The Marvel’s Wolverine Metacritic scores are in and they’re… OK. Insomniac’s latest superhero adventure has solid combat foundations and good performances from its lead characters, but its story never ultimately coheres, the fighting peaks way too early, and it’s extremely limited in scope compared to modern first-party PlayStation games.
At least, that’s my feeling after finishing a pre-release version of the game. In our full Marvel’s Wolverine review, Leon writes that “Marvel’s Wolverine is never a bad experience, just an underwhelming one full of odd choices. I enjoyed it enough for the most part but never really felt blown away, or like I was getting the game Wolverine deserved.”
It’s a shame, because the foundations of a great game are here. I loved the two hours of Marvel’s Wolverine hands-on time I got earlier this year, but it turns out that those two hours showed me most of what the game has to offer, and even over the course of a relatively short 10-15 hour game, those adamantium bones get stretched pretty thin.
You’ll find similar sentiments echoed throughout other reviews, which have resulted in an aggregate score of 77 on Metacritic. There are some glowing outliers, but most reviews align with Leon and my feelings about the game: it’s fine. And, unfortunately, “fine” is well below where expectations are at for a modern Sony game.
That score could shift as more reviews trickle in, but right now, that 77 marks Insomniac’s worst rating for an original game since its small-scale experiment, Song of the Deep, in 2016. Admittedly, the studio has mostly been making the excellent Spider-Man games since then, but Wolverine also fails to measure up to the historic scores of games like Sunset Overdrive and much of the Ratchet & Clank series.
It’s particularly disappointing given how rarely we get first-party PlayStation games these days. Sony’s console is known as one of the last big outlets for AAA single-player games, and now we’re lucky to get more than two of them a year. When one of those fails to hit, it stings.
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