Wolverine Review : Have claws, will travel

If Insomniac’s latest superhero game, Wolverine, was judged on its looks alone, there is no doubt it would be a 10 out of 10.

This is a seriously good-looking game.

Fire up Photo Mode and zoom in on Logan and you’ll see pores on his skin, tiny details in the fabric of his suit and an extraordinary level of visual fidelity. It really is a stunning game — and, even more impressively, it runs extremely well on my launch PS5.

It’s clear that a sizeable chunk of the game’s reported $305 million budget went into making Wolverine look as good as possible. In fact, all of the images in this review were captured directly from the console.

And it shows.

This is the sort of game that makes you stop occasionally and think, “Yep, this is what the PS5 is truly capable of.”

It’s also surprisingly gory. Actually, scratch that. It’s really gory.

Globules of blood splatter Wolverine and the surrounding environment after he has sliced and diced his way through enemies. After some encounters, Logan is absolutely dripping in blood, and in others his adamantium coated ribs are visible through gouges in his body.

Which is rather fitting, really, but as the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

And while Wolverine is an enjoyable romp through the eyes of one of Marvel’s most polarising, it’s just not the great game I was expecting, especially given it comes from Insomniac.

The claws come out

Wolverine’s (real name James Howlet) adventure takes the player across the globe – from the snowy mountains of Canada to the neon lit streets of Japan and the humid climate of Madripoor – and opens with him having to track down his Team X founder boss Nathaniel Essex who is being held captive by Bolivar Trask, an anti-mutant industrialist.

The story is OK as far as super hero stories go but the combat takes centre stage here as you’d expect in a game featuring a near indestructible man with an adamantium skeleton and razor sharp claws that pop our from between his fingers.

And for the most part the combat shines, especially on the harder difficulties. As you progress you earn technique points which you can “spent” on a variety of combat techniques, such as slashing attacks that unleash a flurry of strikes or kicks that will break an opponent’s block and stagger them. Chain enough moves together and parry enough attacks and you can fill Logan’s rage metor which put him into an almost berserker attack mode, able to take down multiple enemies in a blood-fueled rampage.

I quickly discovered that, yes, I could simply hammer square for the most part and unleash a fairly relentless series of Wolverine slashes that would get me through encounters (mostly), but that only took me so far, and it didn’t take me long to realise that using the various combo moves made for a much more satisfying time. You feel more like a seasoned warrior that flows from foe to foe than a first-time brawler just swinging a set of claws.

While, I didn’t think the combat is as fluid as, say, that of the Batman: Arkham series, it works, and importantly, it makes you feel like Wolverine as he impales foes against walls, punctures lungs and lops off limbs all in his quest to reach the end goal.

Australian actor Liam McIntyre also does a sterling job as Logan, as does most of the supporting cast (especially Krizia Bajos as Jean Gray), and there’s a real sense that Insomniac understands the character of Logan and what makes him tick.

Where things start to grate is in how often the game wants to take control away from you. There are a lot of quick-time events (QTEs) – those moments where you’re asked to press a particular button or combination of buttons within a certain time frame to complete an action – and there are a lot of cut scenes. Too many, in my opinion, which becomes especially noticeable during some of the game’s big set pieces.

In one example, just when I thought I was about to do something epic, a cut scene kicked in and I had to watch Logan do something cool that I wished I had been doing myself.

Let me figure it out myself

There’s been criticism online that Wolverine “holds your hand too much” and yes, there is a fair amount of white paint that signifies things that you can jump or climb onto to help you move forward, and Logan will comment things like “[insert name here] must have gone this way”, but this is nothing new for modern games. Again, this is not unique to Wolverine, I remember the Horizon Dawn series was particularly bad for an over talkative hero.

Much has also been made of the blue scent trails used to represent Wolverine’s enhanced ability to track scents. Yes, they’re there, but they’re not quite the immersion-breaking mechanic some of the online would have you to believe as they are not there all the time, only when he’s tracking a specific person (a post-launch patch now lets you dial down the colour dominance so it’s almost imperceptible.

Wolverine can also “smell” where enemies are and identify other points of interest, which is something I wish I could have disabled, but do these mechanics annoy me enough to make me angry about them? No.

And again to be fair to Insomniac, The Witcher 3, for example, uses a similar mechanic, letting Geralt use his Witcher sense to find clues and and points of interest during quests, with important objects effectively highlighted for the player. I don’t remember there being the same level of outrage over that.

Busy Wolverine work

Fans expecting an open world game, like previous Insomniac super hero games, will be in for a shock, too.

There isn’t a huge map waiting for you to explore, with every nook and cranny hiding a collectible (although there are collective chests which contain metal that you can use to purchase new outfits, and whisky bottles). There are things called nightmare doors that unlock Logan’s suppressed memories where you complete a variety of challenges that unlock new resources, but for the most part, this is a very focused single-player experience – and I’m OK with that, although it would have been nice to have been able to explore the streets of Tokyo, for example, in a lot more depth.

One thing that I think Insomniac could have improved upon, though, is the stealth. Logan can climb trees and jump from branch to branch, letting him pounce on unsuspecting enemies, and he can take out foes while skulking around on the ground, but it just feels a little half-baked and a hastily added feature.

So, what’s the problem?

After playing Wolverine from start to finish, I’ve decided that while this isn’t Insomniac’s best game, it’s by no means the train wreck that some on the internet are making out. Is it perfect? No, but, honestly, very few games are. I liked it: I just didn’t love it.

The cast is solid, the combat is good (but maybe could have had a little more variety) and while the story gets better as the game progresses, I think the writing here is some of Insomniac’s weakest. The final third is definitely the most enjoyable.

Insomniac is one of PlayStation’s poster-child development studios, responsible for games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, and while I was playing I was waiting for a moment when everything comes together and it blew me away.

For me, that moment never really arrived.

Maybe it’s the timing

Part of me wonders whether Wolverine has arrived at an unfortunate time in the game-osphere where gamers are just getting tired of super hero games.

We’ve spent years swinging around cities, beating up bad guys and bosses, following waypoints and ticking off activities on maps. While much tighter in terms of game play, Wolverine is still operating within a super hero formula we’ve become very familiar with.

I also feel Wolverine may be the victim of a lot of online hate towards PlayStation for its decision to phase out physical media and and ultimately, games are subjective, right: Two people can often have wildly different opinions about the same game, and you know what? That’s OK. It means those two people have different tastes.

Would Wolverine have been received differently a few years ago? Maybe, but I do know that expectations are high when Insomniac releases a game like this – and Wolverine doesn’t quite reach those loft heights for me.

The verdict

I enjoyed playing Wolverine. Did it frustrate me at times? Of course it did but it’s a game that looks fantastic, Liam McIntyre nails it as Logan, and when Insomniac gets the balance right between letting you play and simply watching the action unfold, it can be bloody good fun, literally – but will I play it again? Probably not.

It’s just not the masterpiece that I was expecting. Wolverine is a good game that falls frustratingly short of being a great one.

Thanks to PlayStation NZ for the review code