Marvel's Wolverine review: Brutal, beautiful, and over before it earns its claws

Insomniac Games has spent the better part of a decade making the best superhero games on any console, and Marvel's Wolverine is technically set in the same universe as its Spider-Man trilogy. Same studio, same Marvel partnership, same PlayStation exclusivity. But if you are walking in expecting Spider-Man with claws, adjust your expectations early. This is a much smaller, much angrier, much more linear game, and that single design decision shapes everything about how it plays and how long it holds you.

India pricing

The standard digital edition is listed at ₹4,999 on the PlayStation Store in India, while the physical disc is going for around ₹5,999 at retailers like Flipkart and Amazon.

Story (spoilers ahead)

Logan has walked away from Team X and spent three years trying to be nobody in particular. That does not last. Bolivar Trask is abducting mutants in the name of human superiority, and Wolverine gets pulled back into the task force he abandoned. The chase takes you from the Canadian wilderness to Japan and on to Madripoor, with Jean Grey acting as Logan's conscience and Sabretooth cast as the world's worst colleague. That Logan and Creed dynamic is easily the most entertaining part of the writing, and it pays off with more emotional weight than I expected.


Everything else is where it thins out. The game is clearly building scaffolding for a larger mutant universe, seeding characters and threads it has no intention of resolving here, and Nathaniel Essex in particular feels like setup for a sequel rather than a villain with anything to do in this one. Logan himself has one emotional register for most of the runtime, which is a problem when the whole pitch is a character study about memory and guilt.

Insomniac wrote one of the best superhero stories in modern gaming with the first Spider-Man. This is nowhere close. It is competent, it is well acted, and it is completely forgettable a week later.

Gameplay

The combat is the reason to play this. The claws have real weight, the animation work is outstanding, and the Rage system pushes you to stay aggressive rather than hide behind a block. The healing factor is cleverly handled too. You regenerate constantly, but dampeners scattered across arenas shut it off and force you to prioritise targets, and burning a full Rage tier to get back up from a downed state is a genuinely tense trade. Swappable Techniques and Adaptations let you tune Logan toward stealth or straight slaughter.

Here is where it separates from Spider-Man, and it is the thing that stuck with me most. There is no open world. You move through contained, mission-gated environments from one set piece to the next. That is a defensible creative choice, and it keeps the pacing tight. But it also removes the thing that made Spider-Man endlessly replayable. With Spidey you would boot the game up for ten minutes just to swing across Manhattan for no reason at all. Wolverine has no equivalent. There is no reason to return once the credits roll.

The runtime lands somewhere around 14 to 18 hours depending on difficulty and how much you poke around. New Game Plus exists and adds a higher level cap plus a few new Adaptations, but I doubt many people will run the same linear corridors a second time to see them.

Visually it is excellent. Insomniac's engine continues to be one of the most reliable in the business, and on a PS5 Pro you get a choice between advanced ray tracing and a higher frame rate, both of which hold up well.

Verdict

Marvel's Wolverine nails the feeling of being Wolverine better than any film or game before it. The combat is savage, the presentation is superb, and the Logan and Sabretooth material genuinely lands. But the story is thin, the world is closed off, and there is no pull to keep playing once it ends.

At ₹4,999 for roughly 15 hours you will play exactly once, it is worth a purchase if the combat is what you came for. If you are hoping for another Spider-Man, this is not that game, and it was never trying to be.