Marvel's Wolverine: All claws, no bite

The stakes of being a hero. The one who rushes first to the rescue, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. No other medium conveys the emotion and story of a superhero better than video games. When you think of superhero games, Insomniac's Spider-Man or the Batman Arkham series come to mind.

Both series follow famous IPs and have attained mainstream success. Insomniac Games hoped to match that with their newest release, Marvel's Wolverine. But based on the public's reception, have they?

Marvel's Wolverine follows the famous hero Wolverine, or Logan, who has been in the media sphere since 1974, when American comic book writer Len Wein created him, and whom superhero comic fans have adored ever since.

The story sees Wolverine making his way through different locations to save displaced mutants endangered by the billionaire villain Bolivar Trask and his cybernetically enhanced militia. Wolverine works with a group known as Team X, formed by one Nathaniel Essex. Because of his innate mutant ability to regenerate from any wound, he is often thrown headfirst into battle. Alongside that regeneration, he wields claws that extend from his arms, forged from a metal known as Adamantium.

If you want an awe-inspiring visual experience where you don't have to think much about your actions or which fights you're winning, and you're okay with a totally mediocre experience— Wolverine is for you.

As Wolverine fights through hordes of enemies and clears many hurdles, he slowly uncovers the past he lost to amnesia. The game reveals this through challenge parkour rooms that help piece together who Logan really is.

Combat is a blend of hack-and-slash and free-flow, with Wolverine cutting through enemies in streamlined attacks. You can also pair your attacks with other characters for special moves and finishers.

The map is very linear, which I did not expect from Insomniac. I believed their strength lay in building extensive open worlds, and I still do.

The game is also riddled with quick-time events, which I found mildly annoying and which have heated up the gaming community. The navigation and pathfinding mechanics, meanwhile, have become notorious as a meme. Beyond the mechanics, the lack of screen presence for other characters disappointed me too.

Certain aspects of the mechanics make the game feel dumbed down and hand-holding at default difficulty. This is especially true of the navigation and quick-time events.

As you move about, you will eventually notice a blue marker, a scent trail drawn from Wolverine's enhanced smell. But while playing, I couldn't shake the feeling of being patronised, with this marker constantly clogging my screen.

You also get obnoxious auditory and visual aids to locate enemies, which prove to be overkill: they show enemy positions through walls and across extreme distances. The same aid applies to hidden chests and other mission-related items, letting you see them through walls. Worse, the feature cannot be turned off, whether players want it or not.

Aside from the awful navigation, the quick-time events frustrated me and the fans. They allow progress without requiring successful completion, which means you could finish the whole game without doing a single one properly.

With how often they appear, they get annoying quickly. It all adds to the sense of extreme hand-holding and dumbing down. These mechanics work together to leave a bad taste in your mouth, regardless of whether the other features of the game are good.

Even with these issues, I found the visuals stunning and on par with the high level of detail Insomniac Games is known for. The environments are extremely detailed, and the explosions and gore are a strong suit of the game. The interaction with grass and other elements is good too, showing the studio's effort. But the game's issues overshadow that hard work. It feels well optimised, though a few bugs linger here and there.

Overall, many players seem frustrated over just a few features, chiefly the navigation and guidance, which feel excessive given the game's linear setting and the fact that they are permanent. This could be easily resolved by an update to the settings, letting players turn the feature on and off as they wish.

They could also model it on the Witcher vision from The Witcher III, which you could toggle on. For guidance, they could strip out the excess white paint or snow used to mark the path and remove the awful visual guides. The game is linear and does not need so many guiding systems.

Other frustrations were the parkour sections and, again, the thin presence of some characters. The parkour lacks any challenge; it is repetitive and never leads to significant revelation, which is a shame given how much it could have added to Logan's story.

The overall story felt basic to me, especially considering the IP the game follows. The more I played, the more I felt Insomniac could have done so much more with a character as rich as Wolverine. The combat compounds this, growing stale quickly through a lack of variation and its repetitive, mindless button-mashing; I believe it could have been far more enticing with rogue-lite elements.

The frustration with the mechanics overall seems to reflect a wider, pent-up frustration towards AAA games as a whole. Some may argue the problems themselves are not that big, but I believe this step in expressing that frustration is necessary to bring about change.

The overall experience makes Marvel's Wolverine feel like a game where you can just switch off your brain and play. If you want an awe-inspiring visual experience where you don't have to think much about your actions or which fights you're winning, and you're okay with a totally mediocre experience, this game could be for you. With a few small updates, Insomniac can try to fix their mistakes, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover from the damage that has been dealt.