Marvel's Wolverine on PS5 Nails the Character, Not Much Else | Preview

Has Insomniac been more focused on making a good Wolverine experience than a good video game?

I imagine that this is an easy trap to fall into when making a game — not seeing the forest for the trees. (Or not seeing the beefcake for the arm fur.) It's also very much like Insomniac. This is a studio that focuses on fidelity and really sweats the details rather than setting out to rewrite the rules of the medium with every project. I mean that as a compliment. What other studio could base a whole game around as prosaic a feature as fast load times and come up with something as spectacular and entertaining as Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?

When this approach works, it really works. Insomniac has clearly cared about nothing other than doing the character of Wolverine justice, and the team has knocked it out of the park. After my time with the game — which was split between its opening section, and a chunk from the end of the first act — I was in love with its rendition of Logan, and not just in a hairy-arm way. Wolverine's look, his movement, his combat kit, his unlockable suits, and above all his gruff, fierce, yet tender characterization — as captured in Liam McIntyre's performance and some truly exquisite facial rendering and animation — are note-perfect. The only thing missing is the cigar (I get it, but still, boo). He's an adorable ball of savagery. And, as much as I love Hugh Jackman's take on the character, it's a joy to see Logan as the short king he should be, barely coming up to Sabertooth's waist.

Insomniac's focus on making a Wolverine game, as opposed to a game with Wolverine in it, has been total. That's why the game is set before the formation of the X-Men. (Insomniac is now essentially the custodian of its own Marvel timeline, which includes the Spider-Man games, Wolverine, and reportedly an X-Men game in the future.) The idea is to keep the focus on Logan and only include characters who will work with his story.

The game's outset finds Wolverine working with his fellow beast-man Sabertooth and the shapeshifting Mystique in Team X — a mutant superteam led not by Charles Xavier but by Nathaniel Essex, who in the comics becomes the villainous antagonist Mister Sinister. (Essex is played by Troy Baker, apparently doing an uncanny Paul Bettany impersonation.) Essex has been captured by the mutant-hating tech bro Bolivar Trask, inventor of the Sentinels, and Team X attempt to exfiltrate him from a heavily fortified Trask compound.

My demo then fast-forwarded to a confrontation with a prototype Sentinel at Trask's Madripoor HQ, after Logan's crush Jean Grey enters the picture, and some downtime in Madripoor's Lowtown, a shabby but mutant-friendly district where Logan can chat, drink whiskey, play "never have I ever" with Mystique, and engage in a loaded arm-wrestling bout with Sabertooth. Finally, a kidnapping sent Wolverine on the trail of mysterious ninja outfit the Hand.

Aside from the mildly clunky Sentinel boss fight — giant robots and stocky men with claws do not make natural bedfellows, in terms of video game mechanics anyway — it all feels just right. Wolverine is clearly an extremely story-forward game, and even my relatively short glimpse fleshed out believable and interesting dynamics between Logan, Jean, Mystique, Sabertooth, and especially Essex, who in this take is a Professor X/Magneto-style mentor figure with whom Wolverine seems to be on a collision course. The characters are boldly but not superficially drawn, and loom large in the frame. As a starting point for a remixed take on some classic X-Men relationships, storylines, and themes, Marvel's Wolverine seems fascinating, even artful.

Insomniac's total concentration on what will work for Wolverine extends to the game design, too. Reasoning that the character is best served by a globe-trotting adventure (as opposed to a single open-world location), a strong narrative pull, and a focus on combat, Insomniac has made Marvel's Wolverine into a single-minded linear action game that barrels forward with all its lead character's heedless energy. It's Uncharted without the puzzles and pace changes. Or, perhaps, it's God of War — by which I mean the original, bloodthirsty Greek games, not the more ruminative Norse era. It is an extremely violent game about fighting and not a whole lot else.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this; you can argue that straight-ahead action is an underserved genre these days, and that Marvel's Wolverine's lack of distractions and feature-creep is refreshing in the modern AAA landscape. Insomniac couldn't make unsatisfying combat if it tried, and there's a pleasing crescendo to battles, as Wolverine builds his rage and you build momentum from parrying and threat management to red-mist massacre. Insomniac also plays cunningly with Wolverine's regeneration power, which could so easily have dampened the challenge. He essentially has a small pool of fast-recharging health and a number of ways to replenish through combat that make him feel simultaneously vulnerable and unstoppable, and that keep you playing on the front foot.

In terms of depth, though, Wolverine's combat is hardly Bloodborne, and other gameplay modes like stealth and traversal are executed well enough, but very simply. There just isn't a whole lot going on here. The shallowness of the game's systems is exposed by the Nightmare Door challenges — abstract levels which unlock nuggets of his backstory, but which don't show a lot of design flair. It was good to take a breather in Lowtown, but every downtime distraction turned out to be engineered to move Logan a step closer to his next fight. You can't get off the Wolverine train.

As a choice for the character, I totally get it; and I appreciate that the game feels lean and free of blockbuster bloat. But I do wonder if room after room of henchmen to chop into little pieces will be enough to sustain players' interest through the promising storyline. I hope Insomniac has found some ways to introduce more variety to Marvel's Wolverine without sacrificing its admirably sure grip on what makes this character tick.

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Marvel's Wolverine will be released exclusively for PlayStation 5 on Sep. 15.