Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure.
Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential. Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption.
It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men. At its heart, though, Marvel’s Wolverine is, like its hero, an unreconstructed brawler. From the start, you can dodge, parry, shred attack and leap attack with speed and savagery, but as you earn XP, you unlock new techniques and combos as well as powerful special moves such as the tornado spin, which damages enemies all around you in a flurry of blades, or the spiral strike, which lets you drill through an enemy to escape a crowd.
Your main combo attack is the barrage, accessed by hitting shred repeatedly, but this can be closed with a leap attack or other unlocked techniques for extra damage, and to stagger opponents. On top of this you can also unlock new DNA strands, which provide buffs to your health and cooldown speeds. The highlight, though, is the three-stage rage meter, which builds as you damage and parry enemies.
At each stage you get more powerful attack and defensive stats, and at the final stage you become an almost indestructible machine of carnage, which is immensely liberating. But while fights feel smooth and empowering, there is rarely any need to be creative or experimental. In the Spider-Man games, the character’s grace, his web-throwing, the three-dimensional nature of his movement, all encourage you to fight beautifully; here I was reminded of 80s beat-’em-ups, or PS3 brawlers – a bludgeoning production line of identical fights against increasingly over-familiar enemy types.
Sure, this fits with Wolverine’s character, but similar melee-based brawling adventures such as Devil May Cry and Bayonetta provide deeply layered combat systems and diverse enemy types which reward (and often demand) varied techniques from players. I survived a huge majority of skirmishes in the default difficulty setting by pummelling parry and switching between linked shred attacks and leaps, opening and closing barrage combos in the process, while letting rip with specials whenever they came online. The boss battles, which felt extremely familiar and at times cliched, demanded a similar approach, just with better timing and more patience.
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