>>FULL REVIEW
I spent the last several days slowly getting talked out of a game I had been excited about for years.
That is probably the strangest place I have ever entered a review from. Wolverine has been one of my top three superheroes basically my entire life. Insomniac had already earned my trust with Spider-Man, and everything they were showing looked like exactly what I wanted: a mature Wolverine game, ridiculous violence, a focused story, and none of the pressure to turn Logan into another giant open-world checklist.
Then the reviews started coming out.
Suddenly I was reading about shallow combat, boring missions, a disappointing story, how short it was, how safe it was, how it wasn't worth $70. Enough of that starts getting in your head eventually. By launch I had gone from insanely excited to wondering whether I had completely misread this game.
I am very glad I ignored it.
I started playing last night. Then I kept playing. Then today became more Wolverine.
There was no point where I had to convince myself to continue because I had already paid for it or because I was waiting to reach some section where everything supposedly got better. The opposite happened. Every time I thought I had found a natural stopping point something else happened and I wanted to see the next ten minutes. Then the next ten. Then there is another fight or story moment or some ridiculous set piece and suddenly stopping feels harder than continuing.
That is what I want from a linear game.
I don't need Wolverine wandering around a massive map collecting 75 adamantium fragments so I can unlock a slightly different pair of pants. I don't need twenty settlements. I don't need a crafting system. I definitely don't need Logan picking berries for three hours because somebody decided every AAA game requires survival mechanics now.
Give me a great story and keep the damn thing moving.
Insomniac does.
The pacing might genuinely be my favorite thing about the entire game because it almost never gets comfortable sitting still. Combat leads into story. Story throws you somewhere new. Something that looks like a normal encounter suddenly turns into something much bigger. It has that older action-game mentality where the developers actually have an adventure they want you to experience instead of handing you a continent and hoping you entertain yourself.
And then there is Wolverine himself.
Being a lifelong fan probably made me more nervous about this part than anything else. Screw up Logan and none of the graphics or gore really matter. Obviously he needs the anger and violence, but there has to be something underneath that or he just becomes an angry guy with knives coming out of his hands.
This version works for me.
He feels dangerous even when I am not controlling him. He's brutal. He can be an asshole. There is also enough humanity underneath everything that I actually care about where the story is taking him instead of spending every cutscene waiting for the next opportunity to dismember somebody.
Although there is a lot of dismemberment.
Insomniac did not chicken out with the violence. These are six giant adamantium claws going through human bodies and the game finally treats them like it. Bodies get destroyed. Logan gets covered in blood. Some of the finishers are nasty. Watching his body take damage and heal also adds a lot to the fantasy because Wolverine can fight with the complete disregard for self-preservation that he should have.
The actual combat has probably surprised me the most because “repetitive” was one of those words I kept seeing before release.
I haven't felt that way about the fighting itself. I love how aggressive it gets, especially once the difficulty starts fighting back. There are encounters where I go from feeling completely in control to getting absolutely pummeled into Last Stand within seconds. Sometimes I recover. Sometimes Logan gets destroyed and I end up running the same fight again and again until I finally figure out what I am doing wrong.
That pressure helps the combat tremendously. You cannot just turn your brain off because Wolverine has a healing factor.
There is, however, a little repetition in who I am fighting.
If I never heard someone yell about the Reavers again I would probably be okay with that.
Enemy variety isn't bad, and the story obviously has legitimate reasons for keeping you around certain groups for extended stretches, so I understand why the same factions keep appearing. I just would have liked a few more surprises mixed into some of those encounters. It is a pretty minor complaint because the difficulty constantly changes the situation around those enemies. The Reaver I barely notice during one fight becomes a much bigger problem when five other people are beating the hell out of me and I am desperately trying not to hit Last Stand again.
So even when the faces get familiar, the fights rarely feel completely automatic.
The one thing that has consistently bothered me is the camera.
I am so used to widening FOV in basically every game I play that this tighter fixed view took some adjustment. There are fights where I am completely locked in on the enemy directly in front of Logan and suddenly somebody outside the frame connects with an attack I never realistically saw coming.
I have messed with my settings enough that I still don't know how much I could improve myself and how much is simply the intended camera behavior.
The annoying part is that I also understand exactly why Insomniac did it.
This game looks incredibly cinematic basically all the time. Keeping the camera close makes Logan fill the screen. Attacks feel heavier. Finishers look more violent. Story scenes slide naturally back into gameplay without the camera suddenly flying thirty feet behind him.
It is clearly intentional.
I would still love an FOV slider and the ability to ruin their carefully framed cinematography myself.
Visually the whole thing is ridiculous anyway. There have already been several moments where I stopped just to look at what was happening around me. Character detail is excellent, the environments change often enough that the linear design never makes the game feel visually small, and the amount of animation work put into Logan becomes more obvious the longer you play.
I also apparently disagree with the idea that a story-driven game taking control away from me sometimes is automatically a problem.
There are a lot of cinematics.
Good.
I bought a single-player narrative game from the studio behind Spider-Man because I wanted them to tell me a Wolverine story. Not every thirty seconds needs to become some interactive mechanic just so I can pretend I have complete agency.
Sometimes I am perfectly happy putting the controller down and watching something awesome happen for a couple minutes.
The price and replay-value argument is where I understand the criticism more. Personally, this is not something I see myself finishing and immediately restarting five times. New Game Plus exists for the people who want that, but once I finish the story I will probably be satisfied and move onto something else for a while.
That doesn't make it worth less to me.
I'd rather pay full price for a focused game that completely owns my attention than play something advertising 100 hours when I am already bored by hour twelve. Hours-per-dollar has never been the only way I judge whether a game was worth buying.
And Wolverine knows exactly what kind of experience it wants to be.
That is why expectations matter so much with this one.
If you wanted Wolverine Skyrim or a giant Spider-Man-style open world or something designed to become your next 300-hour game, I can see how this might not be what you wanted.
It is exactly what I wanted.
A violent linear superhero game with absurd production value. A Logan I actually care about. A story that moves instead of constantly finding excuses to interrupt itself. Combat that makes adamantium claws feel as dangerous as they are supposed to be.
Maybe that is why my experience feels so far removed from some of the coverage I spent the days before launch reading. People are obviously going to respond to games differently, and something that completely works for me can completely miss somebody else.
But I genuinely do not recognize the lifeless mediocre game I was being warned about.
I recognize the game that kept me awake much later than I intended last night.
And the one I immediately turned back on today.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Wolverine fans and anyone who misses tightly focused single-player games that would rather deliver fifteen great hours than stretch themselves into a seventy-hour open world.
SKIP IT IF
You need an open world, extensive exploration, deep build crafting, or hundreds of hours of replayability from every full-price game you buy.
