Marvel’s Wolverine Review: The Claws Hit Hard — The Game Still Holds Your Hand

The claws feel real. The game still won’t fully trust you to play it. CPT Doodoo Bronze grades the board from player evidence — the tone is hard; the numbers stay honest.

I’ve been playing since Nintendo plastic was the whole hobby. I still play at a high competitive level. Soft rhetoric doesn’t get a free pass in this column, and a high score from me means the game earned it on the evidence — not because the prose got friendly. Marvel’s Wolverine has real strengths and real scrapes. Both stay on the scorecard.

This is a PS5 single-player review. Single-player and multiplayer are graded as separate products. Wolverine ships as a campaign, not a competitive suite — multiplayer is N/A. I’m not inventing online scores to fill a table.

What actually works

When Logan is allowed to be a weapon, the fantasy hits. Claw combat can be nasty in the right way — bloody, direct, on-brand — and McIntyre’s performance plus the broader cast still earn credit in the player conversation. Presentation and set pieces can look like Insomniac money. If you wanted a directed chapter game instead of another open-world chore list, that preference shows up in reception for a reason.

Those strengths are scored where they belong: characters, graphics, and combat sit at the top of this board.

Image: Insomniac/Sony / via PlayStation Blog — Logan vs The Hand.

Where it loses the room

Gameplay Mechanics take a real hit because the hand-holding systems are not a side feature — they are load-bearing. Scent trails, readability tools, and the broader “plays itself” stack drag the mechanical experience down significantly for players who want to read a fight and a space themselves. That is why Gameplay Mechanics land at mid-low, not mid-high.

Difficulty Balance is all over the place. On the bike sequence, the scene literally plays itself even on the hardest difficulty setting — you can sit through it without dying while the game drives the outcome. That is not a challenge test. That is an on-rails showcase wearing a difficulty label. Difficulty Balance is scored accordingly.

Insomniac later turned scent-trail opacity down and talked about a future toggle — covered by Kotaku — which tells you the guidance volume was wrong for a real slice of players.

Combat can slap and still fail parts of the depth check. Visceral is not automatic depth. Repetition shows up. Corridor structure after Spider-Man’s freedom is a downgrade a lot of players felt immediately. Story reactions skew uneven. Bugs and camera issues show up enough to count. And the value fight — mid-teens hours against a $70 ask, depending on how you play — is a fair audit, not noise.

Replayability is not a zero. The game does ship New Game Plus, Mission Replay, Nightmare Challenges, Nightmare Doors, and Photo Mode — those are real return hooks and this review will not pretend they don’t exist. The score still lands at 5 because the main story sits around ~15 hours and there is no multiplayer product to come back to. Replay tools help a second lap; they do not erase a short campaign spine or the missing online mode family at this price.

Scoreboards lie if you only watch one

Metacritic critics have sat in the high 70s (~77, with ~78 snapshots earlier). Users have sat softer (around the high 6s in recent reads). PlayStation Store stars have looked rosier next to that (~4.8/5 early). Those are different crowds. This category average lands at 6.3/10 — still in “generally favorable but under the Spider-Man bar” territory after the mechanics, difficulty, and replay cuts, not a hatchet job and not a storefront star bomb. Cross-check: GamesRadar+ called it enjoyable but underwhelming — never a disaster, short on the depth you’d demand from the studio that made Spider-Man fly. That rhyme with the fan split is the point.

Verdict

Wolverine has moments that earn their marks. It also has heavy hand-holding systems, a difficulty board that fails a basic agency check on the bike sequence, and a replay board that credits NG+/Mission Replay/Nightmare Challenges/Doors/Photo Mode while still docking for a ~15-hour story and no multiplayer. The prose stays hard. The board stays objective. Single-player: 6.3/10. Multiplayer: N/A.