It’d be inaccurate to say the X-Men are having a resurgence, given that the team’s escapades are perennially popular stories in comics. However, between Marvel Tokon, Avengers: Doomsday, and X-Men ’97, the X-Men are certainly having a pop-culture moment. Also in the zeitgeist mix is Marvel’s Wolverine, a PlayStation 5-exclusive title developed by Insomniac Games.
I played a couple of hours of Wolverine and was shocked to see just how much of what I experienced lines up with the current X-Men media landscape. Wolverine takes place on Earth-1048–the same universe as Insomniac’s Spider-Man games–and opens with an assault on a Weapon X base, where Wolverine teams up with his longtime hater Sabertooth. I played through this just days after watching them both do the same thing in X-Men ’97.
A foolhardy mission featuring Wolverine is a pretty common narrative beat in Logan’s story, irrespective of format, but that sense of fortuitously timed familiarity became a feeling that permeated much of what I saw and played of Wolverine.
Wolverine is the latest in a type of game that PlayStation has become known for: a mostly linear action game that is narrative-driven and uses introspection, self-discovery, and personal growth as a theme for character development. Having spent ample time with the recent God of Wars, The Last of Us-es, Ghost of Tsushimas, Horizons and, of course, multiple Spider-Men, what I played wasn’t remarkable for its unique ideas, but nevertheless made a good impression in the way it was executed.
I’m neither surprised nor upset that Insomniac is sticking close to that template, as it happens to work very well for Wolverine. In this universe, Logan has lived a life spanning hundreds of years. He’s been through hell (figuratively), his memory is broken, and since the X-Men team hasn’t been established in this particular continuity yet, he’s mostly a loner. This is a compelling starting point for the kind of tame-the-beast-within tale that packs a big punch when it comes to the character.
Though Wolverine may be a game made from familiar pieces, Insomniac is putting them together in surprising ways. This became apparent from the intro, where a calm, wizened figure finds a feral Logan hiding in the wild and extends a helping hand. If you thought that person was Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men, you’d be wrong. This time it’s Nathaniel Essex, the X-Men antagonist who will become known as Mister Sinister.
By subverting expectations, Wolverine (the game, not the person) establishes tension and sparks intrigue, and I began thinking about Essex’s inevitable turn and what could potentially trigger a schism between him and Logan. That event, it turned out, became clearer a few hours into the demo, but my immediate task was to team up with Sabertooth and Mystique. Team X, as the trio is known, was put together by Essex and seemingly disbanded, but has come together once again to find and rescue Essex from the clutches of lunatic human supremacist Bolivar Trask.
Let’s get the easy part out of the way: Insomniac isn’t pulling any punches and has unleashed a Wolverine that savagely tears through his enemies with his iconic adamantium claws. In fact, the gameplay has actually been designed to encourage brutality so that the violence, along with being true to the character and feeling very satisfying, also feeds into the narrative.
This, for me, is the most interesting part of the game thus far. Fundamentally, the mechanics of combat are the same we’ve seen for years now: light attacks, heavy attacks, a timing-based parry, and dodges to create openings. And, like in similar action-oriented superhero games, you can develop all of these mechanics by unlocking new skills or enhance them by unlocking passive perks, which the game calls “Adaptations.” It’s all the essential building blocks of the freeflow combat system popularized by Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham games and are now used in pretty much every game that has melee fighting in it.
But what stuck with me was the sense of momentum that slowly builds as Wolverine lays waste to enemies, how that feeds into Logan’s mental state, and how the player becomes an active participant in that mind-body connection.
Although Logan doesn’t know who he is anymore, he has an acute awareness that inside him is something monstrous fighting to be let loose, which scares him. In the thick of combat, that push-and-pull struggle manifests as a meter that represents his rage. Although Logan has his healing factor, he still feels pain and can be injured. Rage, which is split into segments, begins as a way of recovering health. But the longer the violence goes on, the more Logan’s Rage meter builds, and the more aggressive Logan becomes.
For the player, that creates a satisfying combat loop that, smartly, is in lockstep with Logan’s escalating on-screen emotions. The demands and the precision required of the player to take out waves of Trask’s goons changes as he gets more and more enraged, until there’s a kind of parity between the player’s input and Logan’s blind rage and indiscriminate killing.
Wolverine’s opening salvo usually begins with a leap that closes the gap between himself and the enemy. With his claws out, he plunges into his target, and launches into a series of quick attacks that can be ended with a more powerful one. It’s a ruthless dance of back-and-forth that requires directing Wolverine towards the most imminent threats, be they a soldier firing a gun from long range or one using a shield to take the sting out of his attacks. In one situation, Wolverine is lured into a room that takes away his healing factor, which means the player also needs to juggle taking out the devices suppressing his mutant abilities on top of the dangerous foes surrounding him.
As the Rage built up, I initially used a heavy finisher where Wolverine impales enemies on his claws and, by doing so, recovers health. This pairing of attacking until a bar of Rage is available to heal and then repeating is very effective. However, by mixing in special techniques like Tornado Spin, which sees Wolverine spin with his claws out to control the crowd of fodder, it becomes easier to maintain Rage and continue building toward increasing the meter to its third level.
About the same time that I reached level two, I found that the game was usually trying to overwhelm me with enemies, which pushed me to make quicker decisions in target prioritization, while also parrying and dodging, leaping to targets, attacking them, and moving on. This felt like an intentional ratcheting up of pressure specifically designed to make the eventual payoff feel intoxicating. And it worked very well.
At level-two Rage, I was cutting through Trask’s soldiers like they were made of butter; watching as the world around me was showered in blood and a grunting Logan leaped from one enemy to the next, claws out, shredding everything in his path. A few counters and a whole lot of eviscerated baddies later, Wolverine’s Rage reached level three.
At max level, Wolverine can launch into a berserker frenzy. This sees him essentially losing some degree of control as he’s driven by pure, animalistic instinct. The world loses its color, desaturating into black and white, and the sound of the musical score becomes muted, drowned out by Wolverine’s heavy breathing and snarls, and the snikt of his claws as they slice through bodies and the environment around him. Crucially, the player’s inputs simplify to just hitting two trigger buttons to viciously maul anyone in his path, instantly killing them.
That process no doubt sounds pretty ordinary on paper. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the synergy between the various systems building into a big, violent payoff put a smile on my face. It’s one of the ideas that Insomniac has implemented to bring authenticity to the character, in the same way that exhilarating web-swinging, mid-air pirouettes, and impromptu backflips were how the studio realized the fantasy of being Spider-Man.
There’s a level of satisfaction that comes from that sudden shift from carefully timed strikes and evasive maneuvers to repeatedly hammering two buttons to obliterate everyone and everything that embodies Wolverine and his anger so well. But it was also a release for me, too. Like Logan, I was able to throw out the need to think about what I was doing and give in to effortless and mindless killing.
In this berserker state, continuing to attack and kill adds to his Rage meter, which means it’s possible to stay in that mode for extended periods of time, making the crash all the more effective when the berserker state ends and sights and sounds of the world come rushing back, leaving Wolverine and the player to deal with the death and destruction they wrought together. It’s a very neat trick that, for the couple of hours I played, never got old. Whether the transition remains as effective over multiple hours remains to be seen, but I suspect that being able to unlock new techniques and Adaptations will help keep things fresh.
The satisfaction of combat is what I left thinking most about, but there are a number of other noteworthy elements that I’m eager to experience more of. As mentioned, Nathaniel Essex’s arc from idealist to lunatic is a major one. During my session, I reached the point where cracks started to form in his relationship with Logan, as Essex started to descend into his own kind of savagery. But there are also numerous other characters and relationships that are similarly intriguing.
This is one of the few instances of non-comic-book X-Men material choosing to explore Mystique beyond the usefulness of her shapeshifting abilities in subterfuge. She’s actually the cooler head on Team X and often has to keep Wolverine and Sabertooth on-task. She’s depicted as smart, level-headed, and very much in love with Tyger. That’s a part of the character we haven’t seen much of on-screen. Similarly, there’s nuance in the way Sabertooth is depicted. Although he’s constantly giving Wolverine grief and goading him, it’s clear that he sees him as a kindred spirit and, though he never admits it, the closest thing he has to family.
That means that, when the cracks in Team X start to form, Sabertooth takes it very poorly, lashing out at Logan. Jean Grey is on the run, trying to help fellow mutants while evading capture. As outcasts, Logan and Jean start to build a relationship that brings out the vulnerabilities in both of them. And, surprisingly, my time with the game ended with the introduction of The Hand, a criminal organization that usually shows up in Daredevil’s stories, but are a big part of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This, in turn, paves the way for Lady Deathstrike to further complicate Logan’s life.
It’s undeniable that Insomniac’s take on Logan is firmly planted in familiar game design, but Wolverine is clearly doing more than just fitting a typical story of the character in it. From the little I played, its take on Logan, the way it continues to build out Earth-1048, and the authenticity of the character in how he plays are where the team is aiming to distinguish the game. Given that these are the same pillars that catapulted Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles to success, Wolverine could shape up to be another excellent superhero game from the studio.
