Marvel’s Wolverine review: Fighting the good fight

Insomniac’s most violent game yet is a globe-trotting Wolverine adventure.

With a trio of Spider-Man games under its belt, Insomniac Games has shifted its focus to a much more morally complex comic book character in Wolverine for its latest title. Marvel’s Wolverine succeeds at separating itself from Insomniac’s web-slinging adventures, even if its narrative leaves a bit to be desired.

You had it coming, bub

One of Insomniac’s greatest strengths is character action, and immersing the player in a role. The Spider-Man games make you feel like Peter/Miles, and the same sensibilities are present in Wolverine. He’s an absolute killing machine, and the game makes you feel like you can rip any enemy to shreds.

It’s a standard hack-and-slash format, with Wolverine’s claws slicing and dicing soldiers, ninjas, and anyone else foolish enough to fight a guy who has killed hundreds of people with his own hands. You can chain together light attacks into devastating finishers, and use abilities to stun enemies or damage multiple at once.

I knew what I was signing up for, yet I still found myself taken aback by the level of sheer violence in this game. Wolverine stabs enemies through the face, dismembers, them, and rips them apart as blood flies everywhere. You’ll often see him shake the blood off of his claws before he resumes slaying. Blood and gore can be disabled entirely, but that won’t stop Logan from stabbing his claws into the back of a guy's head and watching as they protrude from his face.

As you level up, you can unlock and upgrade six key abilities that can be equipped to a four-slot wheel. After spending some time experimenting, I was able to create some absolutely nasty combos that helped me rip through even the sturdiest of enemies. Perhaps my favorite strategy was to stun an enemy before hitting them with a claw barrage, or knocking them to the ground so that I could leap a great distance to mount and execute them.

Just when you think the game can’t get any bloodier, Wolverine enters Rage mode, where he essentially becomes a wild animal; killing enemies with unique takedown animations as they scream in terror. Rage can be tweaked and customized by the way you upgrade abilities and equip Adaptations, which are passive abilities that enhance Wolverine’s powers.

While it’s incredibly satisfying to embody Wolverine in combat, the game struggles to make him interesting to play outside of it. Puzzles are fairly light, typically requiring you to follow footsteps or a scent trail, and his climbing and jumping just doesn’t hit like swinging around New York as Spider-Man. I did however appreciate the game’s modular difficulty settings, which let you tune enemy health, parry windows, and other aspects so that you can enjoy the game exactly how you want. Puzzles are few and far between, but you can even choose to skip those entirely if you don’t feel like finding a door code or discovering a weak spot in a wall.

In the end, it really does feel like you’re going through a series of rooms filled with bad guys. Luckily for Marvel’s Wolverine, it’s really fun to tear through a room full of bad guys.

Mutant mayhem

James Logan Howlett, commonly known as Wolverine, is often depicted as violent and hot-headed, the kind of character that punches and stabs most of his problems. This aspect of the character is front and center in Marvel’s Wolverine, and Insomniac Games explores it through his relationship with characters like Nathaniel Essex, Sabretooth, and Jean Grey. Logan also meets and looks after a crew of younger mutants, which serves as a vessel for his character development.

Marvel’s Wolverine isn’t an X-Men game, but it sure takes plenty of notes from popular X-Men themes, like the persecution of mutants and their general place in society. This is when the game is most interesting, in my opinion. Wolverine’s brutality is fascinatingly juxtaposed against younger, naive mutants who’ve yet to experience all the cruelties that he has. The quiet, reflective moments between him and characters like Mystique and Jean are some of my favorites in the game. 

However, Marvel’s Wolverine falls in the same trap as so many other superhero stories by introducing a macguffin and then putting an overreliance on it. So much of the story is spent on the drama of “We can’t let [REDACTED] fall into the wrong hands. It’s way too dangerous!” It’s generic and uninteresting. 

It doesn’t help that throughout the game, bits of Logan’s backstory are dispersed through the completion of Nightmare Cabins (challenge rooms that task players with killing enemies or reaching an endpoint), with many of these tales sounding far more interesting than the game’s actual plot. Wolverine is a character who’s seen generations of friends come and go, and one of these periods could have made an excellent setting for a video game.

Still, I had a decent time playing through the story. Insomniac have proved themselves experts at large-scale, cinematic action, and there were multiple setpieces in Wolverine that felt like something from a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. 

The story had a couple of genuine surprises, and I ended up really loving this game’s depiction of Jean Grey after being initially hesitant about her inclusion. Liam McIntyre is a great Logan, bringing a sense of humanity to a character that can sometimes feel like a caricature in some depictions. I’d be more than willing to sit down and see what adventure lies ahead for this slice of the Marvel gaming universe. 

Fresh claws

While it took me nearly 16 hours to roll credits on Marvel’s Wolverine, the completionists out there will be glad to know that there’s more to it than the main story, despite the game’s linear structure. Hidden material crates can be found and harvested for resources required to unlock suits, many of which draw from Wolverine’s appearances in comic books and other adjacent media. You can even customize his claws, mixing and matching them with his costume.

Nightmare Cabins are pretty neat, and seeing their doors materialize in real-time during a level reminded me of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, where Insomniac used the PlayStations SSD to great effect. The same technology is beneficial here, with minimal load times for practically everything you do in Marvel’s Wolverine. It’s a great-looking game, too, regardless of if you play in Performance or Fidelity mode.

The Shinigami

Marvel’s Wolverine is an action-heavy superhero game that does an excellent job adapting the iconic mutant. Combat is deeply satisfying despite its repetitiveness, and there are some excellent character moments in what is otherwise a fairly standard comic book story. More than anything, I walked away still convinced that Insomniac Games is best equipped to handle the Marvel IP, and I hope they’re far from finished playing in this space.

This review is based on a code provided by the publisher. Marvel's Wolverine launches for PS5 on September 15, 2026.

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Review for
Marvel's Wolverine
8
Pros

• Satisfying melee-based combat
• Cinematic setpieces
• Impressive story performances
• Modular difficulty settings
• Snappy loading and scene transitions

Cons

• Story doesn't reach its potential
• Gameplay gets repetitive
• Not much compelling content outside of combat