Tech
The Wolverine Game Sinks Its Claws Into Emotional Heights Rather Than Story Cohesion
The 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.
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.
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.
To a comics fan, that’s a neat subversion, prompting the question of who Logan is without the moralizing guidance of Professor X and his X-Men teammates. Anyone else without a decent familiarity with Wolverine’s world likely has a tougher time grasping the significance of this alternate universe. As a member of the former, I enjoyed how this reality created space to decide whether the best-known X-Man has an inborn decency or was always clay in the hands of his rehabilitator.
The game’s conclusion won’t shock you, but Insomniac spends good screen time tempting Logan into doing the devil’s work for the right reasons. As a dark mirror of the squabbling but wholesome X-Men, the squabbling and brutal Team X offers Logan a belonging he craves despite his disgust at their methods. Family dysfunction is a strong theme in the game. Love, a little less so.
When hunting down some of Trask’s goons, Logan runs into, and teams up with, a red-headed telekinetic. X-Men fans will pick up on the game’s hints as to her identity — Jean Grey, who in many other versions of the characters, has an unfulfilled romance with Logan owing to her greater commitment to X-Man Scott Summers (Cyclops). Luckily for Logan, he’s nowhere in this game.
Though they grow closer over the course of the story, Logan and Jean’s attraction is more insisted and fated, within the game and without, than observed. As the lynchpin of a lot of Logan’s later choices, this romance isn’t quite as realized as his messed-up adopted family — but in certain moments that Insomniac takes time to build up, the two pitch a doomed love I couldn’t help but yearn to see fulfilled.
Yet plenty of that tension relies on external information. Despite Insomniac’s admirable audacity in making a Wolverine game without the X-Men, plenty of its plot beats and payoffs subvert and evoke character relationships fans know from other media (comics, movies and so on). Players likely won’t care as much about Logan and Jean’s love if they don’t realize it’s the rare What If scenario where Cyclops isn’t standing in the way.
To get around this, Insomniac makes a radical swerve with Logan’s backstory, tying it into his fractured memory as a late-game reveal that shakily works, so long as you don’t look closely at its timeline or implications. As the studio did with its Spider-Man games, this involves planting seeds for future sequels via references to characters and elements from other corners of classic Wolverine storylines — but these mean nothing to players ignorant of X-Men lore. One of them causes a pivotal consequence for Logan at the very end of the game, and for the uninitiated, it comes out of nowhere. The source of his rage is mired in ambiguity, and even I was perplexed.
As the game’s story heads toward its inevitable conclusion, it never quite answers the nature-versus-nurture question with Logan, and the resolution of his fractured memory frankly isn’t satisfying. Elements from his past are excitedly revealed and never brought up again. Lingering side plots are hastily sewn up as the story barrels toward an abruptly escalated final showdown.
But there’s a core of the game — maybe not the Wolverine I expected, but a Wolverine that Insomniac is clearly invested in exploring — that engages with the character’s relationship between violence and love, belonging and endangerment. I want to play the follow-up that leaves the mystery of Logan’s past behind and carves out a more fulfilling story of changing his destiny with more than just claws.
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