Marvel’s Wolverine Review – Mutant Murder Machine

Marvel’s Wolverine Review

Wolverine is an incredible character with a rich history all across Marvel’s comics, movies, TV shows, and games. Yet, for much of that same history, fans have been forced to imagine, to speculate. He’s got those wicked razor-sharp claws, but when do you really see him let loose? Wolverine’s action scenes have always been muted and restrained. His cuts are clean, or carefully edited to spare us the bloody details. Even the comics are rarely allowed to display his dark work without any kind of censorship. Marvel’s Wolverine is Logan in rare form, a bloody beast unleashed and let loose. I haven’t seen Logan get so nasty since the most recent Deadpool movie, and it totally rules.

I’ll do my best to avoid them, but yeah: spoilers ahead for the plot of Marvel’s Wolverine.

The game takes place in an alternate timeline, one where the X-Men don’t exist. Instead, we’ve got Wolverine, Mystique, and Sabretooth working on Team X under Nathaniel Essex. Wolverine had previously walked away from the team, but he’s been dragged back in. Essex has been captured by Bolivar Trask, and the rest of the team is rallying to get him back. Also, Wolverine is working with a mere portion of his memories. Giant chunks of his life are missing. The why and the how of his amnesia are key plot points, the discovery of which I will leave to you. I love a good mystery, and this plot is wrapped up in a whole mess of them. The story also hammers home the most critical mutant plot point – being a mutant in this world sounds absolutely brutal.

Kill or Be Killed

If your secret gets out, you’ll either be kidnapped or killed – or maybe both. It’s either that, or you’re in a constant fight for your life, like our man Logan. The mutant narrative is less about acceptance, and more about survival. It’s a bad time for anyone with cool powers or unusual physiology, but playing as Wolverine helps balance that out. Slicing through the world as an immortal murder machine is a great way to reclaim your agency. And oh man, is Logan ever great at killing people. I almost feel bad for the hapless goons who get thrown at him in the beginning of the game. Bullets barely slow you down, and blades can’t compete with your adamantium claws. When Wolverine really gets into the rhythm of violence, it’s incredible to behold.

Combat in this game is all about balancing strategy with relentless rage. You shoot across the battlefield, slamming your opponent to the ground before stabbing them repeatedly. Parries fend off groups of enemies, but you can’t be careful, and you can’t hesitate. You need a perfect mix of ferocious speed and incredible violence if you want to win most fights. As your rage meter builds, you get even more vicious, until you’re dispatching foes faster than your eyes can properly follow. High level combat sees Logan in constant motion, flowing like a river of knives from one target to the next. When you add special moves to the mix, Wolverine turns into a charging tornado of death.

Mutant Murder Machine

At first, fighting was almost exhausting. I was mostly mashing the square button as fast as I could. It was rad watching all the violence, but it felt clumsy and blunt. But with every new mechanic, the rhythm of combat grew more nuanced, more complex. Soon enough I was mixing in dashes, specials, and parries. Somehow, the fights retained that frantic violence no matter how complex my inputs became. In fact, Logan seemed to move even faster throughout the battlefield. As the enemies specialized in killing Logan in particular, it became extra important to keep my head on a swivel and to perfect my moveset. After all, even if Wolverine can’t be killed, he can very much be defeated.

Wolverine’s mutant healing factor is a huge part of his character. So it’s important that this is properly represented in the game. Marvel’s Wolverine nails that delicate balance required to keep things interesting. If you take too much damage, you black out and you have to try again, as it were. So he’s not invincible. On the other hand, you can use your rage to supercharge your healing once or twice before you’re down for the count. Plus, you’ve got talents and techniques you can build up that give you a slight edge on the healing front.

Walk it Off, Big Guy

But this is all video game mechanic type stuff. The really incredible feats of mutant healing come during exciting plot beats and key story moments. It’s then that the devs really flex their cinematic storytelling muscles to show Logan surviving utterly implausible scenarios thanks to his mutant abilities. Crashing planes, slipping under speeding trucks, getting cooked in white hot flames, and other gruesome trials. You get a strong sense of how brutal it would be to walk away from these things. Sure, you lived through it fine. But it hurts so badly. This game is amazing at showcasing how torturously painful immortality can actually be.

I took my time playing through this game. Rather than zone out and devour the entire thing in a couple sittings, I wanted to really soak in the performances and the plot. For someone who mostly alternates between angry and resigned, Logan has a lot of depth and range. You get that exhaustion, that defeated sense of things always going wrong on a long enough timeline. He feels like someone sick of losing people, someone who keeps his distance (or at least tries to) because it hurts less to do so.

His performance isn’t the only great one, either. Sabretooth is a perfectly realized avatar of gleeful violence. He’s huge in every sense of the word. His physicality comes through in his line delivery and his dialogue. He walks in a room and suddenly everyone is on edge, wondering how he’s going to act. This might be one of my favorite depictions of the character in recent memory. All the major characters are excellent in their own way.

Setting A New Standard

As for the plot, I’ll keep it brief. None of the twists felt especially shocking, but they also felt organic. Of course things would turn out this way, the whole arc of the narrative has been bent in this direction since the opening scenes. The story is more inevitable than it is satisfying, but in a way that makes perfect sense. But maybe I’ve just read too many comics at this point. For me, the real draw is these characters. I love watching them interact, seeing them bounce off one another in cool ways that feel natural yet compelling. The real hook is following Logan on his personal journey. What happens in the larger world is inconsequential by comparison.

Marvel’s Wolverine is a tight, focused experience that never lets up or slows down more than it absolutely has to. The action is intense and incredibly violent, the combat flows beautifully, steadily evolving into something wondrous to behold. I loved the acting and the dialogue; the pacing is excellent, and the world depicted is a brutal one. Like Spider-Man before it, Marvel’s Wolverine has set a new standard for this character. Playing as Logan is unlikely to get better than this for many years.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***