What parents need to know
Wolverine is an action game starring the most popular mutant in the Marvel Universe, Wolverine (for sure the title helped to guess). You play as the Canadian mutant in an alternate universe where Charles Xavier and his X-Men do not exist. The hero with claws of steel (or adamantium to be more precise) works with Team X, a team composed of Sabretooth and Mystique and led by the mysterious Nathaniel Essex.
Wolverine is a linear action game, in which you progress from level to level (the title has 30 levels). As the levels progress, we can find hidden secret rewards; chests full of materials that allow us to acquire new costumes as well as bottles of whiskey that allow us to improve our hero’s passive skills.
We can also find nightmare doors, which offer us certain challenges: survive successive waves of enemies, eliminate all enemies in a limited time or go through a level as quickly as possible. By completing these levels, we also improve our passive skills, but we learn more about Logan/Wolverine’s past who suffers from amnesia.
We also improve our character by leveling up, which allows us to unlock new combat techniques and improve them. To level up, you have to defeat enemies or destroy certain elements of the scenery.
Combat is the heart of the gameplay by Wolverine. At first, our arsenal is quite limited; we can claw our enemies, kick them or jump towards them. You can also block the blows and retaliate, or roll to avoid them. As you progress, new options are added; you can send projectiles, throw your enemies or stun them with more powerful blows.
Some areas also allow us to be more stealthy, but let’s be honest; Wolverine isn’t really the type of guy who prefers stealth, and you’ll probably be discovered quickly, without it having too much consequence on your success.
Apart from a few levels of motorcycle chase, you move around the Wolverine universe on foot, or by jumping from obstacle to obstacle. Endowed with ultra-sharp senses, Wolverine follows a blue trail that represents his sense of smell to find his way.
Details
Level of experience required
| Age | 3+ | 7+ | 12+ | 16+ | 18+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginners |  |
|
|
 |
|
| Intermediate | |
|
|
|
|
| Experienced | |
|
|
|
|
Evaluation
Wolverine is absurdly violent. Our character is burned alive, stabbed, slashed, gouged out… and he gives it back to his opponents. Blood flows freely. We flirt with the horror movie.
The female characters are relatively sexualized, but there is nothing explicit.
The words used are easy to understand, and the game requires little reading, everything being dubbed by actors. However, the characters use a rather colorful language.
In the end, Wolverine defends the innocent, but his methods to achieve this are rather brutal. To quote the mutant himself, “I’m the best at what I do, and what I do isn’t very nice.”
At the highest level of difficulty, Wolverine offers a bit of a challenge, but the difficulty is very adjustable, and there are plenty of ways to adapt the game for people with motor limitations.
For the lifespan and replayability on offer, Wolverine is too expensive, in our opinion.
Local game modes
There is a single-player story mode.
Online Game Modes
None.
Expansions/Add-ons (DLC)
Some optional costumes are available with the Deluxe Edition. For the moment, no other additional content has been officially announced, despite the rumors.
Our opinion
If you follow even a little video game news, you’ve probably already seen and heard a ton of opinions about the new title from Insomniac (the studio behind the Spider-Man games on Playstation 5). Indeed, Wolverine has been the subject of a lot of ink and harsh criticism.
I will try here to bring a more calm look at the title.
Wolverine is not a perfect game, far from it, but I believe above all that it suffers from the extreme expectations caused by the fact that it is one of Sony’s flagship exclusive releases this year and because it is a new game in the Marvel universe by a studio that has accustomed us to a high level of quality with its titles in the Spider-Man series.
Indeed, if we compare Wolverine to Spider-Man, the adventures of the Canadian mutant suffer from the comparison. Wolverine is much more linear than Spider-Man, and the lifespan is much shorter.
I don’t think Wolverine HAD to be an open-world game. In fact, I even think that Wolverine is a character who lends himself less to this type of game; he is more limited in his movements, and it is less interesting to see him evolve only in an urban environment.
In addition, Wolverine’s story takes us to the four corners of the world, from Canada to Japan, which would be more complicated with an open world.
But linear level does not necessarily rhyme with limited exploration. We could have imagined larger levels, which require us to explore to discover the secrets. Here, the levels are very restricted, and the hidden rewards are indicated by a huge blue aura that makes it almost impossible to miss them.
We would also have liked to have had more ways to progress in the levels. One could imagine a gameplay that would allow us to aggressively charge at our enemies, or rather to use the environment to our advantage. After all, in the cutscenes, for example, we see Wolverine cutting the ties attaching pipes to make them fall on the opponents. Why not allow us to do that in the game?
In the first few levels, the game is very very easy, even on the highest difficulty level. We understand that the developers wanted to start slowly to allow less experienced players to embark on the experience, before raising the level. But the problem is that this absurdly easy level of difficulty has given the title a bad press. Everyone shares the first motorcycle mission, one of the very first levels in the game, where we are asked to catch up with an enemy truck on a motorcycle. The trouble is that the guardrails on the side of the road make us “bounce” back and forth, and our bike moves forward on its own, so that we can put down the controller and watch the level complete itself, slowly but surely.
This is only true in this mission. In a motorcycle chase that takes place much later in the adventure, I died several times in a row during the chase. But for many players, it will be too late and their idea will be made.
The fights are a bit repetitive, but we don’t hold it against Wolverine. It comes with the genre of beat ’em-ups, In fact, it’s a criticism that has been levelled at this type of game since the 80s, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will find the miracle solution anytime soon. In fact, in our opinion, Insomniac is doing admirably well; we continue to add new techniques to our arsenal as the adventure progresses, so the fight continues to change over the fifteen hours that the adventure lasts.
Insomniac have captured Wolverine’s animal essence particularly well. As a hero, Wolverine is not a calm and noble warrior above the fray; rather, he is a wild animal that becomes more and more so as rage invades him and blood fills his eyes. This is perfectly well represented in the game; the more enemies you attack, the more you fill your rage bar (which also serves to resurrect yourself if you take too much damage). When our rage reaches a high enough level, Wolverine goes into blind rage; the image loses its color and clarity, and Wolverine leaps from one enemy to another, without thinking, shredding everything under his claws. Even after 10 a.m., it was still enjoyable (and a little disgusting).
We need to talk about the story, both the best and the worst of this Wolverine. The scenario itself is disconcerting. We are offered a rather intense rereading of the mythology of the X-Men, a world without Charles Xavier, Magneto, Cyclops, Storm, in fact, without the X-Men themselves. The title, in fact, focuses mostly on the love story between Jean Grey and Wolverine, as well as the relationship between Wolverine and Essex.
This is a huge departure from the usual canon, which could be interesting if it served a purpose. But even after completing the story in its entirety, I still wonder what we were trying to tell. It’s a change for a change’s sake, but it doesn’t serve a real purpose. The story is not particularly exciting either. A strange parenthesis where we chase the ninjas of the Hand to recover a magical artifact occupies about a third of the story, but when the ninjas disappear, we don’t see them again and we wonder why we spent so much time rubbing shoulders with them and their shurikens.
But on the other side of the coin, the acting is remarkable. We already know Troy Baker well, but his role as Nathaniel Essex allows us to discover a facet of his game that we rarely see. And Liam McIntyre delivers a terrific performance in the title role. Some have denounced that he doesn’t have a face intimidating enough to play Wolverine, but for my part, I completely embarked on the proposal. He gives us a man who is angry, sad and full of conflicts. Wolverine, you know.
It is understandable that some will be disappointed with the lifespan and the more limited scope of this proposal. And at $89.99, it’s quite defensible. Wolverine gave us an enjoyable experience, but the price is too high for what is offered.
Our final verdict? The hatred of a certain fringe of video game commentariat seems exaggerated to me. With this Wolverine, Insomniac offers us an imperfect game, yes, but certainly not without qualities. I’m glad I had this experience? But would I have paid the full price? No.
Wait a few months, like all first-party games from Sony, the price will drop. At $89.99, it’s not worth the cost. But at $39.99? You will have a very nice weekend.
