Insomniac drops the open world for a linear, gory action game that gets Logan exactly right, then asks the same thing of you for 15 hours. I finished it, went back around in New Game Plus, and I would still send people to it.
Insomniac finally builds a corridor
Every Insomniac game since 2018 has handed you a city and then invited you to enjoy the commute. This one hands you a door and tells you what is behind it. That single decision explains most of what works in Marvel’s Wolverine and almost everything that grates, and it is why the studio’s own audience has spent launch week arguing about a game that is, on balance, pretty good.
PlayStation kindly provided the code for this review, and I played it on PS5 from the first fight in the Canadian bush through to the credits, then straight back in on New Game Plus.
There is real history behind the choice. Marcus Smith and Mike Daly, the pair who made Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, took over as creative director and game director from Brian Horton and Cameron Christian in late 2024, midway through a project that had already been ripped open in public by the 2023 ransomware attack on the studio. What shipped on September 15 is tighter and smaller than the studio’s Spider-Man run, and it is deliberately so. Logan does not swing over a skyline. He walks into a room, and the room is full of people who are about to have a very bad afternoon.
What the game is about
Three years after walking out on Team X, Logan gets pulled back into the mutant strike force during its worst week. Bolivar Trask is abducting displaced mutants with the help of the Reavers, his cybernetically rebuilt private militia, and Team X is now fronted by Nathaniel Essex, a pale, smirking Brit played by Troy Baker with the collar turned all the way up. The search for the missing mutants runs alongside Logan’s own hunt for what was done to him, which is the engine every Wolverine story eventually reaches for.
It is set in the same continuity as Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, Earth-1048, and it uses that shared universe lightly. Most of your time goes to Japan and to Madripoor, with Team X headquarters and Logan’s cabin in the Canadian mountains between missions. The cast around him is deep: Krizia Bajos as Jean Grey, Kelly Hu as Tyger Tiger, Debra Wilson as Callisto, Jolene Jaxon as Lady Deathstrike, plus Omega Red, Sabretooth, Mystique, the Hand and a Sentinel program that goes exactly where you think it goes.
The combat, and the ceiling it hits
The fighting is the whole product, and for the first stretch it is superb. You close distance with a leap attack on triangle that fires Logan across a room like something thrown, you parry, you boot people into walls and pillars to stagger them, and then you hold square and turn them into something the cleaners will need a hose for. Every kill has its own animation. Limbs come off. Blood travels along the vector of the swing and then stays where it lands, on the floor, on the crates, floating on water.
Sitting on top of that is Rage. It fills as you cut through a crowd, and at the top the screen drains of color except for red, Logan’s healing factor gets aggressive, and you chain executions until the room is a heap. It is the single best idea in the game, because for those seconds the mechanics and the character are saying the same thing. Rage also feeds the special Techniques on L2, which map moves like Tornado Spin and Spiral Strike to the face buttons and come from spending experience as you level.
The build side is deeper than it first looks. Materials found in supply crates buy suits, and suits raise your maximum health rather than just changing the silhouette. Whiskey bottles and Nightmare Trial scores feed Adaptations, the passive slots that let you recover health on a parry, build Rage while blocking projectiles, or shorten a cooldown every time you land a barrage. Claws are pure cosmetics and you can pair them with any suit, including the cel-shaded Marvel Tōkon crossover outfit and an Old Man Logan skin that looks better than it has any right to.
Here is where I will be honest about what slips. The loop does not grow. By the midpoint you have every tool you need, and the game answers that by making enemies take longer to die rather than by asking anything new of you. There are two enemy factions and they get recycled with new leadership. In the last third you are doing the same parry, the same wall kick, the same square-mash against health bars that have been inflated purely to stretch the encounter, and the moment where Logan pops his claws stops being a thrill and starts being a chore. A combat system this bloody should never become boring. This one does, for about two hours, before the finale pulls it back.
Levels that only go one way
The corridor is the point, and Insomniac mostly builds good corridors. Tokyo at night is gorgeous. The Canadian sections have weight and cold in them. Boss fights are among the best things here, even when the ideas behind them are borrowed.
The trouble is that the game does not trust you inside its own spaces. Collectibles sit down the only branch that is not the main path, which makes exploration a formality rather than a discovery. Invisible walls stop Logan in places where a man who just leapt 30 feet up a cliff face should be able to step over a car. Scent tracking, which should be the most characterful traversal tool in any superhero game, is on so often and so loudly that it turns into a painted line, and that is the complaint that has dominated the conversation since launch. Insomniac’s community team has already said publicly that they are listening on exactly this point, which tells you it landed.
Then there are the driving sections, which are stylish and play themselves, and the quick-time events, which have an accessibility option to auto-complete them and which barely feel different when they do. Nightmare Doors are the best of the optional content: they grow out of purple root structures in the levels, drop you into a combat or traversal trial, and score you from bronze up to adamantium. They are the only part of the design that assumes you might actually be good at this.
Logan, Jean, and a story that shows its hand
Liam McIntyre is the reason the quiet scenes work. He plays Logan tired rather than gruff, which is a harder read and a better one, and the writing gives him room to be funny without ever letting him be cute. His scenes with Bajos’s Jean Grey carry the whole middle of the game. Baker is doing something broad and delicious as Essex, chewing through every line like he knows what the audience knows. The facial animation in cutscenes is the best I have seen on this console.
The script itself is the weaker half. It telegraphs its turns well before it takes them, it keeps swapping antagonists in search of one that sticks, and it introduces a supporting character who becomes structurally essential for a long stretch and then evaporates. Audio recordings scattered through the levels carry good lore and then stop being a thing the game cares about. None of this is fatal, and the emotional beats in the back half genuinely land, but it is a story that would have been stronger at three quarters of the length.
How it looks and runs on PS5
This is the first Insomniac game that ships with 60fps and ray tracing on as the default on a base PS5, and that is the single biggest technical achievement here. Performance mode holds 60 with ray-traced reflections and only minimal dips at camera transitions. It renders at around 1296p on average and reconstructs with Insomniac’s own IGTI upscaler, which is where the compromise shows: the image is soft, edges shimmer, and the artifacts are visible on a large screen. Fidelity mode on the base console runs at roughly 1800p at 30fps and is noticeably sharper.
On PS5 Pro the choice stops being a choice. Performance Pro renders at about 1440p, PSSR reconstructs to a clean 4K, and the 60fps target essentially never wavers. Fidelity Pro sits at around 1800p at 30fps with sharper shadows, better level-of-detail transitions and more convincing foliage, and it is the only mode that offers the advanced ray tracing toggle, which adds ray-traced ambient occlusion, screen-space global illumination and higher-resolution reflections while dropping internal resolution into the 1440p to 1800p band. With a 120Hz display, Fidelity runs at 40fps at roughly 1440p. Turn on VRR and uncap it and Performance sits around 70 to 80fps.
The lighting is the part that dates the game. Shadows use classic cascaded shadow maps, so you get visible pop as cascades swap during normal movement, with the high-resolution work reserved for pre-rendered cutscenes. Diffuse global illumination is an older probe-based system paired with screen-space ambient occlusion, which is why some interiors have no light source you can point at. The upside, and it is a real one, is that the game never suffers the noisy, grainy dynamic lighting that plagues console ray tracing elsewhere. Insomniac spent its budget on hit reactions, on a dedicated physics simulation for blood, and on making crowds of bodies behave, and you can see that trade in every fight.
I should flag two things the day-one update carried. Photo Mode is not on the disc and arrives with that patch, so disc owners need to be online once. The same update fixed progression blockers, including English voiceover failing to play when the console language is set to something else, Jean Grey dropping out of a mission in Japan, and Logan refusing to slide under a prison door in Telambang. There are still bugs at large that will send you back to a checkpoint. None of them cost me progress, and none of them are the reason for the score, but they exist.
That patch requirement is a small thing by itself, and it arrived in a month when nothing about discs is a small thing. Sony announced on July 1 that it will stop manufacturing discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028. A petition against the decision has passed 330,000 signatures, retailers have issued statements of their own, and in late July the group’s CFO, Lin Tao, told an earnings call that 82 percent of software sales are already digital and that the transition would move forward carefully rather than be reconsidered. Marvel’s Wolverine walked straight into the middle of that argument, carrying a disc that needs a download before one of its features works. The timing could hardly have been worse for it, and a portion of the heat aimed at this game is heat aimed at the platform holder.
I want to be precise about what that does and does not excuse, because it excuses almost nothing. The combat loop still flattens out by the midpoint. Enemies still turn into sponges instead of into new problems. The scent trail still leads you by the wrist through levels that were already one long hallway. The story still tips its own hand, the driving sections still play themselves, and there are still glitches in a game from a studio whose reputation was built on shipping clean. Those are the game’s own failures and they are the ones this review is scored on. What the wider fight over discs changes is the volume around it, not the substance of it, and the honest reading is that a decent action game is currently absorbing anger that belongs a few floors up.
David Fleming’s score and the sound of adamantium
David Fleming, whose work on HBO’s The Last of Us alongside Gustavo Santaolalla won an ASCAP Screen Music Award in 2024, writes the kind of score that knows when to disappear. The cues shift with Logan’s state rather than with the level, so the music swells into a berserk stretch and drops away into the cabin scenes, and the main theme, “Logan”, released as a single in July ahead of the full soundtrack on August 28, is the piece everyone will have stuck in their head.
Sound design carries more of the combat than people will give it credit for. The snikt has weight and a metallic tail to it. Impacts are wet and specific, so you can hear the difference between hitting a Reaver’s armor plating and hitting a man. The DualSense work is careful: separate sliders for cinematic vibration and footstep vibration, controller speaker modes, and haptics that spike hard at the top of a Rage chain. The game ships with full dubs in seven languages, English, French, Italian, German, Latin American Spanish, Castilian Spanish and Japanese, and English audio description.
Difficulty, length, and who this is for
Insomniac has gone further on accessibility here than on any of its previous games, with more than 100 new, returning and improved settings. You configure everything before the game starts, through a first-run screen with presets for hearing, motion sensitivity, motor, vision and violence. Five difficulty presets sit on top of independent sliders for enemy health, enemy damage and how fast you get spotted, plus chase assist that slows fleeing targets. Puzzles can be skipped outright. There is a high contrast mode with adjustable outline thickness and brightness, single-color shaders, a screen reader for HUD status, global game speed, and lock-on with several modes.
The violence toggles deserve a mention on their own, because this is the most graphic thing Insomniac has ever shipped and it also lets you dial blood detail, dismemberment and adult language up or down independently. Both of those facts being true at once is genuinely good design.
The campaign runs around 15 hours. Doing every Nightmare Trial to adamantium and sweeping up the whiskey bottles and material caches pushes it to about 18, and even a full clear will not carry you much past 20. New Game Plus is there at launch inside the Nightmare Cabin, with Techniques that do not exist in the first run and a raised level cap, alongside Mission Replay and scored Nightmare Challenges. That second loop is where the build side finally gets interesting, which is a strange thing to say about a game that has already shown you everything.
What you get, then, is a focused action game with no filler in it, from a studio whose last four releases all asked for 40 hours and a map full of icons. If that trade appeals, it is a good one. If length is how you measure a blockbuster, you will feel short-changed, and I understand why.
Verdict
Marvel’s Wolverine is the best Wolverine game anyone has made, which is a lower bar than it sounds, and it is also the least ambitious thing Insomniac has put out in eight years, which is a higher bar than it sounds. It nails the fantasy: the weight of him, the rage, the healing factor as a reason to keep walking into the worst room in the building. It has a lead performance worth the ticket and a technical baseline, 60fps with ray tracing on a launch-model PS5, that other studios should be embarrassed about. It also runs out of ideas well before it runs out of levels, holds your hand through spaces that would have been more fun left alone, and tells a story that keeps tipping its own hand.
Play it if you want 15 focused hours of the most violent action combat on the console and a Logan who feels like the character rather than a set of moves. Skip it if what you loved about Insomniac was the sandbox, because there isn’t one here, and no amount of good corridor design is going to replace it. Play it on a Pro if you have one: PSSR is doing enough work that the image quality gap between the two consoles is the widest I have seen in a first-party release this year.
