This week, I finally finished Marvel’s Wolverine. I kind of had to. With a brand new copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake staring me in the face, and a download code for Grand Theft Auto VI on the way, I wanted to at least see how the game I’d been struggling to get through ended before moving on to other things.
“Struggling” not because the game was particularly challenging in any way, though it could be at times. No, I was “struggling” because it took me forever to find any meaningful attachment to it. And, while I’m ultimately glad I did get to the end, it was quite the journey to get there.
So let’s jump back to the beginning. I, like many of you, was incredibly excited when I heard that Insomniac Games, the same team behind probably my favorite superhero games of all time, the Spider-Man games, was doing a Wolverine game. I’ve loved Wolverine since the first time I saw that devilish haircut and those shiny claws on a comic book shelf in the late 1980s. Over the years, I’ve bought his comics, his toys, his cards. When I first saw him on the big screen, it was so magical, it was almost difficult to comprehend. Even playing as him in the classic X-Men arcade game was something I was very much into.
So a Wolverine game from the Spider-Man team? How lucky were we? After years of waiting, when the game was finally released, I dove right in. My colleague, Justin Carter, reviewed the game for io9 and liked it, so I was encouraged. But pretty quickly, things didn’t sit well with me.
The first thing that hit me was that there was no big, sprawling, open world like in Spider-Man. I hadn’t read too much about the game in the lead-up, so I probably should have known that, but it was still a bummer. Instead, this was a much more straightforward, linear game which, honestly, lent itself better to this story. So while I wasn’t super happy about the choice, I quickly embraced it.
After a few minutes, though, something else felt wrong: my hand. I realized I had been smashing the square button on my controller an awful lot. Maybe too much. As the game went on, various alternate moves and combinations emerged, offering some welcome variety but, for the most part, it was button smashing over everything else.
Everything in the game also felt repetitive and slightly lazy. You’re fighting a bunch of Reavers. Now you’re fighting The Hand. Now it’s the Reavers again, but with bigger guns. We’re in Japan. We’re in Madripoor. Then we’re in Japan again. Then Madripoor again. Hightown, Lowtown, get the Engine, lose the Engine, get the Engine again, etc. And often pieces of the story were conveyed because characters recorded themselves on handheld devices and just left them sitting around for no apparent reason.
There were some undeniable pluses, though. Like that it’s incredibly fun to slice and dice as Wolverine. The performances of the actors, the graphics, and the insanely gross and satisfying violence helped keep things exciting. Having a little love story at the center with Jean Grey was nice too. Eventually, as the story very, very slowly got to the very, very obvious reveal of the true villain, I actually found myself enjoying it more and more. The third act, in particular, has a lot of big, memorable moments that led me to believe I was almost done with the game. I was not.
If I were enjoying the game a little bit more or curious about what happened next, the fact that it all felt so drawn out probably would’ve been okay. I’ve played games or watched movies I’ve never wanted to end. And I’ve played games and watched movies that couldn’t end fast enough. Wolverine felt like the latter.
Part of that is because the game doesn’t find a way to comfortably integrate this deep, layered past it’s created for Wolverine alongside the main story. You have to veer off the path of the main game and complete seemingly unrelated tasks to get tiny hints about the character. And while that long, arduous task does ultimately have a satisfying conclusion, I can also imagine players skipping those side quests in favor of continuing to kill the non-stop parade of bad guys.
However, you have to complete those side quests to get to the game’s biggest reveal: it’s not just a game about mutant survival. It’s a love story for the ages, something that’s very loosely seeded throughout and only revealed in full at the end. By that point, though, you’re done playing, so it loses some of the emotional impact it was clearly meant to have.
And so, after 18 hours spread across several weeks (a few of which, to be fair, I was travelling during), I finally finished the game. I’m glad I did. There’s enough good stuff in there to warrant a play-through, especially if stabbing and chopping off heads with adamantium claws is your thing. But the fact that finishing the game felt more like a chore than a privilege was a disappointment.
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