Playstation continues its Marvel Universe of video games with its second entry, Wolverine. Following a pre-X-Men Logan, the game takes place during and after his exit from Team X, a special forces group that sought to protect mutant kind. The game details multiple lives and timelines Logan has lived in his century-plus life.

Marvel’s Wolverine is a 2026 action-adventure game. Insomniac Games developed it, and Sony Interactive Entertainment published it.

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Wolverine and may also contain spoilers for the overall character mythos and X-Men.

Warm up those claws for a new Marvel adventure.

Officially unveiled back in 2023, Marvel’s Wolverine promised the next step in Playstation & Marvel’s partnership for exclusive games. Following a successful run of Spider-Man games, fans were wondering where Insomniac was going next with the Marvel library. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would have called a game based on Wolverine. It’s such an insane and unexpected departure from the safe Spider-Man; it would be like coming from a string of Care Bear games, and then suddenly pivoting to The Punisher. Though the game has met some polarizing responses at launch, the game is meant to be an origin story to launch an even bigger stage for Marvel & Playstation’s next move together and it succeeds in a lot of ways.

A new Marvel beast is unleashed.

THE GOOD: Deep in a forest, a feral Logan is found in the woods by Dr. Nathanael Essex. After his rescue, he’s recruited into Team X, a task force created by Essex to protect mutants. Part of the team are Mystique, a longtime friend of Logan’s, as well as his half-brother Sabretooth/Victor Creed. Thirty years later, in the present, the trio must invade the base of an anti-mutant company known as Trask Industries to rescue a captured Essex. While attacking the base, Sabretooth & Logan’s old wounds spark continued strife during the mission. They eventually learn that an old, removed teammate of Team X, Omega Red, now leads an anti-mutant task force for Trask.

After Red’s defeat, Logan recommits to Team X, desiring to help mutants find a home. While at the Essex Institute, Logan gets reacquainted with Sabretooth and Mystique, but is soon tasked with protecting a group of mutants attacked by Trask’s Reavers. During the battle with the Reavers, Logan meets Jean Grey, a powerful mutant with psychic abilities who was a part of the group. He helps her save her comrades and convinces them to join him and Essex, which she does. Though Jean agreed to join, she soon becomes skeptical of Essex’s true intentions for mutants and warns Logan.

After a period of peace, Trask finds the institute, and the Reavers destroy it, killing a young mutant named Leech who bonded with Logan in the process. Seeking revenge, Essex orders a retaliatory attack, and the group happily agrees. In the destruction of Trask Industries, they capture Trask, with Essex planning to torture him in a similar many he was, but Logan mercifully kills him. Angry with Logan, Essex has Mystique impersonate Trask for the time being. Logan begins to agree with Jean that Essex is becoming less trustworthy. The survivors operate out of Mystique and her wife Tyger’s bar in Lowtown.  While winding down, Walter is captured by a cult known as The Hand.

Jean and Logan visit a former member of Team X named Shiro who has a tumultuous past with Logan. He agrees to help Logan and Jean locate The Hand’s hideout in Japan, and the duo invades their base. There they find the leader, Lady Deathstrike, and it is revealed that Logan had a history with the group in a past life. They discover a device known as the Helix Engine, which can awaken or improve mutant genes in humans. Logan defeats Deathstrike, and he and Jean attempt to destroy the Helix Engine, but are stopped by Essex and Sabretooth. Logan and Jean learn that Essex killed his family for their mutant gene and is planning to turn the planet into a haven for mutants under his control.

Essex uses experimental Sentinel robots that Logan and Jean discovered at Trask Industries to invade Lowtown and other areas in search of dormant mutants. During the attack, they inspire the locals to revolt and defend themselves. Logan faces Sabretooth in battle, defeating him and going after the remaining Sentinels. Believing he defeated Essex, the latter reveals monstrous-sized Sentinels, one of which kills Logan. While in his supposed death, Logan begins to regain memories of his past and learns that Essex lied to him and altered his and Jean’s memories from the very beginning. He revives and returns to Madipoor to reunite with Jean, and the two join Shiro in a final battle against Essex in Tokyo.

Logan, Jean, and Shiro defeat the Sentinels and kill Essex. Jean decides to continue where Team X left off, creating a home for mutants and asks Logan to join her. He politely refuses, opting instead to further connect the pieces of his lost past with Jean. It is revealed that Sabretooth survived his defeat by Logan and has been hearing the same voice that Logan was who is revealed to be the ancient mutant Apocalypse.

Logan and Jean dance with love in this new origin story.

First, I think when considering playing Marvel’s Wolverine it’s important to remember, for the story at least, that this is an origin of an adapted IP. With licensing and creative vision always being in contention with each other, no adapted work will be 100% exact to the source. With that being said, I didn’t mind this being a story about Logan and Jean having a century-old plus history and love together. The two are capable of being practically immortal, so you can work with that in a lot of ways with a new story.

A good chunk of the characters are solid representations of their comic counterparts. The seemingly never-ending will they/won’t they love story between Jean and Logan is presented well enough that it’s not too unrecognizable from the source material and dozens of other adaptations. The story is serviceable enough for even the most low-level Marvel or X-Men fans to digest without feeling lost or too heavily lore dumped.

The gameplay is admittedly fairly standard hack-and-slash, with you mowing down hordes of enemies at varying levels of severity to get to the next section of the game. You can unlock six super moves that do powerful damage, such as the Claw Tornado and a Drilling-like claw. You can level up Wolverine with XP earned from defeating enemies, finding interesting things around the world map, and destroying certain environmental pieces. Each level increase gives you a skill point that can be used to unlock perks for Logan, such as faster special move cooldowns, gaining health with parrying, etc. The skill points are also used to unlock the super moves as well as further upgrading them.

There’s a lot of suits present to toy around with in the game, from the infamous classic X-Men blue and yellow to his attire in Tokon Fighting Souls. There’s also additional claw designs as well, which aren’t nearly as important as the suits, but something if you want to play with different claw and suit match ups. Additionally there are these bonuses known as Nightmare Trials which vary from wave gauntlets to reaching the goal minigames of sort. Completing them unlocks AP which is used to give Logan more advanced perks outside of skill points such as increase health. They also unlock background story detailing different eras of time Logan lived in, narrated by himself. Finding different brands of whisky throughout the world also gives you AP.

A more humanized Logan is represented by Insomniac.

THE BAD: Ok where to begin with the negatives? Firstly, in my honest opinion there really isn’t that much wrong with Marvel’s Wolverine. A good chunk of it is fairly subjective, where the issue lies is what is 100% objectively misshaping and even grossly hindering the game’s full potential. And even worse is they’re glowingly noticeable. I’ll start with the story, I mentioned above that I thought for the most part it was fine for an origin game. However, there were some noticeable character shifts that me as a hardcore comic fan (not necessarily Marvel) didn’t get. Namely how they tried to give our first taste of the character with a bit of a softer Sabretooth. There are times in canon when he has a legit bond with Logan and depending on the story it’s even the catalyst for his hatred. My confusion lies in starting with him being soft in his debut appearance, him being a borderline, pure evil psychopath is a core part of his character, so it’s a little jarring seeing him as this kind of near comedic relief of sorts.

With Mystique I get, because nearly every piece of X-Men lore has tried to make her a sympathetic, tragic figure. Going further into the story, I felt like going with two major X-Men villains in Mister Sinister and Apocalypse was pretty strange for a debut game. Like they’ve heavily implied that Apocalypse will be the big bad in the sequel, but this is someone who should be on a much higher totem pole than just “Logan and friends”, it’s Apocalypse. This should be a major villain for a fully fleshed out X-Men team in any game, same for Mister Sinister. Just a bit strange for a debut title in the X-Men universe to immediately jump to either as the big bads even with this also being an origin story for Mister Sinister as well.

What are the problems with the gameplay? As far as the player gameplay not too much, I said early that it’s standard hack- -and-slash, which is fine, but it’s also just a bit dull. They try and spread things out a bit with the super moves and skills unlocked, as well as companion finishers with Jean, Sabretooth, and Mystique, but it gets old very fast. The game also has a fair share of bugs and glitches, way more than should have been. I can’t tell you how many times I booted up the game and started playing only to see some NPCs floating all over the place. There were also some game breaking bugs where Logan would get stuck and you just couldn’t progress so you would have to save and reload from the checkpoint. That happened more times than I care to count.

Traversal is one of the biggest blunders of the game. I don’t mind a good linear styled adventure, but even the most literal of linear games give players a bit of breathing room to explore the game’s world. In Marvel’s Wolverine it always felt like you were being held down by an invisible yet still just as depressing chainlink fence that was screaming at you to look but not touch. Just when you thought you could do a bit of sight seeing the map tricks you visually and you’re right back at your main goal. Traversal elements were also just so unbelievably annoying. Why do I need three different ways to be guided around the map?

There’s the infamous scent function, Logan’s heightened senses, and even an indicator for treasure chest to unlock crafting material for a new suit. Seriously, every time it went off it felt like I was having WWII flashbacks of a time on a Navy submarine. And they had the unthinkable, head scratching decision to include a perk that made the senses even more powerful as if they had zero faith in the player’s intelligence. It was all just very weird and jarring during my play through to experience all of that.

Rage against the machine in Marvel’s Wolverine..

OVERALL THOUGHTS: Marvel’s Wolverine is going to be just as polarizing today as it will be years down the line as more people play it. There’s a very good game in there, but with limited aspirations in spite of a massive budget it puts players in a tough spot of how to feel about the game. Coming off of a fairly successful Spider-Man 2 this isn’t a great look for Insomniac and with big plans reportedly in store for the X-Men on Playstation it’s not the opening title one would hope to kick off a new superhero game franchise within their ranks.  That being said, I enjoyed Wolverine mostly, and I feel like the average player will like it more than most, but the hardcore crowd will definitely be more annoyed with its glitches, certain story choices, and lack of breathing room to explore its world.