Marvel’s Wolverine

Marvel’s Wolverine has a problem that becomes obvious almost immediately: Insomniac made an action game first and put Wolverine into it second. That sounds like a small distinction until you play—or even watch—the thing operate. Wolverine has one of the most game-ready power sets in comics, and nearly every interesting possibility contained in it has been flattened into familiar third-person combat.

The claws are the first insult. Wolverine’s defining weapon is not a pair of fancy knives. They are six adamantium blades attached permanently to a man who heals from almost anything. That should dictate how enemies, environments and encounters work. Instead, the claws largely function as another melee damage source. Men stand in front of Wolverine and absorb combinations because the combat system requires them to remain standing long enough for the combat system to happen.

That is the basic mistake repeated everywhere: game convention wins, Wolverine loses.

The combat vocabulary is painfully ordinary. Attack, heavier attack, dodge, parry, finisher. Enemies exist to receive strings of hits until the game decides they have received enough. Whatever animation is wrapped around those interactions, the underlying activity is familiar to the point of exhaustion. Wolverine should present unusual design problems. Here, he mostly presents the same problems as every other close-range action hero, except his hands have blades coming out of them.

His healing factor offers another obvious opportunity. Damage to Wolverine does not need to work like damage to Batman, Nathan Drake or Jin Sakai. An enemy shooting Logan through the shoulder could temporarily ruin one arm. A shotgun blast could destroy his movement until muscle and bone visibly reconstruct. Serious damage could change available attacks rather than simply lowering a bar. The player could be nearly impossible to kill and still constantly suffer meaningful consequences from being injured.

That would be a Wolverine mechanic.

Instead, the game appears terrified of allowing Wolverine’s characteristics to interfere with standard action-game structure.

§ 01 The greater missed opportunity, though, is lethality.

A good Wolverine game should not spend thirty hours asking the player to become progressively better at killing people. Logan is already very good at that. The interesting progression would begin with a capable Wolverine and gradually build him into something frightening. The opening portion of the game could teach increasingly lethal claw techniques, counters, pounces, dismemberments and environmental attacks until the player has assembled an extraordinary combat toolkit.

And then, fairly early, the rules around that toolkit should change.

Not the abilities. The rules.

Keep every move the player earned. Keep every instant kill, every vicious counter and every grotesquely efficient solution available. Then start giving the player situations in which using them indiscriminately means failure. Someone needs to be questioned. Someone in the room is innocent. The target needs to survive. Civilians are present. Evidence cannot be destroyed. A suspect has to be followed instead of converted into several smaller suspects.

Suddenly the player possesses an arsenal built for killing and has to learn restraint.

That would be progression worthy of Wolverine. The early game teaches lethality. The larger game teaches control.

Most action games increase the player’s power so encounters become easier. Wolverine creates the possibility of doing something much more interesting: as his lethal skill set expands, the game can demand greater precision from the player. The easiest answer to a difficult encounter remains available the entire time. You simply cannot use it without consequences.

There is no need for a morality meter. No giant red BERSERKER gauge. No dialogue prompt asking whether Logan would like to be Good Wolverine or Naughty Wolverine. The mechanic itself makes the point. You know you could end the fight in seconds. The challenge is getting through it without doing so.

And because the player actually spent time earning those lethal abilities, restraint would have weight. Later, when the game occasionally presents a situation in which restraint genuinely no longer matters, it would not need to unlock some artificial super mode. It could simply remove the restrictions and let you use the character you already built.

§ 02 That is the kind of thing superhero games should do: derive mechanics from the superhero.

The best examples understand this. Batman’s predator encounters are not generic stealth sections with ears attached to the protagonist. They are built around fear, observation and controlling a room. Spider-Man’s traversal works because swinging through the city is not merely transportation between missions; it is part of being Spider-Man.

Wolverine gives a designer claws, regeneration, heightened senses, extreme durability, animal aggression and a lifelong struggle with controlling violence. There is enough material there for several games.

Insomniac somehow arrives at punch and punch.

§ 03 It is a decorative suggestion.

Even the smaller mistakes suggest the same lack of care about whether what the game says corresponds to what the game is actually doing. Nathaniel Essex tells you his name, yet the dialogue identification continues to call him UNKNOWN MAN . That is funny for about three seconds before it becomes revealing. The player knows who he is. Essex knows who he is. The script knows who he is. The interface has apparently wandered off for coffee.

Fig. 02 — The dialogue identification, in the frame where he identifies himself.

The button sequences are worse. When a game puts a particular button on the screen, there is a very basic agreement being made with the player: press this button and something happens; fail to press it and something else happens. Here, sequences can apparently continue when the requested button is not pressed, when another button is pressed, or even when the player presses nothing.

At that point it is not a quick-time event.

That might sound trivial compared with combat design, but it reflects the same problem. The game repeatedly presents something as mechanically meaningful and then reveals that underneath the presentation there is very little there.

The claws look lethal, but enemies absorb them.

The button prompt looks mandatory, but it is not.

The unidentified man identifies himself, but remains unidentified.

The game keeps asking the player to pretend its systems mean more than they actually do.

That is especially damaging in a superhero game, because superhero games depend on mechanical correspondence. The fantasy works when the unusual characteristics of the character alter the rules. Wolverine should not simply have more violent animations than another protagonist. His existence should make ordinary videogame assumptions break.

Locked doors should be different when you have adamantium claws.

Being shot should be different when you regenerate.

Tracking somebody should be different when you can smell him.

Fighting ordinary humans should be different when virtually any committed strike could kill them.

And difficulty should be different when the protagonist himself is rarely the most vulnerable thing in the encounter.

That last point alone could have transformed the game. The question does not always have to be whether Wolverine survives. He probably will. The vulnerable element can be the hostage, the witness, the evidence, the person you are protecting, the suspect you need alive, or simply everybody unfortunate enough to be trapped in a room with you.

Instead, Marvel’s Wolverine seems determined to protect conventional videogame design from Wolverine.

That is backwards.

The character should have broken the template.

Insomniac had six adamantium reasons to rethink the standard action game and apparently used them to scratch Wolverine’s name onto one.

Universal Game Quality & Impact Score

Under an isolated review model, a game does not score a 1/100 by accident or due to a broken setup. To reach 1/100, the game must exhibit total, intentional design and functional failure at the source: