NOC Review: The ‘Wolverine’ Game is a Haunted Story of Love and Death

Let’s talk about superhero video games for a sec. Marvel’s Wolverine from Insomniac Games is one. Of recent, the definitive works of the genre are (arguably, but not really arguably) Insomniac’s Spider-Man series and Rocksteady’s Arkham series featuring Batman. The two most popular characters in the Marvel and DC universes, go figure. The new Wolverine game for Playstation represents Insomniac’s first branching out from Spider-Verse territory following their superlative spins on the Peter Parker and Miles Morales stories.

Let’s also talk about Marvel’s X-Men. 2026 is a big year for the mutants, with a new season of X-Men ’97 and the return of the iconic film characters to the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. There’s also been casting news about the next iteration of MCU X-People, kickstarted by the reintroduction of Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. (Okay, I was wrong about that one, but glad to be wrong. Sadie Sink’s Jean is X-cellent.)

I just completed one play-through of Insomniac’s Wolverine. Similar to my main takeaway from the Spider-Man games, and this opinion stands slightly apart from feelings about video games and Marvel on the whole, the main thought is: Dang, they totally nailed the X-Men.

BUT DO YOU GET TO EVISCERATE LOTS OF GOONS?

Yes, the basic gameplay loop of see target, stab repeatedly, see next target, stab more, that functions. Hacking and slashing is not skimped on. But the engine of Wolverine is a love story. The love story comes from the perspective of people who are constantly facing death, and have literally died (and repeatedly come back to life, as is the way with basically all the X-Men).

The essential story: Nathaniel Essex finds a feral Wolverine (a.k.a. “Logan”) in the woods. Essex recruits Logan to Team X, which ostensibly seeks to help active and dormant mutants around the world, although there may be more to it than that. Team X is not the X-Men, which don’t yet X-ist in this timeline. Logan’s main mission is to find Bolivar Trask, who heads an army of cyborg Reavers and giant robot Sentinels that insist on throwing themselves in the path of Logan’s adamantium claws. And then Jean Grey comes along, and telekinetic mayhem ensues.

The high bar set by the immersive web-swinging experience in the Spider-Mans requires us to ask the simple question of this game: Do you get to feel like you ARE Wolverine? As far as the combat, a satisfying yes. You are the whirlwind at the apex of the bloodbath. The strike system encourages button-mashing to a degree, which lends to the feeling of building up to Wolverine’s trademark berzerker rage. When there’s a boss fight between two guys with healing factors, the fight takes a long, long time. Although it’s true that Wolverine has basically one weapon (there are a few cool variations involving “hot claws” and “Helix claws”), putting effort into making your attacks speedy and overwhelming results in bigger and gorier finishers.

It’s all gorgeously rendered, as per the Insomniac standard. Madripoor’s pan-Asian streetlife crackles with banh mi stands and moody saloons. The Sentinels loom huge and threatening over everyone. Omega Red does uncomfortable tentacle stuff. Wolverine’s world is grimdark in every way that Spider-Man’s is primary-colorful, and the side missions into Logan’s memories are darker still.

THE THING EVERYONE LOVES ABOUT THE X-MEN

I’m just putting this out there: It’s the sexual tension. The X-Men have a vibe that separates them from the other Marvel squads, whether you hooked onto them via the comics, the animated show, or the movies. They speak to a familiar adolescent-associated set of desires, with the transgressive liberation themes, the extreme violence, the body-dysmorphic drama, but most of all, the constant potential of romantic-sexual sparks. In the comic book, nothing explicit ever “happened,” yet we as the teenaged target-audience readers knew somethings were happening which gave these superheroes an x-tra emotional hook. The Jean-Cyclops-Wolverine jealousy triangle. The puppy eyes between Kitty and Colossus. That smoldering Rogue-Gambit thing. The New Mutants’ angsty flirtations.

To wit, Jean and Logan, voiced by Krizia Bajos and Liam McIntryre, develop a vibe that the Spider-Man games just don’t have (apart from that DLC with the Black Cat, maybe). They meet cute while smashing killer cyborgs. She reminds him of someone. She’s lived mysterious past lives. They kinda like each other except when they hate each other. He’s nervous about letting her telekinetically fly him around. They get dressed up to infiltrate a casino and there’s this lovely moment when they’re slow-dancing as they use their heightened senses to surveil the room.

All of this helps the game remain engaging even after you’ve figured out the dozen different ways to brutalize your enemies, because there’s that much more emotional weight when you’re rescuing your ally, protecting the kids from the killer robots, willing yourself to come back to life one more time. There’s a sequence in a plummeting cargo plane that I like to think pays homage to one famous issue of Wolverine (#75, 1993, by Hama and Kubert) which has no big battle except for Jean and Logan’s struggle to hold onto life, and finding a reason to do so.

FUN FOR THE MARVEL LORE NERDS

The supporting cast of X-Folks does not disappoint. Jean is Logan’s main running buddy, but there’s also significant roles for Sabretooth, Deathstrike (voiced with icy allure by Jolene Jaxon), Mystique (Nicole Pacent sounds a bit like Jennifer Lawrence to my ear, in a good way), Callisto and the Morlocks, and The Hand (the red ninja clan also featured in Daredevil and Spider-Man: Brand New Day). The presence of Walter Langkowski/Sasquatch is gratifying for those of us who pine for Alpha Flight content. And hey, when was the last time we saw Sunfire in one of these joints? Shiro Yoshida hosts Logan and Jean for much of the game’s Japan-based chapter, and has one of the funniest lines, delivered drolly by Jonathan Tanigaki.

There’s also cameos by Marrow, an easter egg with Warren Worthington (Angel), and… that translucent jelly-skull guy from the Grant Morrison run, the name escapes me. A passing mention of the Ravenscroft Institute establishes a connection to the Spider-Man sphere.

The casting and performances are excellent across the board, evoking some familiar iterations of these characters while letting them breathe within this specific story. At times, this Wolverine reminds me of Liev Schreiber, who played Sabretooth in one of the Fox films. Bajos’ performance as Jean is especially affecting, ranging from revolutionary fury to subtle wistfulness. Her chemistry with McIntyre gives the later cutscenes a real snappy energy, mirroring Logan’s swings between a superhero’s gruff machismo and a newborn animal’s utter vulnerability.

It does take a little while to get to the feels: Much of the first act is the characters just yelling “Oh shit!” a lot as one enemy type after another gets introduced. But the writing really ramps up in the back half as we get to explore more of Logan’s past, and the ending arc deserves a special prize for X-Men scriptwriting, which I won’t spoil except to say it draws from and expands on poignant themes from both the recent Spider-Man films and Claremont’s definitive X-Men stories.

SPIDER-MAN VS. WOLVERINE

Speaking of Spidey, it’s hard not to compare the Wolverine experience to the other Insomniac games centering ol’ Web-Head, and while it’s an unfair comparison in some aspects I’ll do it anyway, because crossovers:

Wolverine is linear and doesn’t have Spider-Man‘s sprawling explorable map, but it’s also mostly free of open-world bloat. In the same way that Miles Morales was not quite as long and twisty as Spider-Man yet felt like a focused, compact journey, Wolverine‘s scale suits the story. Like life, like Logan, it’s nasty, brutish and short. Deal with it, bub.

THE ENDLESS PAIN OF SHEER EXISTENCE

Comics fans will recognize a recurring X-Men trope: Wolverine gets hit by a punishing energy beam/eye laser/magic hellfire and staggers toward the source of the beam as it melts the flesh off his indestructible skeleton. In some senses he is always, agonizingly, lurching toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

This happens several times in the Wolverine game. There are several set pieces which try to articulate just how much gruesome pain Logan is in, all the time. And yeah, he has that healing-factor cheat code, but the effort still feel grueling, in the vein of that one mission in Nier: Automata where she’s walking wounded and helpless and your only objective is to get to the safe place before oblivion overtakes you.

It’s this part of this game that really cuts to the bone, if you will. Logan’s overwhelming sense of loss, his haunted longing for another life. The lore kicks in again during an extended flashback sequence with allusions to the Phoenix Force, Apocalypse, and a macabre parade of the lives he’s taken. There is a light at the end of his tunnel, though, and it’s not a spoiler to say that it’s something intensely relatable. It involves having someone to drink a beer with, someone to put your arm around.

That they managed to splice such an affecting love story into a game which also has a satisfyingly massive battle against a gigantic boss robot is, even to this jaded nerd, the real achievement of Wolverine.

“WHO’S NEXT?”

Hey, Insomniac people, I know you’re probably sick of people leaking works-in-progress clips from your awesome games and then complaining about them because they don’t get what works-in-progress are, but some of us who aren’t whiney like that would love if you went ahead and made a full X-Men game! I mean, we get that all the different power sets get complicated, and that Avengers game didn’t quite rise to that challenge. But maybe a Wolverine expansion where you can play as Jean for a while? (Side note: Remedy’s Control is halfway to a Jean Grey game, now that I think about it. There must be a mod for that.)

In the broader picture, as a lifelong Marvel nerd I’m thrilled that with Wolverine and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Jean Grey’s re-re-rising from the ashes is going great, in two different but complementary iterations. A sometimes-overlooked aspect of the best X-Men stories is that they tend to start from a female character’s perspective: Rogue in the Fox films, Kitty’s first day at Xavier’s school in the comics, Dani in the early New Mutants stories. Following that trope, I’d opine it’s a good move if the latest X-Men reboot errs a little Jean-centric. Don’t get me wrong, Cyclops and his hot concussion eyes, totally cool. But Jean could be, for all the different reasons, the Alpha and the Omega.

Rating: 5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ : Excellent story anchored by compelling main characters, fun gore-heavy combat, captures the essential X-Men themes while adding intriguing new dimensions.