I want to preface this by saying that I hope I am completely, embarrassingly, categorically wrong about this. I want to be the person who writes a follow up piece in 2027 where I open by quoting this article back at myself and spend five hundred words eating crow. That would be a wonderful outcome. I would enjoy that very much.
But I have to be honest with you, because that is the only thing I know how to be, and honestly? I do not think Marvel’s Wolverine is going to be good.
There. It is out there now.
Let me be precise about what I mean, because I am not saying it is going to be a disaster. I am not predicting a broken, unfinished mess. Insomniac are too professional for that, too experienced, too clearly in love with what they do. The game will work. It will run. It will look extraordinary. The trailers will make jaws drop and social media will spend a week talking about nothing else.
What I am worried about is something harder to define and, honestly, harder to defend in an argument. I am worried it is going to be spectacular and hollow. A game that feels like an event while you are playing it and evaporates from memory roughly three weeks after the credits roll. A flashy, kinetic, deeply polished experience that gives you all the sensation of being Wolverine without any of the weight.
And after yesterday’s State of Play, I am not sure my concerns have been eased. If anything, they have sharpened slightly.
The gameplay shown was undeniably impressive looking. Logan carving through Reavers in a TRASK uniform, Jean Grey at his side in a trenchcoat, blood everywhere, the claws doing exactly what you want claws to do. It looked brutal and it looked beautiful and the crowd reaction was exactly what Sony would have wanted. But watching it, I kept snagging on the same thing. It looked like a very good version of something I have already played. Fast, fluid combat with satisfying animations and enemy variety and set pieces designed to make you feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. Which is fine. That is genuinely fine. But it is not enough for Wolverine specifically, and here is why.
Wolverine works as a character for two reasons that are genuinely difficult to translate into a video game. The first is that he is functionally unkillable, which means the things that hurt him have to be emotional rather than physical. The threat is never whether Logan will survive. It is what surviving costs him. The second is that his rage is not cool. It is not fun. In the comics, a berserker state is frightening precisely because Logan himself is frightened of it. That tension, the monster he carries around inside himself, is what makes him interesting. Strip that away and you have a man with knives for hands doing very impressive violence, which is entertaining for about forty minutes.
The gameplay shown was undeniably impressive looking. Logan carving through Reavers in a TRASK uniform, Jean Grey at his side in a trenchcoat, blood everywhere, the claws doing exactly what you want claws to do. It looked brutal and it looked beautiful and the crowd reaction was exactly what Sony would have wanted. But watching it, I kept snagging on the same thing. It looked like a very good version of something I have already played. Fast, fluid combat with satisfying animations and enemy variety and set pieces designed to make you feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. Which is fine. That is genuinely fine. But it is not enough for Wolverine specifically, and here is why.
Wolverine works as a character for two reasons that are genuinely difficult to translate into a video game. The first is that he is functionally unkillable, which means the things that hurt him have to be emotional rather than physical. The threat is never whether Logan will survive. It is what surviving costs him. The second is that his rage is not cool. It is not fun. In the comics, a berserker state is frightening precisely because Logan himself is frightened of it. That tension, the monster he carries around inside himself, is what makes him interesting. Strip that away and you have a man with knives for hands doing very impressive violence, which is entertaining for about forty minutes.