Marvel’s Wolverine review – Superbly inconsistent leadership let down by crude, boring combat

ISpider-Man has always been difficult to follow. Insomniac’s three web-slinger games are masterpieces of superhero wish-fulfillment, letting you soar above a depiction of Manhattan filled with graffiti artists, roving journalists, and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, with a life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems like the perfect protagonist for a dark action adventure. However, somehow this well-made game doesn’t live up to its full potential.

The film takes place several years before the founding of the X-Men. In Marvel’s The Wolverine, a disenfranchised Logan returns to Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination, and Team X is determined to stop him, but there’s a secret hidden in Wolverine’s past that’s about to erupt. It’s a decent production, filled with the intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we’ve come to expect from the X-Men.

However, at his core, Marvel’s Wolverine, like his hero, is an unreconstructed brawler. From the start you can dodge, parry, grind and jump with speed and ferocity, but as you earn XP you unlock new moves and combos, as well as powerful special moves such as a tornado spin that damages enemies around you with a flurry of blades, or a spiral strike that allows you to cut through an enemy to escape a crowd. Your main combo attack is a barrage that can be accessed by landing multiple hits on Shred, but it can be closed with a jump attack or other unlocked moves to deal extra damage and stagger opponents. In addition, you can also unlock new DNA strands that improve your health and recovery speed. The highlight, however, is the three-stage rage meter that increases as you deal damage and parry enemies. Each stage gives you more powerful offensive and defensive stats, and in the final stage you become a nearly indestructible carnage machine, which is extremely liberating.

But while combat feels fluid and empowering, there’s rarely any need to get creative or experiment. In Spider-Man games, the grace of the character, his web-slinging, the three-dimensional nature of his movements all motivate you to fight. Beautiful; here I was reminded of 80s beat ’em ups or PS3 brawlers – a strong production line of identical fights against increasingly familiar types of enemies. Of course, this is true to Wolverine’s character, but similar melee-based adventures like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta provide deeply layered combat systems and varied enemy types that reward (and often require) players to use different techniques. I survived the vast majority of encounters on the default difficulty by parrying blows and switching between shred-linked attacks and jumps, opening and closing combo barrages while still allowing myself to use special abilities whenever they came online. Boss battles that felt extremely familiar and at times cliché required a similar approach, only with better timing and more patience.

Likewise, the team at Insomniac warned us that we could expect a more tightly structured environment than the Spider-Man games, and they weren’t kidding. The Wolverine is mostly linear, pushing us from set piece to set piece in a race through the world against time and verisimilitude. When we get to big, attractive cities like Madripoor or Tokyo, we find the roads closed and invisible walls directing us back to the action. The entire world feels like a theatrical backdrop, untouchable and detached, miles away from the bustling metropolis we’ll be living and exploring as Spidey. Yes, we all know it makes sense: Wolverine is by nature a rootless character, an avid wanderer, but introducing us to a Tokyo so meticulously detailed and visually seductive only to block out most of it seems almost cruel.

On the contrary, the game’s interpretation of Logan is a triumph. Thanks to exquisite character art and animation, and a brilliant performance from Liam McIntyre, he comes to life as a flawed, often unwitting hero capable of extreme cruelty and touching vulnerability. His rivalry with Sabretooth and his blossoming relationship with Jean Gray are complex and intricate, resulting in some truly touching scenes. But you don’t play any interactive role in the linear story or its relationships, and the few attempts to offer narrative-related puzzles are hastily developed and quickly abandoned. We’re told that Wolverine’s past trauma will be explored, but for much of the game this happens through pieces of lore that you unlock by taking part in mini-challenges such as timed parkour and battling hordes against waves of baddies. This seems like a rather insensitive way to portray and process PTSD. The game’s climax, when it arrives, is an absolute technical marvel, a Homeric clash of superpowers, but unfortunately its impact is diminished by too much expositional flashback and airy metaphysical detours.

Marvel’s Wolverine remains a lovingly crafted and beautifully polished hack-and-slash game that’s sure to delight Wolverine fans looking to eviscerate as many enemies as possible while hunting down X-Men Easter eggs and stopping every now and then to fill them in on the story and subtext. But despite the full-blooded use of Wolverine’s claws and generous array of moves and combos, the combat lacks both the bone-crushing punch of the Batman Arkham games and the balletic joy of Spider-Man. As the game goes on and enemies line up, it becomes more of a chore. Logan becomes what he always feared: a mercenary.

There is so much seductive and liberating fury in this game, in its story, its combat mechanics, its magnificently conflicted protagonist. But the crescendo always seems elusive, like an argument in another room or a war on the news.