Marvel's Wolverine review: the perfect popcorn game while we wait for GTA 6?

For a few years now, the X-Men have finally been back under the family roof. After Fox, the mutants' film rights now belong to Marvel Studios, which is 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 big screen, then, Wolverine lands at just the right moment to keep fans going. But above all, Insomniac has chosen to go against the current trend. At a time when AAA games foist open worlds on us that can soak up more than 100 hours, Wolverine goes back to a more old-school formula: a linear, spectacular, briskly 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 put 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 turn. Because it's frankly difficult to get bored in Wolverine. The game takes you by the hand, unspools its story at a sustained pace and never skimps on the staging. There's no sprawling, Sony-style open world to roam for hours, nor a formula we've 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 up the thread of the adventure again. For the rest, Wolverine fully embraces its pure beat 'em up DNA, with a few platforming sections that are simple but fluid enough never to break the rhythm. Above all, the studio bets everything on what makes Logan Logan: brutal, nervy and particularly bloody combat. 

18+, but mainstream all the same

Marvel's Wolverine wants to be spectacular before it is complicated, and on that front Insomniac Games knows exactly what it's doing: attacks, dodges, parries and special abilities flow together so smoothly that you quickly feel in command of the character. It's all the more effective because the claws aren't just there for show. The fights are genuinely violent, with blood, dismemberment and executions that are sometimes especially graphic. Logan can take an enormous amount of punishment thanks to his healing factor, but he isn't invincible, while the Rage system lets him temporarily seize the upper hand by boosting his power. A light RPG layer rounds out that growth, with new techniques and upgrades that let you fine-tune Logan's regeneration, damage or mobility. Nothing complex enough to compromise the game's accessibility, but enough to deliver a real sense of progression.

Marvel's Wolverine wants to be spectacular before it is complicated, and on that front Insomniac Games knows exactly what it's doing: attacks, dodges, parries and special abilities flow together so smoothly that you quickly feel in command of the character. It's all the more effective because the claws aren't just there for show. The fights are genuinely violent, with blood, dismemberment and executions that are sometimes especially graphic. Logan can take an enormous amount of punishment thanks to his healing factor, but he isn't invincible, while the Rage system lets him temporarily seize the upper hand by boosting his power. A light RPG layer rounds out that growth, with new techniques and upgrades that let you fine-tune Logan's regeneration, damage or mobility. Nothing complex enough to compromise the game's accessibility, but enough to deliver a real sense of progression.

Follow my lead

And that determination never to lose the player extends right into the exploration. Marvel's Wolverine piles on little nudges to keep steering us back onto the right path, to the point where you rarely have to wonder where to go. His famous sense of smell is called upon to conjure up a trail and guide Logan to his next destination. It's all but impossible to get lost, even when an area looks like it might offer several possible routes. Handy, of course, but it also feeds that sense of a game on very firm rails. The stealth sequences are even more telling, since they rest on extremely basic mechanics: enemies to skirt around, AI that isn't the sharpest tool in the box, 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 title built around pace and spectacle, and Insomniac Games clearly never wants a secondary mechanic to break the adventure's momentum. So the stealth is there to mix things up, and then the game swiftly hauls us back to what it does best: action. That doesn't stop you regretting quite how simplified everything is, mind. You'd have liked Wolverine's sense of smell to allow more play with the environment, the tracking sections to go deeper, or the stealth to genuinely make use of the abilities of a mutant with hyper-developed senses. The issue isn't so much their simplicity as their lack of ambition. Insomniac Games has plainly favoured efficiency over depth, and while that choice works rather well for the overall rhythm, it occasionally leaves a faint aftertaste of unfinished business.

X-Men: the origins

Where Marvel's Wolverine scores more heavily is in its storytelling. And that's hardly a shock given Insomniac's track record in the field. With the Spider-Man games, the studio had already shown it could tell blockbuster superhero stories while giving its characters enough room for you to genuinely care about them. Wolverine confirms that command. The adventure has us witness the rise of the X-Men and of 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 evolve over the course of the narrative and put enough flesh on a story that could easily have settled for stringing action set pieces together.

And if the story works as well as it does, that's largely down to the talent of the cast, starting with Liam McIntyre, who lends his voice and his personality to the clawed mutant. An actor I discovered, like many, in Spartacus, and who delivers a particularly 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 that the Fox films and then Marvel Studios sometimes struggled to combine on screen. Hugh Jackman's talent in the role of Logan has always been praised, but at six foot two, it's hard to call him faithful to the comics. Here, the character finally has that proper ball-of-muscle silhouette we know from the page, without losing any agility.

A very lethal weapon

And you feel it the moment you pick up the pad. Moving around as Logan is a joy of fluidity. Fighting as him is too, with the developers going all in on fury. Every movement conveys that sense of contained power ready to erupt at any second, and it's probably one of the game's greatest successes. Above all, Insomniac has grasped that with Wolverine, combat had to be physical. The scenery becomes a weapon in its own right, with Logan able to hurl enemies into a wall, smash them against a ledge or use whatever surrounds him to amplify the violence of the impacts. And thankfully, the developers have given him something to push back: soldiers, tougher enemies, The Hand's ninjas (blimey, they're hard work), Sentinels (even the human-sized ones) and, above all, a roster of bosses and sub-bosses stubborn enough to remind you that, healing factor and adamantium skeleton notwithstanding, Wolverine isn't invincible. That's precisely what makes the fights so enjoyable: Logan is an absolute war machine, yet the game still forces us to stay alert, to parry at the right moment and to exploit his abilities to gain the upper hand. An approach far closer to what you'd expect 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 models to unlock, plus challenges that stretch things out a little for anyone fancying another round of carnage with 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 buy into that philosophy, it's hard not to have a good time. Insomniac delivers a tightly calibrated, violent adventure that's above all a real pleasure to play through, and never tries to artificially keep you around for dozens of hours. It may not be the greatest game of 2026, nor the one that reinvents the genre, but it's definitely among the most enjoyable experiences of the year in its field.