Is Marvel’s Wolverine Good? Why the New PS5 Game Is Getting Such Mixed Reviews
Marvel’s Wolverine finally arrived on PlayStation 5 on September 15, 2026, after years of anticipation.
And the reaction has been… complicated.
The game is not universally hated. Plenty of critics and players enjoy its brutal combat, performances, graphics, and straightforward action-game structure.
But there is also a loud and increasingly detailed wave of criticism surrounding the game, particularly from players who expected Insomniac Games to do for Wolverine what it previously did for Spider-Man.
That is where the disappointment becomes interesting.
Because the biggest complaint is not simply that Marvel’s Wolverine is a bad game.
It is that playing it does not always feel enough like being Wolverine.
And for a superhero game, that may be the more important problem.
Is the New Wolverine Game Good?
The answer depends heavily on what you expected from it.
Marvel’s Wolverine is a single-player, narrative-driven action-adventure developed by Insomniac Games, the same studio behind the highly regarded Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
It is built specifically for PS5 and is not an open-world game.
Instead, Wolverine uses a much more linear, chapter-based structure that moves Logan through combat encounters, story sequences, and tightly controlled environments.
Some reviewers love that focus.
Others think it makes the game feel restrictive, repetitive, and surprisingly old-fashioned.
That difference in expectations explains a lot of the divide.
If you wanted a polished, violent action game starring Wolverine, there is plenty here to enjoy.
If you expected Insomniac to make you feel like Wolverine in the same way Spider-Man makes you feel like Spider-Man, the results are much shakier.
Why Are People Disappointed With Marvel’s Wolverine?
The criticism keeps returning to several major issues:
restrictive level design
heavy hand-holding
repetitive combat
shallow exploration
a story that does not fully sell its version of Wolverine
mechanics that sometimes feel disconnected from the character
comparisons to Insomniac’s much stronger Spider-Man games
That last point matters enormously.
Insomniac created its own benchmark.
Spider-Man did not simply put Peter Parker into an action game.
The movement, combat, traversal, city design, humor, characters, villains, side activities, and animation all reinforce the fantasy that you are Spider-Man.
Swinging through New York is fun even when you are not doing anything important.
You can be heading toward a mission, notice a crime happening below, dive out of the sky, beat up a group of criminals, fire yourself back into the air, and keep going.
It feels natural to the character.
Wolverine apparently struggles more with that relationship between character and game design.
Does Marvel’s Wolverine Feel Like Wolverine?
This may be the most interesting criticism of the entire game.
Wolverine is an unusually physical character.
He is aggressive.
He heals.
He takes punishment.
He tracks people.
He has heightened senses.
He gets angry.
And, most obviously, he has six enormous adamantium claws attached to his hands.
The fantasy should almost write itself.
You should feel dangerous.
But critics of the game argue that its mechanics do not always reinforce that fantasy.
The Cosmonaut Variety Hour’s hour-long review, “Wolverine - The Game That Thinks You’re Stupid,” spends considerable time examining exactly this problem.
The criticism is not merely that individual fights are boring.
It is that the combat, level design, and story do not consistently combine into a convincing Wolverine power fantasy.
That is particularly noticeable because Insomniac already proved that it understands how powerful character-specific game design can be.
Why Spider-Man Works Better
I am currently playing Insomniac’s Spider-Man, and this is probably the easiest way I can explain the difference.
The Spider-Man game feels extremely Marvel.
New York feels like New York. Spider-Man talks like Spider-Man. He is funny, nerdy, awkward, ridiculously athletic, and constantly moving. He deals with street crime, takes pictures of landmarks, works in a lab, listens to J. Jonah Jameson rant about him, and spends half his life trying to keep Peter Parker and Spider-Man from colliding with each other.
Then there is the movement.
He gets overwhelmed by several enemies, flips over one of them, dodges gunfire, webs somebody to a wall, launches another guy into the air, swings across the room and somehow survives the entire thing.
Even some of the repetitive activities feel acceptable because doing them feels like something Spider-Man would actually be doing.
A superhero game is always going to repeat certain actions, and that is fine. The question is whether repeating those actions keeps selling the fantasy.
With Spider-Man, simply moving through the world does that.
Web-swinging through Manhattan is not dead space between missions. It is one of the main attractions.
And Insomniac deserves credit for that because Spider-Man games existed long before this series. Making a character swing through a city is not a new idea. Making the movement feel so fluid, effortless and recognizably Spider-Man that you can spend an hour just traveling around the map is much harder.
Wolverine needed an entirely different solution.
Nobody expected Logan to swing through Manhattan, and giving him Spider-Man-style traversal would obviously make no sense. Wolverine does not have a flashy movement mechanic that can carry half of the fantasy by itself.
He walks. He runs. He climbs. He rides vehicles. He fights.
So the rest of the game has to work harder.
His environments have to be memorable. His combat has to keep developing. His heightened senses need to feel useful rather than decorative. His healing factor should affect the way you approach danger. His rage, brutality and physicality should make moving through a level feel different from controlling a generic action-game protagonist.
This is where I keep thinking about the older God of War games.
Kratos also spends much of those games moving through linear environments. He is not swinging over cities or freely exploring a giant map. But those games rarely feel small.
You are climbing enormous structures, solving environmental puzzles, fighting increasingly ridiculous creatures, moving through temples and ruins, interacting with mythology, and constantly seeing something that reinforces the fact that you are playing as Kratos.
The environments are part of the character fantasy.
The puzzles are part of it.
The violence is part of it.
The mythology is everywhere.
Even when the path forward is fairly controlled, the game does not feel like it is dragging Kratos down a hallway from one combat room to another.
And the original God of War games were frequently pushing their PlayStation hardware hard enough that they looked almost like games from the next generation.
That is a particularly uncomfortable comparison for Marvel’s Wolverine. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games began on PS4, while Wolverine was built for PS5, yet some players have come away feeling that Spider-Man delivered the more impressive superhero spectacle.
Wolverine did not need Spider-Man’s traversal.
It needed its own equivalent.
Something about controlling Logan needed to be so unmistakably Wolverine that the repetitive parts of the game disappeared inside the fantasy.
For some players, that never quite happens.
Wolverine’s Lore Feels Strangely Distant
There is another piece of the Spider-Man comparison that has nothing to do with combat.
The Spider-Man game is absolutely soaked in Spider-Man.
Peter works in a laboratory. J. Jonah Jameson is constantly yelling about him. Familiar villains, relationships, locations and pieces of Marvel history keep appearing. Even taking photographs around New York feels connected to Peter Parker because photography is part of his character.
The game keeps reminding you who you are playing.
According to the Cosmonaut Variety Hour’s review, Marvel’s Wolverine does not lean nearly as hard into Logan’s history.
That is a strange choice because Wolverine has an enormous amount of history to pull from.
The X-Men.
Professor X.
Sabretooth.
Weapon X.
His memory.
His trauma.
His relationships.
His constant struggle between being a man and being something much more violent.
Wolverine is not a character suffering from a shortage of material.
If anything, the problem should have been deciding which parts of his history to use.
Separating Logan from too much of that mythology removes one of the easiest ways a game could make the player feel like Wolverine.
You can see the opposite approach in older Marvel games. Characters grew through upgrades, new abilities and stronger attacks while constantly being surrounded by recognizable Marvel locations, characters and stories. As your character became more powerful, you also felt more connected to the universe they belonged to.
That combination is incredibly satisfying.
Wolverine should be almost perfect for it.
Let his claws evolve mechanically. Let his healing factor affect gameplay. Let his senses become more powerful. Let his rage change what he can do. Let his relationships and history follow him into the story.
Make us feel the weight of being Logan.
Because putting Wolverine’s character model on screen is only the beginning.
The real trick is making the player forget there is a controller in their hands.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine Open World?
No.
Marvel’s Wolverine is deliberately not an open-world game.
PlayStation describes it as a single-player, narrative-driven action-adventure, and the game is structured around linear missions rather than a large freely explorable map.
Being linear is not automatically a problem.
Some of the best games ever made are linear.
The issue is whether that linearity feels purposeful or restrictive.
Several reviews describe Wolverine’s environments as corridors, combat rooms, and tightly controlled paths rather than spaces that invite much meaningful exploration.
GamesRadar, for example, criticized the game’s “boxy corridors” and limited agency between encounters.
That is very different from saying, “This game needed to be open world.”
It may not have.
But a linear game still needs interesting spaces.
Does Marvel’s Wolverine Hold Your Hand Too Much?
This is one of the more consistent criticisms.
Wolverine uses visual and sensory guidance to help players move through levels and locate objectives.
The problem, according to critics, is that the game sometimes becomes overly aggressive about telling you where to go.
The Cosmonaut review spends a lot of time on this.
He argues that the game has a strange level-design contradiction.
When guidance is active, the game can feel over-directed.
When that guidance disappears, some environments become unexpectedly confusing.
That suggests the problem is not simply “too many hints.”
It is that the environments themselves may not always communicate clearly enough where players should naturally want to go.
That is a deeper design problem.
Good level design quietly teaches you where to look.
Bad level design occasionally needs to shout.
Is the Combat in Marvel’s Wolverine Good?
This is another area where opinions split.
A number of reviewers praise the combat as fast, bloody, satisfying, and appropriately violent.
Push Square gave the game an 8/10 and highlighted the fast-paced gore, brutal takedowns, strong performances, and visual presentation.
TechRadar similarly praised the spectacle and visceral nature of the combat while questioning whether its underlying systems were actually as deep as they initially appear.
That distinction is useful.
Fun combat and deep combat are not necessarily the same thing.
You can enjoy ripping through enemies for several hours while still feeling that the system stops developing too early.
Other reviewers have complained that upgrades do not significantly alter the basic combat loop and that repetition becomes noticeable during the campaign.
Mobalytics, for example, scored the game 6/10 and argued that the combat never meaningfully grows beyond its initial foundation.
That is also one of the Cosmonaut review’s major complaints.
The combat works.His argument is more that “it works” is not enough for Wolverine.
Are the Combat Arenas Too Big?
This is a more specific criticism that I found particularly interesting.
The Cosmonaut review argues that some of Wolverine’s combat arenas are simply too large for the way Logan moves and fights.
That may sound trivial, but environment scale dramatically changes how combat feels.
Wolverine is fundamentally a close-range fighter.
If enemies are scattered across oversized spaces, you may spend too much time moving between targets instead of tearing through them.
That weakens momentum.
And Wolverine is a character whose combat should probably feel like relentless forward pressure.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine Repetitive?
For many reviewers, yes.
A common description of the campaign is essentially:
Fight enemies.
Move through a linear area.
Watch or participate in a story sequence.
Fight more enemies.
Move to another arena.
Repeat.
That basic structure is not unusual for an action game.
The problem is whether the mechanics continue evolving enough to disguise the repetition.
Some reviewers feel they do.
Others feel Wolverine reaches its ceiling too quickly.
VGTIMES described a repeating loop of combat arenas, walking sections, dialogue, and cutscenes that eventually makes the campaign feel longer than it actually is.
How Long Is Marvel’s Wolverine?
Most estimates place a normal playthrough somewhere around 15 to 20 hours, depending on difficulty, collectibles, and how thoroughly you explore.
GamesRadar estimates roughly 15 to 20 hours for most players.
That is not particularly long for a modern AAA game.
Which makes complaints about repetition more significant.
If players are feeling tired of a gameplay loop during a relatively focused 15-hour campaign, the issue probably is not simply that the game overstays a 60-hour runtime.
Why Is Marvel’s Wolverine Being Compared to Spider-Man So Much?
Because Insomniac made both games.
That comparison was inevitable.
More importantly, Spider-Man established what the studio is capable of when adapting a Marvel superhero.
The Spider-Man games are not highly regarded simply because Spider-Man is popular.
They are highly regarded because their mechanics reinforce their character.
The city is not just a map. It is Spider-Man’s playground.
Traversal is not dead time between missions.
Traversal is part of the game.
Wolverine requires a completely different design philosophy.
And that is probably why this game was always going to be more difficult to pull off than it initially appeared.
Wolverine does not have an obvious traversal mechanic.
He does not fly.
He does not swing.
He does not teleport.
His fantasy comes primarily from what happens when he reaches somebody.
That puts enormous pressure on combat, animation, level design, enemy behavior, damage, healing, sound, and narrative characterization.
If any of those pieces feel ordinary, Wolverine starts feeling ordinary.
And Wolverine should almost never feel ordinary.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine Worth $70?
This may ultimately be the most practical question.
The standard edition launched at $69.99.
For somebody who loves Wolverine, enjoys straightforward linear action games, and wants a polished PS5 showcase, that price may be completely reasonable.
For somebody looking at middling reviews and wondering whether this is another must-play Insomniac Marvel game, waiting for a sale makes considerably more sense.
That is especially true because Wolverine does not appear to have the same kind of endlessly replayable traversal or open-world wandering that gives Spider-Man extra life after the story.
What Rating Is Marvel’s Wolverine Getting?
The overall critical response has landed somewhere in the good but not exceptional range.
This is not a universally broken game.
It is not being reviewed like an industry catastrophe.
Some outlets have scored it quite highly.
Others have landed around sixes and sevens.
That spread is precisely why the discussion around Wolverine has become more interesting than a simple “good game/bad game” argument.
Some people are having a great time.
Other players are asking how the studio responsible for Spider-Man delivered something that feels so much less confident.
Does Marvel’s Wolverine Have Gore?
Yes.
Very much so.
Insomniac did not sanitize Wolverine’s violence.
The game features bloody claw attacks, dismemberment, brutal finishers, and a far more aggressive tone than the Spider-Man games.
That has actually been one of the more consistently praised aspects of the experience.
If you were worried that Wolverine would spend the whole game politely knocking armed enemies unconscious with adamantium knives attached to his hands, that is not what happened.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine “Woke”?
This is one of the questions appearing around Google searches for the game, so it is worth addressing without giving it more oxygen than it deserves.
Whether someone considers a game “woke” depends almost entirely on what that person means by the word.
That is not a useful measurement of whether the combat is good, whether the levels are well designed, whether Logan feels authentic, or whether the game is worth $70.
The substantive criticism surrounding Marvel’s Wolverine has much more to do with game design, combat depth, level structure, characterization, pacing, and story choices.
Those are things we can actually examine.
So, Is Marvel’s Wolverine Bad?
I would not call the consensus that simple.
There are too many people genuinely enjoying it.
The visuals are strong. The performances have been praised.
The combat can be satisfying. The violence certainly fits Wolverine.
And some players actually prefer a shorter, focused linear action game to another gigantic open-world checklist.
But the criticism is also much more substantial than “people online decided to hate something.”
The interesting complaints are structural.
Players wanted to feel like Wolverine.
And some of them walked away feeling like they were playing a perfectly competent action game that happened to have Wolverine standing in the middle of it.
That is a much harsher criticism than saying the graphics are bad or that the game has a few boring missions.
Insomniac’s Spider-Man games taught players what happens when superhero mechanics, characterization, setting, traversal, and story all start pulling in the same direction.
That is why Wolverine is being judged against them.
Not because Wolverine should play like Spider-Man.
Exactly the opposite.
People wanted Wolverine to feel every bit as unmistakably Wolverine.
For a lot of players, it apparently does not.
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