Neither I, this website, nor anyone I know is cool enough for brands to send free shit to test out, but I am still a consumer and read advance reviews on the stuff I'm looking forward to. Marvel's Wolverine is no exception. I've been waiting for this game since it was announced at Sony's Showcase back in 2021 (yeah, 5 damn years ago).

With the game finally releasing in 4 days (9/15), people cooler than me have gotten their hands on it, and the reviews are (Michael Scott drumroll)...meh. Bit of a bummer, but digging into the reviews and the reviewers themselves, most of the critical takes are coming from people who play games for a living, not people who play games for fun. That's me: someone who likes video games, but has so little time left in the day that my backlog still has Xbox One titles sitting in it. (I swear I'm going to get to it.)

A few examples: Simon Cardy of IGN gave it a 6. Greg Miller of Kinda Funny gave it a 5.5. Giovanni Colantonio of Polygon didn't score it, but said something about the game existing because of unresolved male anger issues or whatever. I've never met or talked to any of these people, but I know one thing: they aren't reviewing games the way I, or most people, actually play them. Proof: they all gave Mixtape a perfect 10, a "masterpiece." (Note: Giovanni didn't score the game and while saying it was amazing, he had a problem with it not being personalized enough or whatever.)

Question: Have you ever actually heard of or played Mixtape?

I'll admit it: Mixtape is fun, unique, and the animations are beautiful. But it's not really a video game, it's a playable movie and I've seen this movie before, it's a playable version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Read their reviews closely and the praise isn't really about gameplay, it's about the soundtrack (great, no argument there) and the nostalgia it stirred up for them. Is that what a game should be graded on? Their biggest knock on Wolverine is that it's repetitive and linear. Mixtape is no different. Shopping Cart Bomb, the Ferris Bueller-style neighborhood run, all linear, all doing most or all the playing for you. And the "repetitive" complaint cuts both ways: sitting in a bedroom "discovering" objects gets old fast too.

The other games these guys love tend to demand AP Chemistry plus Tamagotchi-level attention just to build and level up your character. I don't have time to min-max the perfect loadout, memorize frame-perfect parries, or "walk" for an hour to get somewhere. Wukong and Sekiro are exactly the kind of games I'd love, if dying 50 times to the third boss because my build was wrong or my timing was off a millisecond counted as relaxing. It doesn't. Even when I do carve out time, I'm usually a quarter of the way through when life catches up, and by the time I come back I've forgotten the story, the objective, and half the buttons. I know this because I started, stopped, and restarted GTA 5 five separate times, and only finished it when I was unemployed.

So until I get the game myself and play it (on the hardest difficulty, obviously, gotta get my money's worth), I'm treating these mid-to-negative reviews as fake news. Most of them come from professionals whose entire job, who get paid, is to play games all day. That's like asking Lewis Hamilton to review a Honda Accord: of course he'll call it slow with bad steering. The man drives an F1 car for a living and owns some of the greatest sports cars on Earth.