Here comes a long one, so bear with me.

Let me make it clear that, from a young age, I grew up with comics, animations, video games, and Marvel/DC movies. My room was (and still is) full of action figures of these heroes. So when I’m waiting for releases like this, beyond the hype I feel, I also feel like a kid again. Batman and Wolverine have always been my two favorites. Beyond the emotional side of things, I’ll try to be as objective as I can.

I’ll start by addressing the elephant in the room, which is none other than the hand-holding and other little things we’ve seen and heard about in the previews.
I played the game on day one, and yes, I encountered the bright blue line that guides you straight ahead in an environment designed for you to go straight ahead. I also encountered the QTEs where, whether I pressed a button or not, the result was the same and nothing was affected. I also saw firsthand the infamous part with the motorcycle that drives itself. Let’s take them one at a time.
First, the blue line represents Wolverine’s ability to track someone or something by scent. The line appears when needed and when there’s a specific reason for it, to serve a purpose; it isn’t constantly on your path. Of course, there’s not much point discussing it anymore, since it was patched yesterday and has been noticeably fixed. It’s no longer very visible, and you can change it from blue to white so it blends in better with the environment and doesn’t bother you. There’s also an On/Off option for tracking collectibles, which is also a positive for people who don’t want them handed to them on a plate.
The QTEs are special cases. What I mean is… there are some segments where it makes absolutely no difference whether you do them or not, and nothing changes. But in some other segments, if you fail, a different animation plays where you take damage, but the outcome is still the same. Essentially, they’re there to make the game more cinematic and nothing more. If you ask me, they don’t bother me.
Now, the part with the motorcycle: yes, it drives itself. You can either press R2 to accelerate or L2 to brake. (The same thing happens in RE9, but I don’t remember us trashing it like this. Anyway, back to the point.) On the difficulty I played, when I tried putting down the controller to see if it would finish by itself, I ended up dying over and over because I was taking damage. When I switched it to Easy, yes, the game finished the level by itself. So it’s both true and false at the same time. The difficulty makes the difference.

I played the game on the highest difficulty it offers and finished it in 22 hours. I didn’t speedrun it; I took my time, explored every level to see what each mission had to offer, and enjoyed every aspect of the level design.
The 22 hours were certainly heavily influenced by the difficulty level. I got absolutely destroyed and had to put in quite a bit of effort to make progress. The same doesn’t apply if someone puts it on Normal or lower, though. I tried it and found that it’s quite generous with the damage you deal to enemies as well as with your health regeneration. Even on Normal, you feel like you’re playing on Easy. For players like us, who have experience with more demanding games, Normal isn’t satisfying. That’s why I recommend the higher difficulties.

So, we’ll be judging it based on this experience on The Best There Is.

I appreciate the fact that the game doesn’t go easy on you at this difficulty. Enemies can easily make you feel overwhelmed, and you can end up vulnerable if you make the wrong decisions during combat.
Combat certainly isn’t anything extraordinary, and by no means have they reinvented the wheel. It’s very simple and has absolutely no depth, unlike other games in its genre. That alone is the main reason many people won’t even touch it, and that’s completely understandable.
But the simplicity of the combat is also what makes it so addictive. The fact that you don’t have 30 different ways to approach a fight like in other games (e.g. Crimson Desert), and that it’s the good old square, square, triangle, dodge, and special abilities, makes me nostalgic for the games I played and loved as a kid (the original GoW series, Darksiders, Mad Max, the Arkham series, etc.). Combined with how fast-paced and smooth the combat is, though, it works exceptionally well. It gets you hooked and makes you feel unstoppable. Besides, what more could a character with six claws and a healing factor do? ?‍♂️

Combat -> pretty basic, but it works perfectly for what it’s trying to represent. It makes you feel like you’re Wolverine. 8/10.

The characters are well-written. The actor playing Wolverine has done an amazing job, and the role fits him perfectly. I have the same thing to say about Jean Grey’s actress. Although it takes a little while for her to grab your interest, she ends up pleasantly surprising you as the story progresses. Of course, it was with her character that I noticed Sweet Baby Inc.’s influence regarding her assertiveness (it feels forced, something this particular character doesn’t need, because she’s one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe). Okay, though, it’s something you get over and can choose not to pay much attention to.
The villain in this story is very well known. His reveal doesn’t surprise us; we’ve seen it coming from miles away. I’d like to dwell on this a little and say that I’m tired of Insomniac making allies turn into enemies at the end. In Spider-Man 1 we had Octopus, in 2 we had Harry, in Miles Morales his childhood friend, and now the same thing here. I want to see something different. But Baker’s performance here is what sets him apart from the other villains in the aforementioned titles. The guy is INSANELY GOOD at what he does.
The game’s bosses are Insomniac’s best work. They’re all memorable and challenging, and beating them gives you an incredible sense of satisfaction. (Except for the god-awful Sentinel prototype boss, which is the most generic thing I’ve experienced in modern gaming.)

Characters -> Well-written, great chemistry between them, an incredible villain who has a reason to exist, but there was room for improvement, and it’s noticeable. 7/10.

Boss fights 9/10.

Finally, let’s get to the game’s story, where it clearly trips itself up. I’ll speak without spoilers.
The game is made for fans and fans only. It takes a lot of things for granted and doesn’t leave room for a little exposition, so that someone who plays the game without the necessary knowledge of the comics can follow the story without being completely lost.
What they basically did was take three different comic-book arcs and storylines, combine them, and come up with this result.
For someone who has the knowledge (like me), it’ll feel clever and quite original, which is something we’re not used to seeing from Insomniac; they usually choose safer paths.
The story makes sense at the end. The rest of the journey confuses you. But that’s intentional: throughout the game, it bombards you with little narrative treats, either through short 2–3 second cutscenes at various points, Easter eggs, or the Nightmare challenges, which also act as a kind of collectible, so that you can put the puzzle together and make sense of it before the ending explains it.

This is also the game’s weak point.
Unfortunately, it won’t turn someone unfamiliar with the genre who picks it up into a fan of the lore and universe, because that simply isn’t its purpose or the audience it’s aimed at. But it will manage to help them have a good time for as long as they spend playing its enjoyable gameplay.

Story -> somewhat predictable when it comes to revealing the main villain, quite bold in what it’s trying to set up for what comes next, with plenty of depth and originality.

For fans, 8/10.
For everyone else, 4/10.

My overall impression of Wolverine is extremely positive. I recognize its many flaws, but at the end of the day I had a great time and enjoyed every minute of it. For fans, it’s a love letter from Insomniac, written with respect for the character. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, though, which I hope we’ll see in a second installment with richer gameplay full of violence and blood.

At €80, I recommend it to fans of the genre.
For everyone else, it’ll be worth buying at €30 or less.

Overall score: 7.5/10!!!

My review is going to be quite long, so for anyone who doesn’t want to or doesn’t have the time to read the whole essay I’ve written, I’ll say briefly that Wolverine, unfortunately, is one of the most disappointing, boring, and soulless games I’ve ever played in my life. 1 star out of 5, and I wouldn’t recommend it even as a joke to anyone unless they find it for €20 or less. To be honest, even if the game were free, I still wouldn’t recommend it. If you absolutely have to get it because you’re a fan of Wolverine like me, I hope you buy it on disc so you can get rid of it afterward, since it doesn’t even deserve to remain in your collection.

I’m going to go over all the issues I personally had with the game now.

Spoiler Alert for anyone interested in the story. I have bad news for you. It took me 13 hours to finish it and get the platinum trophy. €80 for 13 hours wouldn’t bother me so much if the game’s story were actually good and it had at least a little replayability and more side content. Unfortunately, though, the game’s story is so boring, so bad, and so pointless that I genuinely wanted to hit skip during most of the cutscenes. The ending is predictable and, in my opinion, has no impact or buildup whatsoever. The characters have no personality, and the facial animations are terrible, to the point that the actors’ emotions can’t be conveyed on screen because they all look like they’ve had 20 Botox injections each. The dialogue is awful and so clichéd that you can imagine for yourselves what each character will say in their next line. The most important thing, though, is that I simply didn’t care for even a second about anything that happened in the story. It was completely uninteresting. I’d be more forgiving, of course, if the gameplay were really good and the story were the way it is. It’s a shame, though, because we could have gotten a really good story, since we’re talking about Wolverine.

Now let’s move on to the gameplay. By far the biggest disappointment for me in the whole game. It started off okay, but after the first chapter in Telembang, I realized I’d seen 80% of what it had to offer. It’s unacceptable for a character like Wolverine to have only 2 combo strings in the entire game, and for those 2 combos to be extremely clunky. Square three times and then triangle, and triangle, square, square, triangle. Yes, those are the only 2 combo strings Logan can do in the ENTIRE game. As if the game were made for 5-year-old children who can’t press more than one button at a time. Of course, he also has 6 techniques, of which the player can equip 4. Unfortunately, once again, they’re nothing special, and the time it takes for each one to recharge is enormous, so you’re forced to kill enemies with the 2 incredibly boring combos that have absolutely no weight to them while you wait two business days for them to recharge. He also has abilities that make him either stronger or restore health at the end of a combo, but again, nothing that makes his gameplay and moveset more fun, like, for example, the upgrades and abilities in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. The parry system is just okay; it could have been more fleshed out. The only moment when you ‘feel’ like Wolverine, as all the big reviewers say, is when you trigger Rage Drive. Rage Drive is the equivalent of Kratos’s Spartan Rage, just for Logan. In general, I expected more from the gameplay and hoped it would be in the style of Ninja Gaiden, DMC, Metal Gear Rising, etc., because I think that suits this character better. Also, the whole thing with forced walking segments has gotten old. I don’t mind my character just walking and talking to another character if they’re saying something interesting about the story, their relationship, or their past. It bothers me when that happens and they don’t say anything interesting. This happens about 5 times throughout the game and becomes ridiculous.

The gore is way too toned down for a character like Wolverine. You expect to see Mortal Kombat-style finishers, but instead you see Logan finishing off each enemy more mildly than Spider-Man in games by the same developer.

The game’s music is nonexistent; Wolverine’s main theme has two notes at the beginning and then they just gave up on it. Not memorable at all and uninspiring.

The climbing and traversal are also ridiculous. All the walls are painted white so the player can tell where they’re supposed to go and climb, as if there were another path to take, and instead of letting you climb wherever you want using Logan’s claws, it has you grabbing onto ledges as if you were playing Tomb Raider!

The game has a lot of hand-holding, but I can’t say I’d take off a whole point for that. Yes, it gets annoying when you’re trying to collect certain collectibles and Logan tells you that you need to head toward the main objective, but it’s not the end of the world, in my opinion.

The side content includes collectibles that you can pick up in each chapter, either to buy outfits or for a trophy, and it also has the Nightmare Doors. In the Nightmare Doors, you can do three kinds of trials: combat, platforming—which God knows what to call it—and enemy waves. In the latter, every five waves you can choose one of the two statues that appear in front of you, which give you a boost but also a disadvantage. For example, you get more health when you kill enemies, but at the same time your Rage Drive fills up more slowly. This also gets very tedious and boring, though, because the enemy variety is laughable. There are three types of enemies, if I’m not mistaken. Guys with ranged weapons, guys with energy blades who hit you whenever they get the chance, turning the encounter into nothing but a parry festival. Finally, there are brutes, who have A LOT of health and take 40 seconds each to kill. Oh, and some other ghost enemies that appear later in the game. All these enemy types stay the same throughout the entire game and are simply reskinned. At the beginning, they’re the same three enemies as Trask soldiers; later, in the middle of the game, Hand soldiers; and at the end, Sentinels. Overall, after this digression, which I think was important, the Nightmare Doors don’t offer much beyond the wave challenges, but there’s nothing else besides those.

Something I forgot to mention in the gameplay section is the camera. It’s so badly designed that you can’t tell where the hits are coming from. There are moments from the middle of the game onward when you face 10 enemies at once and they all charge at you without you even seeing them in front of you. The reaction time you need to parry an enemy that’s mere millimeters away from hitting you is that of an F1 driver. At least in my case, playing on the Best There Is difficulty. It might also be a skill issue, I don’t know lol. It would be more enjoyable if the camera during combat encounters were zoomed out more, like in the Batman: Arkham series. It’s the worst camera in a game I’ve played since Dark Souls 3, specifically the first phase of the Nameless King…

This is an unacceptable result for a game that was in development for 4–5 years and reportedly had a budget of $300 million. This game was an insult to the gaming community.

I see a lot of reviews saying that we should be happy and even grateful that we got this game after all the leaks and delays that happened. I believe we shouldn’t lower our standards so much, because Sony sees that it sells and will prepare another batch of equally terrible games. If someone genuinely loved it and enjoyed the game, good for them; I’m not going to sit here and tear them apart or attack them. Everyone has their own opinion.

Now, as for the positives, I wish I could write a whole paragraph, but given how things are, I can’t.

The graphics are nice, and some locations are beautiful, like all of Tokyo, for example. Most of the outfits are nice, and as for boss fights, I really liked Lady Deathstrike, even though her design is absolutely awful.

If you get it, you’ll have fun for 7–8 chapters (28 in total), but I think that after a certain point you’ll be playing it out of obligation and because you’ll feel bad about the money you spent. That’s how I felt, at least, and I don’t think I would have bothered finishing it if I didn’t like Wolverine as much as I do as a character, but everyone will have their own opinion.

I hope this helped, and thank you to anyone who read this whole wall of text.

The hate this game has received is unbelievable. Yes, it’s not perfect, but anyone giving it one star is kidding themselves. I don’t understand why everyone is suddenly trashing a linear game. 007 First Light was also 15 hours long and everyone praises it (me included). Uncharted 4 was also 15 hours and is considered a masterpiece. All the Uncharted games. Spider-Man was 17 hours, and everyone loved it. Miles Morales was 8 hours. The older God of War games were 8–10 hours and are all-time classics. If you enjoy something, it’s worth the money. Not every game needs to be Elden Ring or The Witcher 3. Relax a little.
As for Wolverine... A pretty decent story, very good performances from the actors, and an emotional, bittersweet ending that wraps everything up really nicely. As for the woke element that many people are criticizing, not at all. There’s a lesbian in the entire game and people made a big fuss as if it mattered to the story. It doesn’t matter at all! All you see is two women talking and saying they’re married. Wow!
The gameplay was the highlight for me. I wanted violence, blood, finishers, and that’s exactly what I got. And anyone who says the game either plays itself or has no depth at all was probably playing on easy mode. Combat has different combos depending on whether you tap or hold square or triangle; you perform different attacks if the enemy is stunned and if they’re not; there are 6 special abilities, of which you can have 4 active; there’s a separate ability for crowd control, rage mode where you slaughter everyone and everything, dodge, parry that requires good timing, stealth, and dozens of passive adaptations so you can play the way that suits you. Personally, I played on hard and thought it was just right for a good challenge. There’s also a very hard difficulty, which might be better for a second playthrough.
It also has good enemy variety, and every few hours you fight something different, which keeps the battles interesting. The 5–6 bosses it has are quite different from one another; you have to read their moves and react accordingly, or you’ll die very quickly if you just attack. They gradually get harder the more you play, culminating in an epic, spectacular finale with 3 stages and incredible action.
Speaking of hours, various people here say it’s not worth the money. For the €70 I paid, I had a fucking great time and don’t regret buying it for a second. I did all the extras (nightmare doors), searched for all the collectibles, and unlocked all the outfits. It took me 19 hours in total, without rushing and without dying many times. I think I died 10–12 times in the whole game. Even if it takes you 15 hours, it’s still an extremely fun game.

I’ll put it simply …
A truly immersive experience

A game that manages to capture exceptionally well the wild, dark, and relentless side of Wolverine. From the very first moments, it’s clear that this is not just another game based on a Marvel character, but an experience that truly wants to put you inside Logan’s mind and psychology.

What stands out most is the feel of the combat. Wolverine doesn’t feel like an ordinary superhero character. His movements are violent, fast, and dynamic, while his claws are truly the game’s main tool. Every fight has intensity and makes you feel like you’re controlling a character who isn’t afraid to jump into the middle of the conflict.

Particularly impressive is the fact that the game seems to place great importance on Logan’s personality. Behind the strength, rage, and violence there is a character with a past, inner conflicts, and emotions. This side makes the story much more interesting and gives greater weight to the moments between battles.

The game’s world is also one of its strong points. The atmosphere is darker and more mature, which fits Wolverine perfectly. The environments, characters, music, and direction create a feeling that is more like a cinematic adventure than a simple superhero game.

And of course, we can’t not talk about the graphics. The detail in the characters, environments, and animations makes the world look impressive. The facial expressions and cinematic scenes help a lot in making you feel like you’re watching a major Wolverine story and not just playing a game.

What I liked most, though, is that the game seems to understand what makes Wolverine so special. It doesn’t try to make him just “another superhero.” He is Logan: violent when necessary, sarcastic, lonely, but at the same time human and emotional.

The overall experience is truly immersive. From the battles to the exploration, and from the cinematic scenes to the more personal moments of the story, the game constantly creates the feeling that you’re taking part in a great Wolverine adventure.

If you’re a fan of Marvel, Wolverine, or action single-player games with a strong story in general, this is a title that truly deserves your attention. It has all the elements you’d expect from a major production: impressive action, a strong atmosphere, cinematic presentation, and a protagonist who can carry the entire experience on his own.

Marvel’s Wolverine is exactly the kind of game I expected to see from a character like Logan. Brutal, dark, spectacular, and full of personality. A game that makes you want to keep going, not only to see what happens in the story, but because you simply enjoy being Wolverine.