Marvel's Wolverine review: the perfect popcorn game to tide us over until GTA 6?

For a few years now, the X-Men have finally found their way home. After Fox, the mutants' film rights belong to Marvel Studios, which is busy preparing their grand return to the MCU. Last month at D23, Kevin Feige even unveiled the cast of the next X-Men film along with its release date. Two years ahead of the cinema, then, Wolverine arrives at rather a good moment to keep fans occupied. But above all, Insomniac has chosen to go against the current grain. At a time when AAA games foist open worlds on us capable of eating up more than 100 hours, Wolverine returns to a more old-school formula: a linear, spectacular, well-paced adventure that gets straight to the point without wasting the player's time. And for a character like Logan, it's hard to imagine a better playground. The question is whether Insomniac Games has managed to turn that promise into a genuinely great adventure.

Before charging headlong into this full review, we need to place Wolverine in the context of Insomniac Games, which has established itself as the most prolific PlayStation studio of the PS5 generation. Between Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and now Wolverine, the studio has been rattling off big productions with fairly impressive regularity. And while the game clearly isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, God knows Insomniac Games knows how to make it spin. Because it's frankly difficult to be bored in Wolverine. The game takes you by the hand, unspools its story at a brisk pace and never skimps on the staging. There's no big Sony-style open world to trudge through for hours, and no formula we'd already run into the ground with the Spider-Man games or Ghost of Tsushima. Instead, Insomniac favours small areas in which you can sometimes choose between stealth and a frontal assault, before picking the adventure back up.

For the rest, Wolverine fully owns its pure beat-'em-up DNA, with a few platforming sections that are simple but smooth enough never to break the rhythm. And above all, the studio stakes everything on what makes Logan Logan: brutal, twitchy and particularly bloody combat. Where some games pile on mechanics to impress, Wolverine ultimately prefers to do something very simple: make you want to pop the claws.

18+, but mainstream all the same

Marvel's Wolverine wants to be a spectacular game before it is a complicated one, and on that front Insomniac Games knows exactly what it's doing: attacks, dodges, parries and special abilities chain together with a fluidity that quickly makes you feel in command of the character. It's all the more effective because the claws aren't just there to look pretty. The fights are frankly violent, with blood, dismemberments and executions that are sometimes especially graphic. Logan can soak up an enormous amount of punishment thanks to his healing factor, but he isn't invincible, while the Rage system lets you temporarily seize the upper hand by boosting his power. A light RPG layer finally accompanies that rise in power, with new techniques and upgrades that let you fine-tune Logan's regeneration, damage or mobility. Nothing complex enough to break the game's accessibility, but enough to give a real sense of progression.

Marvel's Wolverine wants to be a spectacular game before it is a complicated one, and on that front Insomniac Games knows exactly what it's doing: attacks, dodges, parries and special abilities chain together with a fluidity that quickly makes you feel in command of the character. It's all the more effective because the claws aren't just there to look pretty. The fights are frankly violent, with blood, dismemberments and executions that are sometimes especially graphic. Logan can soak up an enormous amount of punishment thanks to his healing factor, but he isn't invincible, while the Rage system lets you temporarily seize the upper hand by boosting his power. A light RPG layer finally accompanies that rise in power, with new techniques and upgrades that let you fine-tune Logan's regeneration, damage or mobility. Nothing complex enough to break the game's accessibility, but enough to give a real sense of progression.

Follow my lead

That determination never to lose the player carries right through to exploration. Marvel's Wolverine piles on little nudges to keep us on the right track, to the point where you rarely need to wonder where to go. His famous sense of smell is duly pressed into service to conjure up a trail and steer Logan towards his next destination. Getting lost is all but impossible, even when an area looks as though it might offer several routes. Handy, obviously, but it also feeds that sense of a game on very firm rails. The stealth sequences are even more telling, since they lean on extremely basic mechanics: enemies to slip past, AI that isn't the sharpest, and silent takedowns that sometimes feel lifted straight out of an action game from fifteen or twenty years ago. And on some level, you can see why.

Wolverine is a game built around pace and spectacle, and Insomniac Games clearly never wants a secondary mechanic to break the adventure's momentum. Stealth is there to vary the diet, and then the game hurries us back to what it does best: action. That doesn't stop you regretting how thoroughly everything has been pared down, though. You'd have liked Wolverine's sense of smell to do more with the environment, the hunting sections to go further, or the stealth to genuinely make use of a mutant with hyper-developed senses. The problem isn't so much their simplicity as their lack of ambition. Insomniac Games has plainly favoured efficiency over depth, and while that choice works well enough for the overall rhythm, it does occasionally leave a faint aftertaste of unfinished business.

X-Men: origins

Where Marvel's Wolverine scores more heavily is in its storytelling. Which is hardly a shock, given Insomniac's track record in that department. The studio had already shown with the Spider-Man games that it could tell blockbuster superhero stories while giving its characters enough room for us to genuinely care about them. Wolverine confirms that command. The adventure has us witness the birth of the X-Men and Team X, while gradually assembling a cast who aren't merely there to make Logan look good. Several strong figures cross his path, with relationships that shift as the narrative unfolds and put enough flesh on a story that could easily have settled for stringing action set pieces together.

And if the story works this well, that's largely down to the talent of the cast, starting with Liam McIntyre, who lends his voice and his presence to the clawed mutant. An actor I first came across, like most people, in Spartacus, and who delivers a thoroughly convincing Logan here, with that blend of rage, fragility and sarcasm that fits the character perfectly. It's also hard not to point out how well Insomniac has captured Wolverine physically. Logan is short, stocky and heavily muscled — three traits the Fox films and later Marvel Studios sometimes struggled to bring together on screen. Hugh Jackman's turn as Logan has always been rightly praised, but at six foot two he was never going to pass for comics-accurate. Here the character finally has that solid ball-of-muscle build we know from the page, without losing any agility.

A very lethal weapon

And you feel it the moment you pick up the controller. Moving around as Logan is a joy, wonderfully fluid. So is fighting as him, given how hard the developers have gone in on sheer fury. Every movement conveys that sense of contained power on the verge of erupting, and it's probably one of the game's greatest achievements. Above all, Insomniac has understood that with Wolverine, combat has to be physical. The scenery becomes a weapon in its own right: Logan can hurl enemies into walls, smash them against ledges or use whatever's around him to make the impacts hurt more. And thankfully, the developers have given him plenty to push back: soldiers, tougher enemies, The Hand's ninjas (God, they're stubborn), the Sentinels (even at human scale) and, above all, a roster of bosses and sub-bosses hardy enough to remind us that, healing factor and adamantium skeleton notwithstanding, Wolverine isn't invincible. That's precisely what makes the fights so enjoyable: Logan is a walking war machine, yet the game still forces us to stay alert, to parry at the right moment and to use his abilities to gain the upper hand. An approach far closer to what you want from a Wolverine than from a Spider-Man with claws.

And in the end, we rather liked this old-school approach. We finished the adventure in around 17 hours, a length that feels pretty well judged for this sort of game, especially as the experience doesn't necessarily stop at the credits. There are plenty of costumes and various claw designs to unlock, plus challenges that stretch things out a little for anyone fancying another round of letting off steam as Logan. So yes, Marvel's Wolverine is an old-fashioned game. Sometimes a bit too much so, particularly in certain mechanics that could have done with more depth, but if you're on board with that philosophy, it's hard not to have a good time. Insomniac delivers a tightly measured, violent adventure that's above all a real pleasure to play through, and one that never tries to keep you hanging around artificially for dozens of hours. It may not be the greatest game of 2026, nor the one that reinvents the genre, but it's certainly among the year's most enjoyable experiences of its kind.