The opening for Marvel’s Wolverine does not hold back, and really you wouldn’t expect it to. Within just a couple of minutes, James ‘Logan’ Howlett is jumping out of a helicopter, slicing his way through waves of soldiers, taking a full barrage of high-calibre anti-aircraft cannon fire to the chest, and then angrily regrowing flesh around his Adamantium-coated skeleton to go back on the rampage.
It’s an opening mission that has plenty in common to Insomniac’s first superhero foray, back with 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, throwing you right into the action and avoiding much of the origin story trap. Where Spidey was swinging through and quipping his way to bring one of his greatest foes to justice, though, Wolverine’s story is altogether more angry, more visceral and morally compromised. The X-Men don’t exist in this universe, there’s no Charles Xavier to guide and tutor young mutants toward maturity and a version of the world where mutants and humans can coexist. Instead Logan has joined Team X to fight alongside Mystique and Sabretooth, their current mission to rescue their leader, Nathaniel Essex, from the mutant abusing capture of Bolivar Trask.
If you know your comic books (or have been watching X-Men: The Animated Series and its modern continuation X-Men ’97), then you’ll know there’s not a whole lot of ‘nice’ personalities here. Logan has been brought back into the fold to help rescue Essex, and there’s immediate frictions with Sabretooth, a cold ruthlessness from Mystique in the field, and butting heads with Crimson Omega along the way.
And of course Logan himself is not the nicest of heroes. Certainly, compared to Spider-Man, he has no qualms about using his powers to kill – the blood flies thick and fast here, though there are accessibility options to turn this down for a marginally more family-friendly tone. The combat is immediate and easy to grasp, tapping away to string together a basic ‘barrage’ of attacks, adding a leaping attack to immediately close the gap to enemies, with dodging and parrying alongside. It will feel familiar to any Batman: Arkham or Insomniac Spider-Man fans, though the closeness of the camera does shift some of the emphasis as incoming attack indicators more often appear from the side for threats off-screen.
Wolverine is a fairly fixed character, in many ways. He’s not about to pick up a gun, grab a new sword, or gain more health when levelling up – after all, he’s got that healing factor, so why would he need more health? The focus is instead of picking up new techniques, building out his move set with new regular combos and passive buffs, and a handful of special attacks. On the standard track, you can add Savage Sprinter to slash at enemies while running through them or a Stagger Leap to stun enemies for a moment, and quite usefully the Sprint Block to deflect small arms fire when sprinting around. The Special Techniques need to be charged up before you manually trigger them, the Tornado Spin having Wolverine whirl around, or a rising knee attack to an enemy’s chin, an accelerated healing factor for a moment. These Special Techniques can be further upgraded and extended.
Having abilities that trigger Logan’s healing factor is important, because he can still die. He’s often seen as being unkillable (uh, outside of that time with Magneto), but Insomniac has settled on the idea that if his heart stops, then so too does his healing factor. The antidote to that is Rage, which feeds into his abilities in general. Built up from stringing regular attacks together, Rage enables the use of Wolverine’s Special Techniques, can be built up to the point that he launches into a killing frenzy, leaping between enemies almost at will and ripping them apart, and it also provides a lifeline for him to get back up again and keep on fighting.
It’s fun and thoroughly absorbing, starting off against Trask’s regular goons before the Reavers are brought in to provide a bit more challenge – these cyborg mercenaries having various limbs replaced and electrically charged blades. There’s a neat sequence set in a mock suburban setting – Trask training his soldiers to hunt down down innocent mutants, which is honestly one of the less evil things he has going on in this facility – and it gives Logan a chance to choose a different approach to going in fists flying. With his more sensitive animalistic senses, a stealthier approach can be very rewarding, sneaking through tall grasses and trying to approach enemies from behind for quicker takedowns or heavy initial blows to more heavily armoured ones. It’s similar to the Uncharted series where you likely can’t clear an entire area in complete stealth, but can use it to whittle away at enemy numbers and give yourself a better chance. Stealth kills also pre-build up Logan’s Rage meter, to give access to those special attacks more quickly.
There’s no using stealth against bosses though, jumping ahead to a section deeper into the game and a boss battle against a prototype Sentinel. Even just as an upper torso that’s mounted to one wall in its testing chamber, It’s an imposingly large mechanical creation with plenty of reach to punch towards Logan, slap down its forearm, and fire off some laser blasts from its eyes. While it’s fairly easy to read its moves, there’s just enough of a pause to lure the over-eager, button-mashing player into dodging a moment too early, taking a giant hand slap to the face instead of deftly dodging and leaping in to slash away at armour panels and reveal weak spots.
In the end, it takes the combined abilities of Team X to bring it down, which is rather foreboding when you might expect fullblown armies of these mutant-hunting monsterbots to be unleashed.
With so much fighting, it’s important that there’s also some downtime and a more, well, human side to the mutant struggle. Retreating to a little bar in Madripor and with a small community of mutants finding refuge with Essex and Team X, Logan is pushed to open up a bit and talk to the rest of the team. It goes about as well as you might expect with Sabretooth, a bit better with a game of Never Have I Ever with Mystique, and there’s other significant figures that have joined the gang, including Jean Grey.
This is a linear adventure, but there’s still moments to explore and take in the world, and to find things off the beaten path. One of those is the Nightmare Doors, whisking Logan away to a log cabin of his past and stories that he can try to rediscover. These come in the form of gameplay challenges, racing through a very game-like nightmare of floating shipping containers and abstracted scenery, or battling against a set of enemies. Both are against the clock, and I definitely feel the need to upgrade Logan’s moves further to take down tougher Reavers when trying to beat them in time. I do rather want those Adamantium (not ‘Platinum’) time records, though.
Insomniac’s take on Wolverine is refreshing, carving its own path distinct from the comics and to the iconic Hugh Jackman. Without the X-Men there’s no cosy safety net, there are more abrasive relationships and looming difficulties that Wolverine must face, and he’ll do so by leaping, claws first into whatever stands before him.
