Marvel's Wolverine Review Roundup: Insomniac's Lowest-Scoring Marvel Game Yet
This piece discusses the game's setup, Team X roster, and the broad shape of its plot, but not its ending.
Marvel's Wolverine launched September 15, 2026, exclusively on PlayStation 5, and the reviews that followed don't agree on much. That's notable on its own, because Insomniac Games hasn't had this problem before. Marvel's Spider-Man landed at 87 on Metacritic. Miles Morales hit 85. Spider-Man 2 topped the studio's run at 90. Marvel's Wolverine is sitting at approximately 78 on Metacritic across roughly 110 critic reviews, with OpenCritic pegging it around 79-80 and about 72% of critics recommending it — Insomniac's lowest-scoring Marvel release to date, and the first time the studio's near-decade streak of near-universal acclaim has actually cracked.
That number alone undersells what's interesting about this launch, though. A flat 78 usually means a game that's broadly fine and unremarkable across the board. This one isn't that. It's a game that multiple outlets scored an 8.5 or higher, that Hardcore Gamer gave a perfect 5/5, and that other equally credible outlets scored a 6/10 or lower. The average is a compromise between two genuinely different experiences of the same game, and that split is worth digging into on its own terms rather than just reporting the aggregate and moving on.
The scores, laid out
On the high end: Push Square and Destructoid both landed at 8/10, while DualShockers, Game Informer, and Wccftech all scored it 8.5/10. Hardcore Gamer went furthest, awarding a full 5/5. Those are the kinds of scores that would normally anchor a strong launch week on their own.
On the low end: IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, and VGC all converged on 6/10 — a specific kind of consensus in itself, four separate outlets landing on the exact same "good but flawed" number independently. Eurogamer scored it 60/100, in the same range. Giant Bomb was the outlier on the harsh side, at 2.5/5. Polygon and Kotaku both published critical pieces without attaching a numeric score at all, which in itself tends to signal an outlet that found the game hard to summarize as a single digit.
That's not a game critics are lukewarm about. It's a game critics have starkly different reactions to, and the aggregate score is doing a poor job of communicating that on its own.
Where the praise lands: combat, presentation, character work
The high scores consistently point to the same things. The Rage system — the three-tier meter that replaces passive health regeneration and rewards aggression, culminating in a black-and-white, red-blood-accented Tier 3 state with procedural dismemberment finishers — is the mechanical centerpiece previewed ahead of launch, and it's also the thing reviewers who liked the game keep coming back to. Claw-based melee built around Square for quick strikes and Triangle for combo variety gives Logan a moveset that critics in the 8-and-up camp describe as genuinely satisfying to execute, not just thematically appropriate for a character whose whole identity is refusing to stay down.
Character work is the other consistent bright spot, and it cuts across both camps — even outlets that landed on lower scores tend to credit the writing and performances rather than dismiss them. Liam McIntyre's Logan reads, per multiple reviews, as a Wolverine who carries weariness and rage in the same breath rather than leaning on one note the whole game. Troy Baker's Nathaniel Essex — introduced here as a human ally within Team X, well before any Mister Sinister transformation the comics eventually put him through — gives reviewers a genuinely unsettling presence to play against, a quietly manipulative figure whose loyalties are never fully legible. Kelly Hu's Tyger Tiger rounds out a supporting cast that critics generally agree is doing real work, even in reviews that otherwise struggled with the game surrounding it.
Where it falls apart: IGN's "wears thin" critique
The lower scores tend to circle one specific problem: the Rage-fueled combat that wowed early reviewers doesn't hold up across a full campaign. IGN's review is the sharpest articulation of this, describing combat as "slick and satisfying" but noting it "wears thin well before its conclusion" — and crucially, adding that the game's strong character work "can't quite save it from being anything more than okay." That's a pointed way to frame a 6/10: not a broken game, not a bad one, just a game whose best mechanical idea runs out of room to keep surprising players long before the credits roll.
That's a familiar failure mode for action games built around one standout system. A Rage meter that shifts the screen to black-and-white and unlocks dismemberment finishers is a genuinely striking moment the first handful of times it happens. Whether that same moment still lands the fortieth time, in a 15-to-20-hour linear campaign with comparatively little else to vary the rhythm between encounters, is exactly the kind of question that separates an 8.5 review from a 6. Reviewers who scored the game highly generally found enough variety in enemy types and environmental staging to keep the loop fresh. Reviewers who scored it lower generally didn't.
The bigger structural complaint: linearity after Spider-Man's open world
The other recurring criticism has nothing to do with combat variety and everything to do with what kind of game this is at a structural level. Insomniac built its reputation on Spider-Man's open-world traversal — swinging across Manhattan wasn't just a means of getting from mission to mission, it was arguably the single most beloved mechanic the studio has ever shipped, and it gave players real freedom in how they approached the city between story beats.
Marvel's Wolverine drops that entirely in favor of a linear, roughly 15-to-20-hour campaign, and multiple critics have flagged that shift as a step backward rather than a lateral move. It's a defensible creative choice on paper — Logan's story here is tighter, more personal, and more contained than Spider-Man's citywide stakes, and a linear structure can serve that kind of narrative better than an open map full of side content ever would. But reviewers weighing this game against Insomniac's own back catalog keep noting that trading player agency and replayability for a more focused campaign is a real cost, not a neutral trade, especially for a studio whose last few releases made open-world freedom feel like a signature strength rather than a genre default it was obligated to include.
That structural complaint and the combat-fatigue complaint are, in a sense, the same problem viewed from two angles. A linear campaign puts more pressure on its central mechanical loop to stay interesting throughout, because there's no open-world side content, exploration, or optional activity to break up the pacing when combat starts to feel repetitive. Spider-Man could lean on swinging and side missions to cover for a slow stretch of story. Wolverine doesn't have that cushion.
The story: Team X, Trask, and a search for missing memories
Setting reviews' mechanical disagreements aside, there's real consensus on what the story actually is. An amnesiac Logan reunites with his former black-ops mutant strike team, Team X, to investigate industrialist Bolivar Trask's abduction of displaced mutants through the Reavers, his cybernetically enhanced militia — all while Logan chases down fragments of his own missing memories along the way.
Per a Game Informer interview with the development team, the game is deliberately set before the X-Men have formed as a team. Mutants in this world live in hiding, feared and hunted, even though the public already knows of heroes like Spider-Man — a specific, considered placement within Insomniac's shared Earth-1048 continuity that stops short of an actual Spider-Man crossover. That's a smart bit of world-building restraint: it lets Wolverine exist in the same universe without needing Peter Parker to show up and validate it, and it explains why a world that's apparently comfortable with a friendly neighborhood superhero still treats mutants as something to be hidden or hunted.
The confirmed Team X and antagonist roster reads like a genuine mutant-comics deep cut: Sabretooth, Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike, and Mystique all factor into the story, with Nathaniel Essex implied to be the one who recruited Logan into the group in the first place — worth remembering that Essex here is still just a human, years away from whatever transformation eventually makes him Mister Sinister. Jean Grey also appears, continuing a thread that was already being teased in pre-launch previews. Directors Marcus Smith and Mike Daly, both previously on Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, are steering a story that trades the ensemble optimism of Spider-Man for something closer to a paranoid, black-ops thriller with claws.
Reading the split: what kind of player is this game actually for
Aggregate scores flatten nuance by design, and few recent releases illustrate that better than this one. The critics who scored Marvel's Wolverine highly — Push Square, Destructoid, DualShockers, Game Informer, Wccftech, Hardcore Gamer — generally frame the linear structure and the Rage system as a focused, confident swing rather than a compromise, and seem to have found enough encounter variety to keep the combat loop from going stale across the runtime. The critics who landed at 6 or below — IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, VGC, Eurogamer, Giant Bomb — generally agree the combat is good in isolation but don't think it, or the linear campaign wrapped around it, can sustain 15-to-20 hours without real fatigue setting in.
Neither camp is disputing the same underlying facts about what the game contains. They're disputing how much weight to give the good parts versus the parts that wear out their welcome, which is exactly the kind of disagreement that produces a wide score spread rather than a tight cluster around one number. That's worth remembering for anyone using Metacritic's 78 as their only data point before buying: that number represents a genuine fight between two camps of critics, not a shrug of collective indifference.
Why this matters for Insomniac's Marvel plans
There's a broader context worth flagging here. Sony's other high-profile Marvel bet, Marvel's Blade at Arkane Lyon, has reportedly seen its own status wobble amid Xbox's studio cuts, which puts more scrutiny on whatever Insomniac does next in this shared continuity. A 78 isn't a disaster by any reasonable measure — it's still comfortably in "generally favorable" territory, and the game clearly has real defenders among critics who gave it top marks. But it is a meaningfully different outcome than the near-universal acclaim Insomniac's Spider-Man games have enjoyed, and it's the first real data point suggesting the studio's Midas touch isn't automatic outside of Spider-Man's specific formula.
Whether that's a one-off stumble tied to this specific character and structure, or a sign that Insomniac's next moves in Earth-1048 need real rethinking, is something only time and whatever the studio ships next will answer. What's clear right now is that Marvel's Wolverine is a genuinely divisive game rather than a mediocre one — and divisive games tend to generate more interesting conversation, and often better community word of mouth over time, than games that everyone agrees are simply fine.
The verdict, such as it is
If there's a single throughline across both camps of reviews, it's this: nobody is arguing Marvel's Wolverine is poorly made. The Rage system is a clever, thematically coherent translation of Logan's healing factor into a mechanic that punishes passivity, the voice performances are strong across the board, and the Team X story gives Insomniac room to explore a corner of the X-Men mythology its Spider-Man games never touched. The disagreement is entirely about diminishing returns — whether a strong combat idea and a tight, personal story are enough to fill 15-to-20 linear hours without the seams showing, and whether trading Spider-Man's open-world freedom for that tighter focus was worth the cost.
For players who loved Insomniac's Spider-Man games specifically for the traversal and the open city, this is worth tempering expectations for going in. For players more interested in a focused, brutal, claws-out action game with a strong voice cast and a story that plants flags for a bigger mutant-focused corner of Earth-1048, the high end of this score spread suggests there's a genuinely good game here — just one that, per IGN and others, doesn't quite know when to stop asking players to do the same satisfying thing one more time.
Expect a post-launch patch cycle addressing pacing complaints, plus continued speculation about whether Insomniac's Earth-1048 continuity extends into a follow-up X-Men project.