Alright, so, real quick before we get into this one. This is gonna be a no-spoiler review, I'm not gonna touch anything past what's in the trailers and the marketing, so if you're on the fence about whether to play this, you should be totally safe watching or reading this all the way through. I'll flag if that changes, but it's not gonna change.

Okay. So. Marvel's Wolverine. I put about eighteen hours into this, finished the main story, did a decent chunk of the side content, and I want to start somewhere that's not actually about the game, because I think it's relevant to how you're gonna receive everything I say after this.

When this thing launched, the conversation for like the first week wasn't about the game. It was about a scent trail. A little blue-green line that shows up sometimes when Logan's tracking something, and somebody, I think it was a journalist actually, called it "fart gas" online, and that just... that became the whole story. That was the narrative. Outlets built entire pieces around that one joke, and look, I get it, it's a funny bit, I laughed the first time too. But here's the thing, and I say this as someone who plays a lot of these games: that trail only shows up during specific tracking moments. It's not on your screen constantly. Is it a fair thing to bring up in a conversation about hand-holding in big-budget action games? Sure, yeah, that's a legitimate conversation, we can have that. But building your whole review's framing around a screenshot of a glowing line instead of actually talking about the eighteen hours of game underneath it, that's not really doing your job as a critic, in my opinion. That's just, that's content. That's not a review.

So I want to actually talk about the game. Let's do that.

The story, no spoilers

Here's what I can tell you. Logan's missing pieces of his memory, and the whole game is structured around him, and you, slowly putting those pieces back together. It takes you through Canada, through Madripoor, through Tokyo, chasing the fallout of this anti-mutant thing that Trask and Essex have got going. That's genuinely all I'm gonna give you plot-wise, because I don't want to rob you of it.

What I will say, and I don't say this lightly, is that this is, for me personally, one of the best stories Insomniac has put into any of their Marvel games. I know that's a big statement. I stand behind it. It's a character piece first. It's not really trying to be a save-the-world blockbuster, even though technically the stakes are kind of that. It's more interested in who Logan is underneath all that. And Jean Grey, when she shows up, I want to be careful here, but the relationship between the two of them, it's not just a romance subplot bolted onto an action game to check a box. It's given real time. Real quiet moments. That's honestly rare in this genre, and I think it deserves to be talked about a lot more than it has been.

Combat and how it plays

Okay, gameplay. This is, hands down, the best a Wolverine game has ever felt to actually control. I've played the other attempts at this character in game form, and they always kind of felt like they were borrowing a moveset from somewhere else. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like Insomniac sat down and said, okay, what does it actually feel like to be an apex predator with knives coming out of your hands, and then built the combat system around answering that question.

It's aggressive. It's got weight to it. Every kill feels like it costs something, even though, obviously, with the healing factor, it doesn't actually cost him anything permanent. That's a neat trick the animation and the sound design are pulling off.

Level design is more contained than the Spider-Man games, it's not open world, and honestly, for this particular story, I think that was the right call. It keeps things focused.

If I've got one actual complaint on the gameplay side, and I do have one, it's the boss fights. They're fine. They're competent. But after spending hours learning how reactive and nasty the regular combat can be, I kind of wanted the boss fights to push that further than they did. They played it a little safe there.

Let's talk performance, because this is actually a big deal

So this is the part I really want people to pay attention to, because Insomniac did something here they haven't done before. Every previous Marvel game from this studio, you had your 30fps fidelity mode and your 60fps performance mode, and the ray tracing was always kind of bolted onto performance mode late, almost as an afterthought, sometimes even patched in after launch.

This game flips that completely. Performance mode on a base PS5, no Pro required, runs at 60 frames per second with ray tracing on, and that is the default mode when you boot the game up for the first time. That's not nothing. Internal resolution's sitting somewhere in that 1080p to 1440p range before reconstruction kicks in. If you go into fidelity mode, you're getting closer to native 4K internally, but you're sacrificing that frame rate, and for a combat system built around parries and dodges and fast chain attacks, I don't think that trade is worth it for most people.

If you've got a PS5 Pro, there's an Advanced Ray Tracing option, better reflections, better global illumination, and it's only costing you three to four frames per second to turn on, which is honestly a pretty small hit for what you're getting. And if you've got a VRR display that supports it, Performance mode on Pro can get up near 100 frames per second.

My recommendation, and I know some people are gonna disagree with me on this, just go with Performance mode. Turn off motion blur while you're at it, it's not doing you any favors at 60fps. Chromatic aberration too, personal preference, but I turn that off in pretty much everything.

So, should you buy it

Alright, let's get to the actual question everybody's here for. It's $69.99 standard, $79.99 if you want the Digital Deluxe stuff. Runtime's somewhere around fifteen to eighteen hours depending on how much side content you touch, which, yeah, that is shorter than Spider-Man 2. If cost-per-hour is the main thing driving your buying decisions, that's worth knowing going in, I'm not gonna pretend it isn't.

But for me, the story and the character work alone are worth the price of admission here. Combined with genuinely the best combat this character's ever had in a game and a technical package that's actually pushing forward instead of just repeating what the studio's done before. I think this is worth playing at launch if you've got any interest at all in this character or in Insomniac's other Marvel stuff.

We rate everything on the following scale:

PRESS X — This is worth your time. Go watch it, play it, listen to it.

YOUR CALL — Solid enough, flawed enough. Depends what you're in the mood for.

SKIP IT — Not worth the time you'd spend on it. There's better stuff out there.

Marvel's Wolverine: PRESS X

That's where I'm landing on this one. Play it on Performance mode, ignore the scent trail memes, they're really not worth the airtime they got, and go in for the character writing, because that's genuinely what's gonna stick with you after the credits roll.

As always, this is just one guy's opinion. Go play it yourself; form your own take. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you in the next one.

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