Going into my demo of Marvel’s Wolverine, I mainly wanted to try out the game’s very bloody combat. And it is delightfully bloody. But after two-ish hours of slashing and stabbing (and parrying!) enemies with Wolverine’s claws, I left surprised — despite no previous attachment to the character, I was deeply endeared to Logan himself.
The demo, which was held at Insomniac Games’ office in Burbank, California, started at the beginning of the game. In this story, Wolverine is rejoining the mutant task force Team X after a few years away in order to fight for his fellow mutants. He’s a reluctant hero with rocky relationships and little memory of his past — all good ways to onboard a newcomer without having to do a straight-up Wolverine origin story.
As Logan relearned how to be Wolverine, I was learning how to be him for the first time. Combat started out a little clunky for me as a result. It’s all about chaining attacks and kills to build the Rage meter, which gives you access to stronger and more devastating attacks to end combos with, all while dodging ranged attacks and parrying melee ones. It was a lot to keep track of amid showers of blood from eviscerated enemies. I found myself repeatedly trying to dodge melee attacks rather than parry them, which led to more than a few deaths as I learned the ropes.
So maybe it’s on me and the difficulty of learning new game mechanics under time pressure, but Wolverine felt far more vulnerable than I expected. This is a character whose nature revolves around being able to take punches. Building up the Rage meter unlocks Last Stand, which lets you get back up from a downed state and go a little berserk for a bit, and that does make him feel feral and dangerous. As do the gruesome finishing moves, most of which involve shredding or impaling enemies in delightfully over-the-top ways. But despite his super-fast healing and adamantium skeleton, Wolverine can die. He’s an apex predator in many ways, but he’s also a wounded animal lashing out in fear.
That’s underscored by the original story Insomniac wrote for the game and its characterization of Logan outside of combat. After the bloody opening act, the demo skipped ahead to a quieter sequence in which Logan had to go around Princess Bar and talk to his friends. His relationships here are marked by bitterness, regret, and concern about the barriers Logan has built between himself and the people he cares about. He especially felt like a sad puppy in these conversations, an outcast among outcasts.
It was in Princess Bar that I really fell for the character. My last real exposure to Wolverine was 2017’s Logan, and while I liked the movie, I didn’t have any particular affinity for him one way or another. But after fighting as Wolverine and seeing his lethality, paired with his vulnerabilities in and out of combat, I understood the character in a way I hadn’t before. I felt a surge of affection for the man who wants to care and be cared for but is afraid of his capacity to hurt everyone around him.
If you’re a Wolverine fan, you probably already knew this. But coming off of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, the near-immediate connection I felt after just two-ish hours with this version of him is an important piece of Wolverine’s pitch. Everyone knows Spider-Man, the ever-present hero with hit after hit in theaters pretty much every few years. The Spider-Man games didn’t need to sell anyone on being Spider-Man; they needed to sell the fantasy of what it would be like to be him, the one most of us had in our minds already, and Insomniac succeeded on that front.
Lots of people know Wolverine, of course, but far fewer people know what the character is truly about compared to a cultural behemoth like Spider-Man. It’s a testament to Insomniac’s characterization out of the gate — and its scrappy, deadly, but still vulnerable combat — that I came into the demo expecting just some fun, gory mayhem and came out of it wanting to protect Wolverine at all costs.
Marvel’s Wolverine launches on the PS5 on September 15th.
