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. Here is the scorecard, and exactly why each category landed where it did.

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 scorecard.

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. Every point on that scorecard comes from player evidence. Single-player: 6.3/10. Multiplayer: N/A.