The new game from the makers of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has proven unexpectedly controversial, as we go hands-on with the new PS5 exclusive and speak to its director.
There’s a good chance you’ve already read a hands-on preview for Marvel’s Wolverine, as some of the bigger gaming sites played it recently at developer Insomniac’s offices in the US. That’s not unusual as, ironically, it’s often the bigger titles that publishers limit access to, more than the smaller ones they’re less certain will be a hit.
What is unusual though, is that Sony organised essentially the same event in London just a few days later, including an interview with the game’s co-director Mike Daly. It wasn’t a reaction to the initial previews, as it was organised several weeks ago, but that created an awkward situation where we already knew that not only were some journos not convinced by the game, but fans had seemingly turned fully against it, ribbing it mercilessly for its perceived lack of interactivity.
Knowing this before going in for the hands-on, we were more than a little surprised that we actually liked the game, especially as we’re largely indifferent to the character of Wolverine and the X-Men in general. It’s almost certainly not game of the year material, but it absolutely doesn’t deserve the drubbing it’s been getting online.
The fan response is no doubt fuelled by general dissatisfaction with Sony right now, thanks to their abandoning of physical media on PlayStation 5. None of that is Insomniac’s fault but a first party game is going to be an especially big target for those that are, quite understandably, angry with Sony’s anti-consumer policies.
For those that have no prior knowledge of the game, Marvel’s Wolverine is very easy to get up to speed with. Made by the same studio as Sony’s Spider-Man games, it takes place at the beginning of Wolverine’s career, when he’s befriended by Nathaniel Essex – who comic book fans will know becomes Mister Sinister.
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Obviously, with a name like that, he’s a bad guy but in world where the X-Men do not yet exist, Wolverine is part of Team X, which is composed of traditional baddies Sabretooth and Mystique. As the game begins Essex has been kidnapped by his human counterpart-in-evil Bolivar Trask, creator of the giant robot Sentinels.
This leads to some light stealth and the disarming (in the ripping limbs from bodies sense of the word) of an endless army of hapless soldiers and Reavers – the cyborg mercenaries that were also featured in the film Logan. It all looks and feels exactly as you’d expect from the makers of Spider-Man, with top notch graphics and very easy to grasp controls. Although, it’s not open world and is instead reminiscent of Uncharted, with linear sections and a number of small, more open-ended areas.
Having read some of the previews, we struggle to connect their complaints with what we played. We don’t want to name names but the talk about a lack of ‘fluidity’ to the combat (a word which Insomniac is very keen to associate with the game) are hard to understand and reading between the lines it seems fairly obvious that some of those playing the preview just weren’t very good at parrying. Which seems odd because Wolverine is not a particularly complex or difficult game. Sekiro, this is not.
Wolverine isn’t necessarily easy, it just feels like the difficulty is well judged in terms of making you feel like a man with an unbreakable metal skeleton that’s almost impossible to kill. In gameplay terms, the game is pretty shallow, both in terms of the controls and the characters’ abilities. The linearity makes it feel strangely old-fashioned, despite the graphics, and while there’s new moves and abilities to unlock, and customisable buffs, there’s not really a skill tree… barely even a skill potted plant.
What there is instead is simple, accessible but still surprisingly distinctive combat that feels more like a modernised scrolling beat ‘em-up than a Devil May Cry style action game. There’s really only one main action button, plus a leap attack that can also serve as a combo finisher. You have special moves on a timer (the tornado spin is very useful for creating space in a crowd) but that timer takes quite a while to run, so they’re only an occasional treat.
We may not be experts on the Wolverine character but we’re not really sure what else could be done with him, if not a game like this. Especially as what depth the game does have is in its storytelling. This is a younger version of the character than is usually portrayed, hanging around with people of dubious moral standing, but even the ones that seem more one note, like Sabretooth, are portrayed in a manner that does make them seem somewhat human and relatable.
The only complaints we have is the Nightmare Door sections, which are a series of optional time trials used to unlock Wolverine’s dormant memories. They’re really not very interesting, with the three we played including two very dull assault courses and a combat challenge.
Of more note is the main boss battle in the preview, against a legless Proto-Sentinel that looks and acts like the Terminator from the end of the first film. It also acts like something out of a PlayStation 2 game (or earlier, it’s very reminiscent of Big Fuzz from Contra 3), with heavily telegraphed attacks that you learn in the first few minutes and then endure for what seems like forever, as the whole thing goes on for far too long.
It’s weak stuff and we can certainly understand the mockery levelled at it, but we did get a very good answer out of Daly, about why Western boss battles are still so hit and miss, compared to their Japanese counterparts.
Maybe it was just because we enjoyed the interview, but we came away from the preview perfectly enthused about the game’s eventual release, especially considering we have no prior attachment to any of the characters. There’s much to be upset about in the gaming world right now, but Marvel’s Wolverine is not something to get the pitchforks out for. It may not be the best there is at what it does but it’s certainly no slouch.
Formats: PlayStation 5
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Insomniac Games
Release Date: 15th September 2026
Age Rating: 18
GC: I’m going to open with the same question I always do for a Marvel-related interview, but I fear I already know the answer is no in this case: is Squirrel Girl in this?
MD: [laughs] I think if you were to put Squirrel Girl in a game, she would deserve to be on the cover of the box.
GC: [laughs] That’s true. So what’s your situation with the Marvel games? Were you able to pick any character you like to make a game about or did Sony come to you and present Wolverine as an option?
MD: So, a decision like what character to take on next definitely requires the alignment of Insomniac, SIE [Sony Interactive Entertainment], and Marvel. Before we shipped Spider-Man: Miles Morales, we knew that team was going to be available to work on a next game. And it made a lot of sense to try a new Marvel property. And so, sort of the notion was kind of in the air, and basically it wasn’t like we’re going to give you a blank check and you pick a name. It’s more just like… we meet with our producers at Sony and our producers at Marvel regularly for feedback, discussions, and ideation.
And so what character to pick next kind of was a natural part of those conversations. And basically, when we put all the factors on the table, of what would be the best choice – like a combination of Insomniac’s excitement for the character and interest in it; Marvel’s excitement for getting the character out there, more prominently in video game form; and the fan’s interest and excitement to see a character like that, all lined up and made it a clear choice.
GC: I’m a great fan of the Miles Morales game, I always hoped that would set a precedent for the generation, in terms of being a high quality but relatively short game. It’s not just that people don’t have enough spare time anymore, I felt the shorter length helped focus the storytelling too. In hindsight I think Sony just wanted something ready for the PS5 launch but has there been no further talk of more games like that?
MD: Well… I think Miles was a great game too. I really liked the pacing of the game, the size of the game. That, to me, was a very consumable game [laughs] that fit nicely with my lifestyle.
GC: The villain worked better for me too; it seemed more personal than Doc Ock or whatever.
MD: Yeah. Now, how much game to put into a game is a subject that we do a lot of hand-wringing over in every game. For Marvel’s Wolverine, we wanted to create a game that was very story focused and sort of kept your attention the whole time. And so that’s one of the reasons why we picked the linear structure, without open world segments… so that you kind of didn’t have those pacing breaks that let you forget the previous events.
We really wanted to create something that felt like a comic book, in the sense that it had that sort of roller-coaster pacing. So Wolverine is a bigger game than Miles Morales, but I think that you’ll find its story focus – the ability to follow along with the characters and their paths – is a little bit cleaner and easier to follow than games that you play out over open world segments.
GC: In terms of Wolverine, obviously he’s very popular but did you worry that there might not be enough there to work with, mechanically? He doesn’t really have a unique form of traversal, like many of the best superheroes.
MD: So, you could say the same thing about his combat kit as well. He has claws, he doesn’t use weapons or gadgets. Is that like a limiting factor? Sure, it means that we can’t do some of the things that we’re used to doing in other games, where we can have more exotic traversal or a bunch of gadgets and weapons, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not more than enough to work off of to make a really satisfying game.
At the top of the totem pole is make sure you feel like Wolverine with every action. And ultimately you’re navigating through a lot of different environments with different features. So we knew traversal would be important. You couldn’t neglect it. We did have control over the proportion of combat and traversal. Getting that proportion right was important. And then within traversal, to make it feel like an insomniac game, we knew we needed to deliver fluidity and strong game feel, which is to say all the channels of player feedback have to be there, tuned to just the right level.
So to feel right for Logan traversal, we knew we needed to make him move like an animal. We needed to have him move very naturally in natural places, because he has a connection to nature, and we knew we needed to make him feel heavy, like he has a metal skeleton. And so we focused our feedback on that, making him land with a thud, getting those quadruped animations integrated at just the right time.
And making sure that whenever you press a traversal button, he could fluidly transition from whatever he was doing to what the player intended to do reliably. If we checked those boxes and then spent the right amount of playtime on traversal, then it still feels like a great feeling game that also feels in character.
GC: I have to agree, I enjoyed it. But I’m in the unusual position where I’ve read last week’s previews and I have to say I don’t quite understand some of them. Having played the game myself, it just seems like they weren’t very good at it.
MD: [laughs]
GC: Where you surprised at the response? One of your colleagues seemed to get quite frustrated with it online, and understandably so.
MD: Well, part of our job… it is a joy to see fans’ reactions to the game. But of course, that’s a big mix and there’s a lot of different opinions in there. From my experience, seeing many games come out and how the fans react to those… I played through the Spider-Man games and I can tell for myself, these are great games. They’re fun. They’re well rounded, well-balanced games with a really engaging story. And yet you still see a lot of online discourse of just like, ‘This game is a mess.’ It has all these problems, this, that, or the other thing. And so in a way, I’m kind of accustomed to knowing that for some people there really is nothing you can do. It doesn’t mean that you haven’t made a great game.
GC: Some of the complaints have been in jest but the nasty ones… it must be upsetting. Do you have systems to help staff deal with that?
MD: I mean, I feel like internal to Insomniac, we have pretty healthy communication channel about what’s going on with the game’s reception. People share articles with the rest of the team, whether they’re positive or negative, and we can see people sort of react and respond to those within the team. And from seeing that play out over many reactions, I can say I wouldn’t worry too much about the team.
I think we’ve got a pretty level-headed reaction to all of that. And I think a large part of that is because we get to see all the positive alongside the negative and we get to see sort of the rest of the team’s take on it as well, which helps us calibrate. And ultimately, at the end of the day, people who don’t like the game don’t really have any influence on our decision-making process, really. So to what degree it affects us is up to us.
GC: The fans have made some fair points, including what they perceive to be a low level of interactivity. There must have been a question early on, as to whether you’d make the combat more complex, more like Devil May Cry or something. But I imagine accessibility was a primary concern?
MD: In truth, the primary concern was, and this is going to sound kind of redundant, but the most important filter we put on every decision was, is this the best for a Wolverine game? The character was at the centre of all of our decision-making process. And so games, game systems, combat games can take many different forms with different levels of complexity and feedback, decision making, and variability. And what we calibrated for was what form will make you feel like Wolverine for each decision that you make? And that precludes a lot of things.
Wolverine does not sit there and wait until he’s memorised the patrol routes and distracted people with throwing rocks or whatever. There is stealth in the game. So stealth players can reasonably complain like there was not as much tools as I wanted in a stealth game.
GC: I liked the little stealth bit where you’re in the tall grass.
MD: Right. Yeah. I mean it’s like traversal, where a big part of it is finding the right size of the game to spend in that part of the system, so that each of them feels like when it has its moment, it breaks up the pace, gives you some new, different, interesting decisions to make; makes you feel like Wolverine and then you move on from it.
And so, at the end of the day, you can easily come up with any sort of criticism that this game is not the thing that you wanted, because the thing you wanted is a thing from a different game that is not Wolverine. And so I rest easy knowing that we’ve made our decisions focused on making the best Wolverine game and not the best open world game or the best skill tree or whatever, that we set out to accomplish our mission. And that just means it’s not a game for everyone.
GC: I’m always interested in balance, but this one has a strange one in terms of the fantastical elements. Because it feels quite grounded, but then you have Mystique in a comic accurate outfit and people flying around whenever they want.
MD: Yeah. [laughs]
GC: But I’m betting, and I’m putting this in my Squirrel Girl wishlist category, that you don’t go to the Savage Land and Wolverine doesn’t end up fighting dinosaurs. So how do you decide how far to go with the fantastical stuff?
MD: So, how grounded versus fantastic is one of those things that is very difficult to succinctly describe because we’ve constantly tried to with the team and we still always got to feel it out. It’s the sort of thing where other forms of media that feature Wolverine are never the right balance that we can point to.
And so the thing that helped us the most, for deciding the right balance of how believable versus how fantastic, how human versus how superheroic, was really looking at the Spider-Man games, because we struggled with that problem for years and years to try and get it right. And we have that example to look to, that’s like Spider-Man lives in a city of humans where you can hear them have serious emotional conversations about their lives, but then Sandman might escape the next day and take up 10 city blocks.
So that to us was like… if we go for this right level, where we remind you that it’s fantastic, but use it sparingly, then we can delight you with a world that feels believable and relatable; yet gives you the excitement of these drama peaks and makes them really more impactful.
PR person: We’re just running up against time.
GC: OK, this last one is more about Insomniac in general. One of the big problems in the industry now is how long it takes to make games, but you guys really knock them out, like twice as quick as most comparable games. Assuming it’s not something evil, what are you guys doing that you can produce these so quickly?
MD: [laughs] Yeah. I can’t talk about our dark pacts… [laughs] Anyway, Insomniac, I think there are many, many little things that go into the answer, but I can talk about a few that are sort of big and broad impacts on it. One is developing multiple games at a time and offsetting them, so that the studio can put its support, its muscle, behind the game that needs it most at the moment, while the other team kind of has the pressure off to cook and solve problems over a longer period of time.
GC: How many staff do you have? It’s always hard to guess with a bigger developer if they have the capacity to make two big games at once.
MD: I think you might have to just look at the credits on Spider-Man 2 because I don’t know. [laughs]
GC: Is it just because you’re big? [Wikipedia suggests they have around 450 staff, which is a lot – GC] Or is it, as you imply, because of how you’re organised?
MD: It’s not that it’s very large per se, because it’s not the same as just taking two game studios and duct-taping them together. By virtue of having that offset, the teams don’t have to stay the exact same size throughout the entire production. There are surges to get to key milestones and shipping. And there are phases where the sort of iteration and ideation is a slow burn, but everybody still knows each other. They work on the same sort of projects. And so that transfer of expertise and specialisation is relatively smooth and seamless. So that is one aspect.
Another aspect is that Insomniac, I think has a really strong, positive, collaborative culture. And so we are able to make tough decisions early on because we take everybody’s input and use everybody to sort of weigh the best options and pick the right things because the wrong decision early on in the project can really add a lot of time before you discover what the right answer is. And skipping those steps is really crucial.
And then finally, we are exclusively focused on PS5. And there is a lot of sort of foundational synergy between our games. And so with each game, we have a team that’s constantly re-evaluating our workflows and our technology and our tools to make it better. And so we’re constantly building on that to get faster and faster, trying to keep pace with increased expectations and production values and frame rate and resolution and all that sort of thing.
So I do think that even though Wolverine and Spider-Man have very different fundamental game designs, they share a lot of the same technology and that gave Wolverine a big springboard, compared to as if we had just started it right out of the blue.
GC: OK, that makes sense. Can I just squeeze in one more question? Although I don’t want to end on a sour note because the one thing in the preview I didn’t really like was the boss battle. It did seem… not just old-fashioned but like a classic example of how Western boss battles often don’t compare well to the best from Japan. Is that something you’re aware of? Do you have any explanation for why, traditionally, that’s always been the case?
MD: Of course we want the sort of mechanics and the challenge of our boss battles to be incredibly satisfying, because they are like the intensity peaks of the whole macro of the game. That being said, our priority, like the rest of the game, is to evoke the character of the boss battle even more than the mechanics, necessarily. The mechanics serve that character being evoked.
So in the case of the boss battle you got to experience, that’s the Proto-Sentinel. And when we set out, we were like, there are some elements of the Proto-Sentinel that must be present to deliver the fantasy and that we know you have to be intimidated. It needs to feel massive, like a huge threat. And that part of the experience has to be how Team X sort of reconverges and comes together to defeat it. So those were sort of our high level goals for Proto-Sentinel.
And then, given those sort of constraints, we figured out what are the attacks and the opportunities that let you interact and basically fight your way through the challenge. So putting character above mechanics involves some compromises because you can’t just have the Proto-Sentinel do things that violate the fiction or don’t feel right for him. And similarly, you can’t have Wolverine fighting back against the Proto-Sentinel in ways that don’t fit his character.
Like, he’s not going to come up with some sort of clever ruse to lure it into a trap or whatever gimmick that you might use for a different character. And so given that perspective, I am really happy with how our boss battles play out because the best stories in video games are the ones told by the actions the player took. And when you feel like you defeated this character, it’s a more important and satisfying part of the story than if the character was forgettable and it had good mechanics.
GC: I think that’s the best answer to that question I’ve had in an interview. Yes, that makes sense. Because I think, at least in an action game, Japanese developers are much more focused on the gameplay than they are the story or plausibility.
MD: It kind of goes back to the original, sort of the main guiding thing is just… that’s Wolverine. Everything in the game is about telling that character’s story. It is the first thing that guides really all these other elements. And so I think it is very reasonable to want more nuance or complexity to the boss fight, but really… we feel like we’ve done our jobs if the boss fight gives you an unforgettable encounter with an iconic villain. And that means that the storytelling is the most important thing.
GC: That’s great. Thank you. So, in conclusion: you can confirm that your next game is Squirrel Girl Goes To The Savage Land?
MD: [laughs] You know, I was taking notes of what you said… [laughs]
GC: [laughs] That’s great. Well, I’m sorry that overran but thank you.
MD: No problem, that’s what I’m here for.
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