Marvel's Wolverine Backlash: Why Reviews Are Slamming the Combat, Boss Fights and Hand-Holding in Insomniac's $70 Game

Marvel's Wolverine is out, or at least the reviews are, and people are going at this game hard. Before even getting into the meat of it, a post from Geeks and Gamers started trending on X quoting Insomniac's narrative director describing the Wolverine and Sabretooth rivalry as a mix of yearning, love and hate. I don't even know where to unpack that, so I'm leaving it on the shelf for people to decipher for themselves.

The game itself doesn't look bad. Insomniac hasn't forgotten how to make an impressive looking superhero game. The backlash is happening because after nearly five years of waiting and a seventy dollar price tag, Wolverine apparently treats the player like they've never held a controller before. The early reviews are all over the place, with some people having a great time and others calling it the gaming equivalent of bowling with the bumpers up, where the machine gives you a strike even if you throw the ball backwards.

The Combat Looks Brutal But Reportedly Runs Out of Ideas Within the First Hour

Wolverine is a character built for a deep, aggressive combat system. The claws, the healing factor, the rage, the adamantium skeleton, decades of fighting styles all should add up to one of the nastiest action games ever made. On the surface it delivers: Logan cuts people apart, throws bodies around, launches himself across rooms, and the animations are brutal with blood everywhere. Insomniac clearly understood that Wolverine couldn't feel like Spider-Man with knives attached to his hands.

But according to some of the harshest reviews right now, once the initial excitement wears off there isn't enough underneath. The complaint isn't that combat feels bad, it's that the game reportedly shows almost everything it has within the opening hour and then expects those basic ideas to carry the whole experience. You can unlock new techniques, equip special attacks, build rage and customize Logan with adaptations, but the criticism is that most of it doesn't fundamentally change how you play.

You're still charging into the same groups, hitting the same basic combinations, waiting for the same special abilities to recharge, and watching another bloody execution animation. That could be entertaining for a few hours, but the question is whether dismembering the 700th generic enemy still feels good once you realize the combat hasn't meaningfully evolved since hour one.

Boss Fights and Enemy Variety Reportedly Reduce Wolverine's Rogues to Damage Sponges

Wolverine should have been perfect for enemy variety. Assassins who force you to parry, giant machines that require tearing away individual parts, enemies who can temporarily disable Logan's healing, fights that make his senses matter and force him to adapt, because that is literally what the character has done for more than a hundred years. Instead, a lot of the enemies reportedly start blending together.

The bosses may be the biggest disappointment of all. The most common complaint is that too many boss fights are basically larger, slower versions of enemies already fought, with more health, bigger attacks and longer animations but the same underlying idea. Given the villains and monsters this character has fought, Sabretooth, Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike, Sentinels, an entire Marvel universe to draw from, these battles should be vicious chess matches between characters who can survive things that would kill anybody else. A Wolverine boss shouldn't just be a regular guy with an extra large health bar. Some reviews make them sound like damage sponges that slowly take turns swinging at you.

The Hand-Holding Goes Beyond Yellow Paint, With Glowing Collectibles That Can't Be Missed

Shallow combat isn't what's upsetting people the most, it's the handholding. Modern PlayStation games have been criticized for yellow paint for years, where you look around a room for a few seconds and a companion immediately tells you where to go. Wolverine apparently takes that philosophy and cranks it up further. There are indicators showing where to go, what to climb, what to inspect and where things are hidden. Even collectibles, which are supposed to reward curiosity, can be incredibly difficult to miss, with chests glowing a blue hue that shows up over objects.

This isn't an argument against accessibility. Accessibility options are fantastic, every player should be able to modify an experience around their physical or cognitive needs, and Insomniac has done excellent work in that area. The problem is designing the default experience so that every single player gets those assists whether they asked for them or not. Give players the options and let them decide, don't build a game where paying attention feels completely unnecessary.

Skill Up's Review Says the Quicktime Events Feel Impossible to Fail

Nothing represents the hand-holding problem better than the quicktime events. According to one example highlighted in Skill Up's review, which has gone viral, these sequences can practically be impossible to fail. Press the wrong button and the scene may continue anyway. Don't press anything and it apparently continues too. That isn't a quicktime event, it's a cutscene with a button icon floating over it for emotional support.

Skill Up compared the overall experience to bowling with the bumpers up again, since you're going to get a strike regardless. That description has spread widely because it captures why people are frustrated. Games need stakes. If a collectible can't be missed, if you can't get lost, misunderstand a puzzle or fail a cinematic sequence, that's not participating or playing, it's just sitting close enough to a controller that the game can pretend you're involved.

The Seventy Dollar Price Tag Sits Inside a Bigger Sony Conversation

This isn't a four hour interactive movie sold for thirty dollars. This is a seventy dollar PlayStation release people have waited for since 2021, five years to become Wolverine, not occasionally press a button while Insomniac becomes Wolverine for them. That price tag exists inside a much bigger Sony conversation, with PlayStation Plus prices climbing, console prices becoming a constant frustration, and people worried about the future of physical media.

Sony wants premium money for premium hardware, premium subscriptions and premium first party games. If you're charging premium prices, people are going to expect premium content, and you can't ask players to spend seventy dollars and then act surprised when they examine what they received beyond graphics, performance and cinematic presentation and find issues.

Insomniac's Response to Backlash Blurs Legitimate Criticism With Toxicity

Members of the studio have spoken out about the relentless negativity surrounding the game and how social media algorithms constantly push outrage. They're not completely wrong. Gaming discourse is miserable, games get decided as either flawless masterpieces or the worst things ever made, developers get personally attacked, and voice actors get harassed over characters they did nothing wrong in playing. That is garbage and none of it should be defended.

But legitimate criticism of a product isn't toxicity. Saying the combat becomes repetitive isn't harassment. Saying the bosses are underwhelming isn't abuse. Saying the game holds your hand too much isn't attacking a developer's family. People can condemn personal attacks while still asking why a seventy dollar Wolverine game appears scared to challenge them. Both of those things can be true at once.

The real danger is lumping all the negativity together, because once every complaint becomes toxic, studios no longer have to engage with anything players are saying. The worst comments on social media become a shield against the most reasonable criticism, and Wolverine deserves an honest conversation, because there appears to be plenty here that people actually like too. The presentation is fantastic, Logan is properly violent, the performances are praised, and the story seems to understand Wolverine is more than an angry guy with claws. Some reviewers are enjoying the straightforward, linear structure, and linear doesn't have to mean shallow, accessible doesn't have to mean impossible to fail, and cinematic doesn't mean the players barely beat it. That's the line Wolverine is struggling to walk.

Maybe you'll play it and love every second, and ripping enemies apart for fifteen or twenty hours as pure stress relief is exactly what some people wanted. People aren't haters for expecting the gameplay to have as much depth as the blood effects after Insomniac spent five years promising the most brutal version of Wolverine they could create. What some players believe they delivered is a polished roller coaster where Logan does all the danger while players occasionally prove they're still awake.

Where do you fall on this? Is Wolverine being unfairly piled on because negativity gets clicks, or did Insomniac build a seventy dollar superhero game that doesn't trust its own players?