Insomniac gives Logan a new history and a familiar pair of claws. The harder question is whether its combat, characters and storytelling make this particular Wolverine worth knowing — and what happens when all our other Wolverines come with us.
“Which Wolverine?” Stacy asks.
“The new one,” I say.
“That is a release schedule, Eljara. Not an answer.”
She has a point, which is inconvenient. I had hoped to get through the introduction before that happened.
There is the Wolverine somebody remembers from a childhood comic. The one another person knows from the films. The animated Logan, the videogame Logan, the version whose past has become an entire shelf of books.
Put those people in front of the same new story and they are not necessarily meeting the same man.
Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine, released for PlayStation 5 on 15 September 2026, has to negotiate those expectations while delivering something much more immediate: a single-player action-adventure that is satisfying to play and worth following to its conclusion.
It cannot succeed merely by recognising the right names. Nor should it be punished simply for doing something different with them.
The question running through this review is therefore straightforward:
Does this Wolverine make sense because of the story the game tells, or because we supply the missing pieces from somewhere else?
This Logan has his own past
The starting point is deliberately specific. Logan rejoins Team X after three years away. Mutants are being hunted by the Reavers, a mercenary force whose bodies have been enhanced with machinery. Their client, Bolivar Trask, believes in human superiority. Jean Grey emerges as a leader among the captured mutants, while the wider public remains unaware that mutants exist.
That last detail matters.
We cannot assume this world already contains every familiar public argument about the X-Men. It begins with different information in different hands. The people being hunted know something about the danger; the people going about their ordinary lives may know nothing at all.
For our reading, that makes secrecy part of the setting’s structure rather than merely a convenient way to delay an explanation.
Caelwyn looks at the description of the captured mutants.
“So who protects them?”
That is the right question for him. Not how impressive Logan looks when he attacks, but what happens to everyone who cannot survive the same injuries.
It also gives the game a sound foundation for making Wolverine matter. His durability becomes more interesting when somebody else is vulnerable. His violence acquires a purpose beyond demonstrating that the artists have spent considerable time researching unpleasant things.
The premise offers a strong distinction between being dangerous and being useful to people in danger.
Whether the entire story sustains that distinction is another matter. But Insomniac has chosen an effective starting point: a man returning to relationships that already carry history, in a world where the people who need him cannot simply telephone the authorities.
The combat turns aggression into survival
The clearest expression of Insomniac’s Wolverine is mechanical.
Successful attacks, parries and kills build Rage. Logan can use that resource for stronger attacks or healing, while special moves called Techniques broaden his offensive options. Critical Strikes provide finishing opportunities, sometimes involving another character. The highest Rage tier adopts a black, white and red presentation explicitly inspired by Marvel’s Black, White & Blood comics.
This is not simply a collection of animations attached to a health bar.
The important relationship is between action and survival. Keep fighting effectively and the game gives Logan more means to continue. In published hands-on assessments, Rage also drains over time, encouraging movement from one opponent to the next rather than prolonged hesitation.
Stacy taps the description.
“It rewards keeping the pressure on.”
“Very subtle character writing,” Sean says.
It is character writing, though.
A game teaches us who somebody is partly through the behaviour it rewards. A cautious system asks us to study danger from a distance. This one encourages us to close that distance and remain effective inside it.
That is a persuasive way to express Wolverine’s physical confidence. It makes his body something the player actively manages rather than a supernatural excuse mentioned only in dialogue.
But it also creates a difficult responsibility for the story.
A narrative can present a man who fears becoming nothing but a weapon. The mechanics can make being that weapon exhilarating. Those ideas do not have to cancel each other out. Their tension may be the point.
What matters is whether the people around Logan respond to more than his usefulness in a fight.
Otherwise, the game risks condemning in conversation exactly what it celebrates everywhere else.
Momentum is not the same as depth
The critical disagreement around Wolverine’s combat is useful because it identifies two different pleasures.
One is the immediate satisfaction of an attack: speed, movement, impact and the transition into the next action. The other is the range of decisions that remains interesting after the player understands the system.
Some published reviews praise the energy of sustained aggression. Others find the fighting too limited or increasingly repetitive. Those conclusions are not necessarily incompatible.
A move can remain enjoyable to perform after it has stopped being interesting to choose.
That distinction matters particularly in a Wolverine game. Spectacle can communicate his strength very quickly. Maintaining the player’s interest requires encounters that ask something beyond repeating that strength.
The relevant test is not how many attacks appear on a menu. It is whether different situations make us reconsider timing, positioning, priorities or the risks we accept.
Our reading of the evidence is that Insomniac captures the immediate appeal more consistently than the long-term variety. That does not make the combat worthless. It means the recommendation depends on what someone wants from it.
Players seeking a tightly directed, forceful action experience have good reason to be interested. Players hoping to spend the campaign discovering radically different ways to solve combat situations should approach more cautiously.
Caelwyn folds his arms.
“Doing one thing well is useful.”
“Certainly.”
“Being asked to do it forever is employment.”
An unusually efficient review of repetitive encounters.
A directed journey, not an open-world obligation
PlayStation describes Marvel’s Wolverine as a story-driven single-player action-adventure and explicitly states that it is not an open-world game.
That is not an apology. It is a design choice.
A focused route can preserve urgency, control the order of revelations and keep relationships from disappearing beneath twenty unrelated errands. Wolverine does not owe us Spider-Man’s city simply because the same studio made both.
The useful question is what happens inside the narrower space.
Are quieter stretches opportunities to absorb the world, or simply corridors between fights? Does an environment encourage observation? Does moving through it reveal something about the people who live there?
The game travels through markedly different locations, including Canada, Madripoor and Tokyo. Published reviews praise much of the staging and presentation, while some critics find the restrictions on exploration and experimentation frustrating.
For Mythveil, neither an enormous map nor a high number of interactive objects automatically creates a convincing place.
A small room can possess a history. A vast city can remain scenery.
What we want is a relationship between location and action. A street should matter because of what happens there, who uses it, what Logan discovers or what a confrontation changes — not merely because it provides an attractive surface for another fight.
This is where the game’s directed form becomes both an advantage and a limitation. It can move quickly towards a meaningful encounter. It can also move us away before a place has acquired enough ordinary life to make its danger personal.
Wolverine’s senses should reveal a world, not cover it up
Logan’s heightened senses offer a natural way to guide the player without placing a completely unrelated navigation device in his hand.
But guidance changes how we look.
An aid that helps us notice something can support immersion. An aid that announces every answer can replace it.
That is not an argument against accessibility. Different players need different kinds of information, and a feature that feels intrusive to one person may make the experience possible for another. The important question is whether the presentation can adapt.
Post-launch options are relevant here. Update 1.001.006 added switches for several optional sensory cues while story-critical guidance remains.
For me, the principle is simple: let Logan’s senses enrich what the player understands, while giving the player some control over how insistently the game communicates.
Stacy considers that.
“He can smell things we cannot.”
“Yes.”
“That does not mean everything needs an arrow.”
Exactly.
A believable ability and an effective interface are related problems. They are not the same problem.
Jean Grey cannot arrive with her character development already completed
The story’s relationships demand closer attention than the familiar names initially suggest.
Jean is not merely a reward for remembering other Marvel stories. Insomniac introduces her as a powerful participant with responsibilities of her own. The official story material also places Logan’s vulnerability and his relationship with her near the centre of its presentation.
That creates an obligation: the game must earn the relationship within its own scenes.
Recognition can make an audience curious. It cannot perform every step between curiosity, trust, intimacy and conflict.
Published criticism is sharply divided here. Some reviewers find several choices involving Logan and Jean unconvincing; others respond much more warmly to the emotional story and character interactions.
For our review, the disagreement exposes a central risk of adapting established characters: emotional familiarity can be mistaken for emotional groundwork.
A player who already cares deeply about Logan and Jean may accept a connection quickly. Another may require the game to demonstrate why these particular people trust one another.
Neither audience is wrong to exist.
Mara looks up.
“Does she get to want something that isn’t about him?”
There is the question.
Not whether Jean resembles a preferred version from somewhere else. Whether she has enough purpose here for her choices to feel like her own.
The same standard applies to allies and enemies. A character should not become important only when Logan needs a revelation, then drift out of the story once the information has been delivered.
Our reservation is therefore not that Insomniac has changed familiar relationships. Reinvention is welcome. The concern is whether the new relationships always receive enough development to support the weight placed upon them.
Remembering should be more than collecting
The Nightmare Trials are especially relevant to this reading.
Published accounts describe optional challenges tied to material about Logan’s past. These can include combat or traversal tasks, connecting additional character information to activities outside the main sequence.
As a design idea, that has promise.
A memory does not have to arrive as another conversation in which someone explains the protagonist to himself. A challenge can interrupt routine, create a different rhythm or ask the player to engage with the past through action.
The difficulty is the relationship between the task and what it reveals.
If the activity helps us understand something about Logan, play and narrative reinforce one another. If it functions mainly as a ticket machine for another fragment of biography, the past becomes a reward dispensed for completing an unrelated job.
“Can I remember it without doing the race?” Chibi asks.
A reasonable question from somebody who normally considers rules a preliminary suggestion.
Not every optional memory must be essential, and not every challenge requires a profound symbolic explanation. Sometimes an extra fight can simply be an extra fight.
But a game that makes memory central invites us to examine how those memories are delivered.
Logan’s past should deepen the person in front of us, not merely increase the percentage of information we have collected about him.
Presentation carries weight — but cannot carry everything
The production has considerable strengths to bring to that task.
Published technical assessments report strong presentation and stable performance on tested hardware and settings, while post-launch updates have continued to address image quality, crashes, progression, visual presentation and accessibility.
The more important artistic point is that presentation should make the action and emotion legible.
The black, white and red Rage treatment is a clear example: a visual reference becomes part of how the game communicates a changed state. It does not merely place a familiar image in the background.
There is a similar opportunity in performance and music. Liam McIntyre’s Logan, Krizia Bajos’s Jean and David Fleming’s score are central parts of Insomniac’s dramatic presentation.
But even excellent delivery cannot fully repair an unearned change of heart. Nor can an impressive location create freedom the level design does not offer.
This is the recurring shape of Wolverine’s strengths and weaknesses: the presentation can make an immediate impression more reliably than the underlying structure sustains every implication.
The older Wolverines explain the expectations
At this point the comics become useful — not as an examination the game must pass, but as a way to understand the expectations it inherits.
Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 miniseries takes Logan to Japan and places honour, humiliation and his relationship with Mariko at the centre of his struggle. Its importance to our comparison is the possibility of a Wolverine whose fighting ability does not settle his most difficult problem.
Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X follows a different route through Logan’s past: experimentation, pursuit and uncertainty about the reality of his experience.
These are not interchangeable pieces of background.
One comparison asks what happens when violence cannot restore dignity. The other asks what happens when a person becomes the object of someone else’s experiment.
Both offer ways to assess a new Wolverine without demanding that it reproduce either comic.
Here we also need to be careful with the word continuity. It means the connections that let one part of a story follow from another. Learning a previously unknown fact is not automatically a contradiction. A later story changing an established fact is a different matter again.
“Someone found another page,” Sean says, “is not the same as someone replacing the book.”
Quite.
The game is entitled to select and reinterpret. Our job is to notice what that selection accomplishes.
The films and games do not form one enormous biography
The film Logan begins with an ageing Wolverine caring for an ailing Xavier before a young mutant disrupts their attempt to remain hidden. Its premise builds responsibility around relationships and vulnerability.
Deadpool & Wolverine uses another solution: a Wolverine from an alternative reality becomes part of the story. That is not simply an additional chapter in the same uninterrupted life.
The distinction matters when we approach Insomniac’s game. We may remember the emotional impact of a film without importing all its events into this Logan’s biography.
Games make their own selections too.
Raven’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine already combined aggressive combat, defensive techniques and regeneration in 2009. Insomniac is not the first developer to discover that Wolverine can support brutal action.
In Marvel’s Midnight Suns, his abilities serve a different purpose. Drawing enemy attention and enduring punishment help him protect a team. The same broad character traits support a different kind of play.
That comparison is particularly useful to Caelwyn.
“He can survive the attack,” he says. “So he takes it instead of somebody else.”
Exactly. Healing can mean aggression. It can also mean responsibility.
Neither interpretation becomes automatically superior. Each must make sense inside its game.
Insomniac’s task is therefore not to fit every previous Wolverine into one body. It is to make its chosen version coherent enough that our recognition becomes a starting point rather than a substitute for understanding.
A prequel should add a room, not hide the front door
There is a direct connection between the new game and another medium worth separating from those broader comparisons.
The official prequel comic is written by the game’s Narrative Director, Walt Williams, with art by Luke Ross. Insomniac describes it as a Team X story establishing relationships before the main adventure.
That makes it part of a deliberate expansion of this particular interpretation, rather than a comic that happens to feature Wolverine.
The opportunity is attractive: more room for an earlier mission, a relationship or an unresolved grievance.
The risk is equally familiar.
An additional work should reward interest without becoming compulsory homework for understanding the work somebody has already bought.
We have not examined the complete prequel closely enough to judge whether it crosses that line. Its existence alone proves neither a problem nor a success.
But the standard is worth stating. The game should explain the relationships it needs. The comic can make them richer.
A front door should still open without purchasing the conservatory.
Then somebody puts Wolverine on a character sheet
The same selection problem becomes practical in the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game, whose core rulebook arrived in August 2023.
Imagine the group.
One player knows the films. Another brings decades of comics. Someone else is thinking about X-Men ’97. A fourth has just finished Insomniac’s game.
They agree to include Wolverine. They have not yet agreed which relationships, memories or events come with him.
Fortunately, the role-playing game does not demand that they reconcile every Marvel story. Its “Which Universe” guidance explicitly treats the group’s campaign as its own universe. Events from other versions may have happened there, but are not compulsory.
That freedom is already in the game. It does not need Mythveil to invent it.
The remaining challenge is maintaining a shared understanding once play begins.
The rules distinguish mechanically significant Traits from Tags that often communicate background and narrative information. That is useful because a character is more than a collection of attacks.
Yet a printed profile cannot anticipate everything a campaign will change.
Logan’s healing may remain the same while his trust in an organisation collapses. An ally may forgive him; another may refuse. The group may expose an event that a published version kept secret.
Those developments create the campaign’s own continuity.
The practical danger is not that the players have read different books. It is that nobody notices when their assumptions begin producing different versions of the scene they are supposed to share.
A small place for Rexborn
This is where Rexborn, our framework for developing worlds through their relationships and consequences, offers one possible approach.
It does not require every account to become simultaneously true. The framework allows choosing one version, combining compatible elements or maintaining separate branches.
The useful next step is to follow what that choice changes.
Imagine an original campaign in which the group uncovers contradictory records about an experiment involving Logan. The game master establishes what happened, while allowing witnesses and organisations to hold incomplete or conflicting accounts. If the players release the evidence, those people acquire new reasons to act.
That is what we mean by resonance here: an event changes more than the paragraph in which it occurred. It affects trust, knowledge, resources and future decisions.
Not every discrepancy needs a portal. Sometimes a record is wrong. Sometimes the group simply chooses a different version and agrees to keep it.
“Good,” Stacy says. “The multiverse was becoming a filing system.”
The purpose is not perfect agreement between every Marvel publication. It is enough shared truth for the next story to grow from the last one.
The Mythveil verdict
Back to the game, then. Wolverine has not spent this entire review waiting for us to finish organising his paperwork.
Our recommendation is qualified, but genuine.
For players drawn to a focused Wolverine action-adventure, the evidence supports a compelling attraction: a combat system that turns aggression into momentum, a distinctive physical identity and a directed story built around familiar people in a newly arranged world.
The reservations are equally substantial: repetition, restricted opportunities to experiment and relationships whose effectiveness divides hands-on critics.
We would not recommend it on the promise of open-ended role-playing, a freely explorable Marvel world or a definitive account of Logan’s life. Those are not the experience it sets out to provide.
Its more interesting ambition is to make one selected Wolverine feel immediate.
In our analysis, the game’s strongest idea is the connection between the body and the player’s behaviour. You do not merely hear that Logan survives terrible punishment. His survival becomes part of how you are encouraged to act.
Its less secure achievement is making all the surrounding narrative carry the same conviction. Spectacle establishes power quickly. Trust, responsibility and a changed relationship require more patient work.
Mara has been considering the healing.
“If he gets better,” she asks, “does that mean everyone else does?”
Caelwyn shakes his head.
“No.”
There it is.
A useful Wolverine story does not end every consequence at the edge of his skin. Other people remain frightened, grateful, furious or absent. A promise still exists after the wound has closed.
That is also why no new interpretation needs to carry every old story intact. It needs to understand which parts of its own past still have consequences.
Stacy turns back to her first question.
“Which Wolverine?”
“This one,” I say.
“And is that enough?”
It can be.
But the game has to earn the answer.
The claws tell us who has entered the room. What he does to the people in it — and what remains afterwards — tells us whether this Wolverine has a story worth remembering.
Editorial basis: This is a source-based critical review combining official game material, published hands-on assessments, Marvel and tabletop references, and Mythveil’s narrative analysis. It does not claim a Mythveil playthrough or independent performance testing. Post-launch information is current to 4 October 2026.
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