strands, but like, even with all of that it just still felt very shallow which I was surprised by, because in the beginning I was like, oh, this is solid. Like, the gameplay is pretty good.

[13:19] It seemed like it was only going to get deeper, but it never really did. You get more abilities towards the end of the game, but the abilities, like, the special abilities don't change a whole lot about it. Like, they're flashy, they're pretty cool, but it doesn't really make the gameplay much different.

[13:35] So, like, your combos, I wouldn't even really call them combos, because you only have, like, a handful. You've got, like, a very small, tiny handful, like a five-foot-six-man's handful of combos.

[13:47] Like, there's not a whole lot of wiggling around there with cool combos to unleash. It's just a matter of when you want to weave in your special abilities or when you want to start critting, like, when you get enough rage.

[14:01] It just, the gameplay, unfortunately, did just start to get boring. So, carving through hordes of enemies became less fun and more of, like, a chore. especially during some of the nightmare doors, some of the trials.

[14:14] The trials are a joke. The trials are exactly what you are led to believe they are, where if it's a traversal trial, it is hold forward and jump occasionally. And it's not deeper than that. It's very difficult not to get the highest level adamantium on your first or second try.

[14:31] You'd have to maybe be asleep to miss those. The combat trials are equally as easy. The whole game is easy on normal difficulty. I imagine if you crank it up to the highest difficulty, you'll at least get presented with some kind of challenge.

[14:44] But the trials, they are as bare bones as they come. And the one in particular that I hated was just the surviving 25 waves of enemies to get the adamantium.

[14:56] You have to survive like 24 waves of enemies to get that. And like I said, since the gameplay never felt like it got anywhere beyond where you started, even with all the new additions of these special abilities and the technique

[15:10] points you're allocating, all of it still just felt so samey every single encounter. I don't know, it did just get repetitive, so I didn't enjoy going through 25 waves of bad guys, which I thought I would.

[15:23] Like, to me, Wolverine combat, that's obviously going to be the bread and butter of the experience, and it has decent ideas and there is some fun to be had for a few hours,

[15:36] but then it just starts to get stale. I do like the boss fights. I'll highlight those. I actually thought the boss fights were fun. There's nothing mind-blowing about them, but they were flashy.

[15:49] I also don't think the boss movesets were very deep, especially Sabertooth. the Sabertooth boss fight, I'm pretty sure he only had five moves, because that's all he used on me.

[16:03] Five moves, over and over and over again. Same with Omega Red, too, actually. So, like, the boss movesets aren't deep, but like I said, they're flashy. The final boss fight has a lot going on,

[16:15] so that's cool, but yeah, since the story was really not good, it's hard to really get invested in you know what happens next post fight But yeah anyway the combat was fun for a little while it did get very repetitive it wasn able to stay strong and satisfying and get me excited looking forward to each enemy

[16:40] encounter, each, you know, fucking bad guy that I eviscerate, it did just get very bland, after reaching, like, the halfway point, really, is when that started to set in,

[16:52] Which is unfortunate, it's a shame, but I don't want to be misconstrued, I don't think the combat's bad. As I said, I was enjoying it. I actually thought it was very solid for the most part, but it gets very stale and repetitive.

[17:06] It just feels like it never really evolves that much throughout your playthrough. even when you're getting new special abilities or putting new strands in there

[17:18] to like reduce the melee damage you take or you know charge your special faster through doing a barrage all of that never really feels like it does too much to let you get deeper

[17:30] into the nitty gritty of how you want to start just fucking two-piecing people and just cutting them to ribbons it always just feels like it's same old same old since the beginning of the game

[17:42] You know what I think would have really helped keep the combat feeling fresh? Is going for a more traditional hack and slash route with like old school air juggling and stuff like that. There's something here you can do where you can like drop kick an enemy and if you kick them off something you can actually dive on them and start barraging them when they hit the ground.

[18:00] Which is satisfying, which is pretty cool. But I think they should have went deeper into that realm and I think it would have suited Wolverine a lot more to just be more traditional hack and slash. You're doing, like, air combos. You're doing more than just two different combo finishers.

[18:14] So, like, you start a combo here with three hits, you finish it with triangle, or, you know, two hits triangle, or two hits jump and then go to the next guy. Like, if they would have just went a little harder on that to, like, keep you juggling enemies

[18:26] and keep you doing combos, I think that would have made it feel more fresh. But anyway, I do think there were good bones here with the combat. I did enjoy it. It just loses its luster when you get more towards the end of the game.

[18:40] So yeah, overall, I think Wolverine is just very... eh. It is far from the worst game of the year. That's just a bunch of fucking barnacles.

[18:52] It's not the worst game of the year. It is mid. And I mean that in like the truest textbook definition of that word. Not like an exaggeration or anything. It is just a very average, mediocre game.

[19:04] There's nothing special about it. It's not the worst experience. Like, there is fun to be had. Is the fun to be had here worth 70 clams? I don't think so.

[19:16] I don't think you get $70 worth of entertainment out of it. I don't mind that the game's linear, by the way. I guess I should mention that. I am very vocal about this. I actually prefer linear games. Because then you get to fully control the pacing of the game

[19:29] instead of like an open world game where there can be just these huge moments of just boredom and just like a slog or filled with bloat or just like empty. There's just so many open world sloppy

[19:41] sloppy games out there that don't do it well. So I actually think linear games have done a better job at delivering a really high quality experience because they're fully in control of like the pacing

[19:53] and what gets experienced by the player. In Wolverine here, I have no issue with it being linear, but what they do is they take a linear game and then make it feel even smaller, even more on rails, by having things auto-complete, by having you on your

[20:07] motorcycle not even need to interact with the game, it'll just do it for you, you get your scent trail that makes it feel, like, even more bottled, it's just, they take linearity and somehow find a way to go even more linear, so, like, it, it, I don't understand why they

[20:25] would do that, like, they just didn't trust the players to be able to, like, navigate a linear game anymore, I guess. It's so weird. And if you came into Wolverine knowing nothing about the character,

[20:37] you would probably think his defining characteristic is his sense of smell, like his super senses, instead of his claws. You would probably walk away from this game going, oh, so Wolverine's a character that's beloved because of his smell.

[20:50] Like, he's utilized, even outside of that trail, all the time. Like, when you're doing investigations and stuff, you're smelling things in the world and hearing things in the world so you can go look at them and listen to Logan talk about it. So, like, they just put the emphasis, like, on the wrong things

[21:04] with how they approach a linear game. So, again, I don't think it's a problem that it's linear. I think it's a problem how they utilize that here. But, yeah, I'll stop blabbering so much about it here.

[21:16] Overall, it's just an A game. It's very fine. I don't think it's worth the $70 price tag, but I think if you got this game on sale, you could probably get your money's worth if it was like a good enough sale for it.

[21:30] Now, I don't assign numbers to reviews or anything anymore, but last night on stream I kept getting asked like what would I give it out of 10. And for me it'd be like a high 5, low 6, somewhere in that general vicinity there.

[21:46] As I said, just like a very average game. Not the worst game of the year, but not very good. very disappointing from Insomniac. Alright, well anyway, that's about it. See ya.