Marvel's Wolverine Review (Patreon)

I like Insomniac’s take on Wolverine and the world the studio has built around him. It’s an interesting universe with its own version of events, separating Wolverine from many of the typical origin stories that have been told across games, movies, and comics over the years. The performances really make it, with a lot of great little facial animations and touches that make the love story that sits at the core of the story work really well. The action is bloody in ways that games—especially games with this kind of budget—usually aren’t these days, which further fits the character. If you want to see Wolverine ripped to shreds, his enhanced bones poking through the holes in his flesh as he slowly heals from a bloody mess to, like, a regular dude, then this is the video game for you. But it comes with quite a few caveats that left me feeling like this whole thing is a seriously missed opportunity. There’s half of a great game here.

Or to put it another way, Wolverine is five hours of ideas stretched across a ten-hour game. It suffers from a shocking lack of enemy variety and tactics, meaning that once you’ve figured out a couple of key concepts, like the specific combo-ender that restores a ton of your health and the surprisingly mash-friendly parry button, there isn’t too much more to learn or do beyond just murdering everyone in your path with the exact same tactics for the rest of the game. Larger enemies show up from time to time, but the main difference there is that they just take longer to overpower. This eventually turns the combat into a repetitive grind as you just go through the motions, hitting normal enemies with a little heavy, light, light, heavy to set them up for a staggering attack that lets you kill them and move on to the next one. Many encounters feel like they go on one wave too long, and I found myself wishing that the game would just get on with it already instead of forcing me into more and more of the combat.

That’s not great place for a combat-focused action game to be, obviously, but the real crime here is that you have quite a few tactics and you’re often picking up more. While you’re fairly standard out of the gate, before too long you can do front kicks that let you bypass some of the combat by simply kicking guys off of cliffs, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic-style. You can hold down buttons for stronger combo-enders. You learn special attacks on cooldowns that can interrupt enemy attacks to give you the upper hand with no delay. But then the game’s skill tree eventually gives you free counters on the back of most any parry or dodge, which eventually tilts the entire combat system in the direction of waiting around and parrying as soon as an attack heads your way. While at times this feels powerful and cool, it’s a significant part of why the combat wears out its welcome so quickly.

The boss fights are weirdly skewed even further in this direction. In one case you’ll fight someone with the ability to heal, but if you parry enough of their attacks you’ll build up a stagger meter, eventually stunning the opponent and cutting off the healing while you wail away on them in a Quick Time Event. Rinse and repeat until enemy is dead. If you fail to parry here, the game will eventually pop up the icon for the parry button and essentially say HEY YOU NEED TO PARRY THIS GUY A BUNCH OR THIS FIGHT WILL LITERALLY LAST FOR-FRICKIN-EVER. Even the fights that don’t feature a healing opponent work the same way. It’s just a weird hook for the developers to hang almost every single boss fight in the game on. Considering how wide the default parry window is, you can practically mash it out between your attack animations and get way more parries than you probably deserve. If the rest of the combat was suited for these specific tasks, then maybe you could make an argument for bumping up to a harder difficulty setting or simply setting a smaller parry window in the options, but in practice utilizing more of your moves just makes these fights take even longer without actually making them more engaging. It’s frustrating and more than a little bizarre, because the core of it seems really sound in the first few hours. But the game just… doesn’t do anything with any of it. The triangle button is a heavy attack that also leaps to targets, so you rarely even have to navigate from one enemy to the next… he’ll just hop to the next guy and keep on cuttin’.

There’s still something to be said for the way this makes Wolverine feel like an impossibly powerful combatant. As you build up a rage meter with successive attacks, you can eventually take out lightly damaged enemies with a single blow, cutting through waves of dudes like they were nothing. It’s satisfying in that video game power fantasy kind of way. The trade-off is that Wolverine is more or less a glass cannon. You’ll dredge up health upgrades by grabbing collectibles, but even after getting to 200% health before the end of the game, there are attacks that will take like half your life. So there’s a bit of a dance involved as you parry everything you can while gliding from one guy to the next and trying to make sure that you aren’t being shot by off-screen enemies. If you run out of health and have a chunk of your rage meter filled, you’ll be granted another chance after mashing the square button to trade that rage for health. Otherwise it’s back to the last checkpoint.

The other thing that the game really likes doing is beating the ever-loving shit out of the main character. Wolverine is constantly getting torn up. In normal battles you’ll come out with simple tears in your suits and pants and stuff. Other parts of the game start to feel like a weird homage to the Metal Gear Solid 4 microwave corridor. Weird beams, rays, and jet engines are constantly conspiring to tear every last bit of flesh off of Wolverine’s body, leaving him a sinewy mess of blood and meat. Don’t sweat it too much, he heals fast! I found myself consistently impressed with the game’s willingness to constantly rip up characters. When you hit the highest rage level and start murdering guys with one attack, you’re just carving them up into bits. Legs come off, things of that nature. At one point it reminded me of 2000 classic (classic?) shooter, Soldier of Fortune. In cutscenes and the game’s too-frequent Quick Time Events you’re practically performing Mortal Kombat fatalities on people. You’re also on the receiving end of some brutal stuff. Ninjas will pounce and drive a gang of blades into your body, but don’t worry, you can yank a blade out and get a free kill with it. Honestly, it gets a little gross in a couple of spots, which is pretty neat. Games don’t often do this level of violence, especially licensed ones. It feels true to the character and the concept.

The game rewrites a lot of the typical origins of the teams and groups involved. This is a game about Team X, which in this specific story is a Canadian crew of mutants led by Nathanial Essex, who is running a sanctuary for mutants in a way that seems similar to basic idea of Charles Xavier and the X-Men. The game opens with Wolverine reconnecting with Team X after having run off on them some number of years back. Before too long they rescue a crew of mutants including Jean Grey. Bolivar Trask is the first big enemy on display, and here he’s still the same basic guy, hunting mutants and inventing Sentinels. Wolverine is a man who doesn’t remember much about his own past, and part of the game—including a series of optional combat and traversal trials that pop up as you move through the story—is about you uncovering more details about your previous exploits. I’m not deep enough into comics to have a strong opinion on ideas like “Mister Sinister repackaged as the leader of a mutant strike team,” but I found that most of the story they’re telling here works, and it feels fresh, even when it starts to bump up against ideas that have existed in other Marvel universes.

There’s a really powerful combination of story, writing, visual effects, sharp dialogue, great human performances, wanton violence, and frequent on-camera drinking that should’ve resulted in an amazing package. It’s a damned shame that the video game part of the video game just doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain. I very much wanted to like this game more than I did, but by the time the third act rolled around I was just mashing out the same combo over and over again and wondering how much was left.

3/5