Yeah, yeah. I know. I went on a whole rant about critics being unfair to this game and now here I am giving it a 6. While I'm aligned to the number, I'm not aligned to their reason. 

My 6 is different from theirs. Theirs is a "this is fine" 6. Mine is a "you broke my heart Insomniac, but it was still fun" 6. One's a waiter bringing you the wrong soup. The other is your dad forgetting your birthday.

It's a "quick pick-up and drop" button masher game where, while you need to get good at parrying, you could not play it for a while and pick up where you left off; no need to spend a week learning all of the buttons again. 

There were glitches, some funny, some annoying, none that made me throw a controller or that required me to restart the whole level. I decided to play the game on Hard mode because I wanted to get the most out of the game and it didn't disappoint, I had my fair amount of "what the hell?" and "how could they?" and calling myself a stupid idiot for not hitting the X button at the right time. 

The whole "fart trail" or blue line thing wasn't that bad either. I mean how else are you supposed to show off scent? 

Hence the game gets a fun score of 7.5.

With that said, there were a few letdown areas, which brings the score to a 6.

For the amount of time the Insomniac team had to think about and develop this game was a HUGE waste of the potential of what it could have been.

This game was announced in September 2021. It released worldwide for the PlayStation 5 on September 15, 2026. 5 years. You can get a college degree in five years and still have a year left over to realize it didn't help.

And look at who made it. Insomniac's résumé includes the Spyro the Dragon trilogy, Ratchet and Clank, the 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man, its 2020 Miles Morales standalone, and 2023's Marvel's Spider-Man 2. (Miles Morales should've been DLC. I will die on that hill, just not today.)

Critics noticed this too, but I think they read it incorrectly. While they pointed out that Wolverine landed well below Marvel's Spider-Man at 87, Miles Morales at 85, and Spider-Man 2 at 90 (making it the lowest-rated original Insomniac game in a decade, going back to Song of the Deep in 2016), I think it had more to do with expectations. I really believe that if the game was announced in 2021 and released in 2022, it wouldn't have been rated so bad.

I feel like what we got was a game made by a team that only heard about the Spider-Man games at a party and had never played Batman Arkham series. 

Honestly, I'd have taken Spider-Man 2 with a Wolverine re-skin. The mechanics of this game were not there, at all. About 70% of my deaths came from the camera refusing to snap back behind me, or the game refusing to lock onto the enemy my joystick was literally pointing at. The Arkham games solved this in 2009. Spider-Man solved this too, but it seems like they didn't take that core concept from that game.

This is the big one. You have WOLVERINE. And not one Berserker Barrage? Not one Drill Claw? Not one "Let's go Bub!"? These aren't deep cuts. Capcom has had Berserker Barrage and Drill Claw on Wolverine's move list since the '90s. A fighting game from when phones had cords knew this and a $70 game that was announced 5 years ago and was in development since 2018 didn't.

And then there's Sabretooth. Did anyone at Insomniac read a single comic? In Wolverine #10 (1989), Sabertooth tracked Logan down and attacked on his birthday, starting a grim tradition, killing the woman Logan loved, Silver Fox. Marvel's own character bio says Sabretooth assaulted her, "apparently raping her and leaving her for dead." 

It gets worse. In 2024's Sabretooth War, Creed and his army killed Daken, Logan's son, and dismembered him in Wolverine #41, and then arranged the bodies into a message for Logan: Happy Birthday. This is a man who treats Logan's birthday the way the rest of us treat the Super Bowl. Whatever that thing between them in the game was, it wasn't that. It actually had weird moments where you thought they would get it on ("That's my Wolverine"...wha?).

The linear-ness was fine. What got me is that the world barely breaks. You're Wolverine. You have knives in your hands. Permanently. Meanwhile Donkey Kong Bananza lets you destroy most of the terrain to carve your own paths, and DK's weapon is his hands. A gorilla with no knives out-destroyed a man made of knives.

Here, besides some boxes that cough up XP, nothing breaks. Which is funny, because before launch, Insomniac's directors said the game emphasizes physical destruction of the environment. The boxes, I guess. They meant the boxes.

Here's the thing. The biggest problem with this game isn't the game. It's the bar. Look at 007 First Light. It was first announced in 2020, a year before Wolverine. It's a very linear action-adventure, and critics dinged its basic quick time events too. People still loved it. GamesRadar called it Bond's best game ever.

The difference? Bond hadn't had a game in 14 years, and the last one, 007 Legends, was a stinker. The bar was on the floor. Insomniac's bar was Spider-Man 2 at a 90. Bond got to be the comeback kid in a world where a Bond movie wasn't released. Wolverine had to be the valedictorian in a world where Marvel is at the top and people waiting for a Batman/Spider-Man style game, but with a playable Wolverine. What did it turn out to be? A demo video game of what the real Wolverine game should be and thats what this game is, the demo for the real game.

Final score: 6.