GoKawiilThe Marvel superhero Wolverine has been a fan favorite for so long that he’s been spread across a lot of media, splintering his identity as much as his character’s memory: Is he an X-Man, an Avenger, a lone wolf, a team leader, an ancient soldier, a savage berserker, a noble warrior? Insomniac, tapped to make a game centered around the surly mutant who can heal anything except his attitude, opted for a linear adventure hitting the emotional beats of belonging and betrayal — and getting the character’s claws bloody.
Insomniac was already a beloved studio, with the Spyro, Ratchet and Clank, and Resistance franchises behind it, but its trio of Spider-Man games shot it to another level. There in the bright streets of a sprawling (if abridged) New York City, Insomniac unfurled stories of the web-slinging Peter Parker and Miles Morales that enthralled with polished gameplay and engaging emotional heft. The high-water mark had been reached. How would the studio approach a very different hero, tied not to a villain-ridden city but to causes, themes and time?
In Wolverine (the game), Insomniac abandoned the open world for a chapter-based tale bouncing from locale to locale, narrowing the lens to Wolverine (the character, going by Logan) and a small circle of allies, frenemies and foes. It’s a functional structure to keep the scale personal, though this ends up making a lot of the game feel like a string of room-by-room fights (or chat cutscenes) where the people in Logan’s life flit in and out. It works fine, effectively controlling the pace and narrative to deliver emotional beats, but omitting sidequests and tucking collectibles behind a side door instead of scattering them across a city.
That’s the price to pay for this journey: move forward through Insomniac’s plot beats unfolding along a very straightforward path, fight what’s in front of you, and enjoy the emotional story. If you boil it down to extremes, the one thing setting this game apart from a series of cutscenes is the combat, which pits Logan against anything from handfuls to mobs of enemies who he can skewer and dice apart with attacks and abilities. Though the novelty doesn’t last, combat is initially brutally satisfying, with an escalating rage that grows more vicious, showering Logan in a comical yet worrying volume of blood.
This is one of several ways Logan ends enemies. You’ve been warned. Insomniac Games/Screenshot by CNET
It’s this oscillation between severe violence and emotional interchange that grounds the game in the character of Wolverine, even if the plot’s cohesion frays further into the game. The character beats, backed by honed dialogue, kept me engaged to the end — and while the writing won’t please everyone, its strong start hooked me enough to keep going. Between missions of continuous violence, Logan gets moments of downtime to chat with his allies and fill in the backstory of a game that drops you into a very different world than Wolverine typically inhabits. In this one, the X-Men don’t exist.
This premise is one of the game’s strengths. In the opening scene, a feral Logan, barely a man, growls at the outstretched hand of another whose British accent and elegant suit evoke a familiar scene: the mentor bringing the wildling back to his humanity. But contrary to expectations, this isn’t Charles Xavier. Instead, he introduces himself as Nathaniel Essex. Comics fans know him as Mister Sinister.
Nathaniel Essex, aka X-Men villain Mister Sinister, appears to bring Logan back from his feral bottom of the barrel.
How far you can go with an ‘evil alternate universe’
Without the conventional goodness of the X-Men, evil battles itself. Essex strives for the liberation of mutants like himself, only with brutal methods fronted by Team X, a squad made up of the level-headed Mystique, the violent sociopath Sabretooth and, once upon a time, Wolverine, who left out of a vague frustration with the team’s savage means. Opposing them is human supremacist Bolivar Trask and his private military, who seek to wipe out mutants with his Sentinel hunter-killer robots.
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