Just as Logan is the best at what he does, the team over at Insomniac is genuinely spectacular at making superhero games. With three excellent Spidey games under the belt, they’ve now turned to the world of mutants, with Marvel’s Wolverine blending their focus on character-driven performances with some truly barbaric combat.
In this version of the Marvel timeline, the X-Men don’t exist and mutants themselves are still relatively unknown to the wider public. That hasn’t stopped infamous mutant-hater Bolivar Trask from making it his mission to hunt down and destroy or control them all though. While Chuck and his merry band of mutants aren’t around to stop him, the similarly-named Team X are fighting the good fight, desperately trying to free their brethren and give them the lives they deserve. Nathaniel Essex leads the team, supported by Mystique, Sabertooth, Sasquatch, and the Canucklehead himself, Wolverine.
It’s a set up that’s grounded in comic canon and lore but feels distinct and new. There’s great chemistry between the team, despite some tension caused by Wolverine’s previous exit, which leads to a lot of in-fighting between him and Sabertooth. The rivalry between them was a high point of the preview session, with Wolverine somehow being the calm and level-headed one to Sabertooth’s raw, animalistic and, sometimes, sadistic nature. Mystique is the calm and collected member of the team, ever-dependable while Essex himself seems benevolent when he meets a near primal Logan at the start of the game but quickly starts to be a source of concern for both Logan and the player.
The first part of the preview has us rescuing Essex from Trasks facility, which involved a lot of fighting. We were told that the game was built around fast, fluid claw combat and that it’s as essential to Logan as web-slinging is to Spider-Man, and this clearly shows. While Spidey often felt like combat was a dance, effortlessly jumping and bouncing between enemies, Wolverine is like a furry pinball full of rage. He still leaps between enemies but every one of them ends up as a pile of mush on the floor. It’s easy to build into a frenetic rhythm as you switch between attacking, leaping, using special moves and hitting parries, some of which lead to incredibly violent takedown animations. It strikes the perfect balance between looking the part while still giving you all the agency, control and risk. And guess what? While you’re lobotomising a guard with your claws and leaping up the side of buildings, you don’t even notice the suit regeneration that’s had so many balking.
Everything you do earns rage, which subsides out of combat but while in a fight unlocks more attack damage, and at level three, allows you to perform multiple insta-kills. It’s pure berserker rage, as Wolverine moves so furiously fast that it’s almost difficult to keep track of him at times. You need to keep killing to keep your rage meter up, and by the time it finally empties all that’s left of your enemies are piles of body parts on the floor.
Wolverine’s healing factor kicks in constantly, but you’re not invincible. There are multiple ways it can be impacted, and if you take too much damage you can be killed. If you’ve got enough rage then you can enter a Last Stand phase, where you’ll see close up the damage and devastation he’s taken and by mashing square you’ll see skin, muscle and sinew knit back together and you’ll get a second chance to get revenge. It’s brutal, like everything else in this game.
While Logan can’t swing around an open-world like Spidey, he’s still nimble in his own right and will be sprinting, jumping and swinging on a much smaller scale through linear and slightly larger open zone segments. One early section has you in a replica town that Trask’s goons, known as Reavers, use as training for hunting mutants. You’re free to clamber around and sneakily execute guards or just fly in and start slashing. I really liked this area and hope to see more of them throughout the game.
We then moved towards the end of act one, starting with a Sentinel boss fight. Now, I’ve seen a few people moaning about this online, but I found it very cool to actually play. Yes, we’ve seen these “upper body” bosses before, but we’ve kind of seen everything in every game before, so it shouldn’t detract from the fact that Marvel’s Wolverine does it well. The end of this fight is so bombastic that I think it’ll change a lot of minds too.
Following this we moved to Madripoor where things slowed down and I found one of my favourite parts of the preview: hanging out with the mutants. We take a bit of a break from killing anything with a pulse and spend some time chatting to Team X and exploring the bar and some of the wider Madripoor environment as Logan goes to meet Jean Gray. The world is packed with details, including some recognisable faces in the bar including Caliban, Calisto and Toad, and I also spotted a tiny nod to Dazzler where she was listed on the jukebox. There’s little nods to Mystique’s relationship with Tyger, or Caliban’s struggle with his powers and it’s really cool getting ten minutes of calm to just exist in this little haven.
Every performance I’ve seen so far is stellar, with Liam McIntyre’s Logan managing to be gentle and caring at times without it feeling completely detached from the murderball he is elsewhere in the game. My personal standout though is Sabertooth, and every time he’s on screen you can feel the tension rise. He’s hurt that Logan left the team and isn’t afraid to express his anger physically. He’s incredibly violent and unpredictable, seemingly causing carnage for the hell of it, whereas you can see that Logan’s there because he believes in the mission and wants to save mutants.
We finished with chasing The Hand through Madripoor and ended with more combat. What struck me most was how much the combat had evolved in just the two hours I had with the game. Enemies went from having shields, to using inhibitor fields to block your healing factor, to using heavy weaponry and then The Hand introduced impaling, which locks a chunk of your health bar and makes it unusable until the weapon falls out. If this is indicative of the rest of the game then there should be more than enough variety to keep things exciting all the way through until the end. Wolverine has plenty of special moves at his disposal too, so experimenting with weaving them into your standard attacks keeps things fresh too.
I’m very excited for Marvel’s Wolverine. Let’s be honest, it was never going to be anything other than great, but it’s really reminded me how much I wanted an 18-rated superhero game. The outstanding character performances captivated me and left me wanting to see more while the combat is every bit as brutal, frantic and bloody as you want from a Wolverine game.
Marvel’s Wolverine is coming to PS5 on September 15. See all the 2026 release dates here.
