Keep Logan angry. Keep Wolverine alive.
Because of the company he keeps, that gentleness stands out.
Liam McIntyre’s Logan says sorry. Wolverine is a hard character to put in a video game. He doesn’t stay down. Shoot him, stab him, drop a building on him, and he walks out of the rubble a few minutes later, mostly irritated. That works in comics. In a game, a hero who can’t die leaves the player with nothing to lose. Insomniac has figured this out, and most of Marvel’s Wolverine is built on the answer. Logan heals only when he has rage to spend. Let his health run out with rage stored up, and that rage gets spent putting him back on his feet. Let it run out with the meter empty, and he stays down. It’s the first Wolverine game that made me worry about him. He’s never needed my help staying alive before. That worry follows him into every fight. The first time Logan hits the floor with nothing in the meter, and stays there, the rules make sense very quickly. So every fight becomes about feeding it. Slashes build rage, parries build more, and finishers build the most. It climbs in three stages, with Logan hitting harder at each one, until weaker enemies start dropping in a single strike. At the top, a room full of armed men lasts a few seconds, and there’s usually enough left over to catch him if something goes wrong. Which makes playing it safe the risky choice. Hanging back and waiting for openings keeps the meter empty, and an empty meter makes Logan mortal. The safest place for him turns out to be the middle of the crowd. By the second act, I had stopped looking at the health bar at all. Getting into that crowd is the leap’s job. One button throws Logan across the arena at whoever is standing furthest away, and within an hour, every fight falls into its rhythm. Land, shred, parry, leap again. The parries keep all that speed readable. A blue flash means an attack can be turned away, red means get out of the way, and gold means a reckless swing that either takes a big bite out of Logan or leaves the enemy wide open, depending on the timing. Get it right and he can unload a barrage of stabs, which is grim to watch and the fastest way to fill the meter. The special moves he picks up along the way lean into the same loop. Tornado Spin clears a circle around him. Spiral Strike drills him through one enemy and out the far side of a crowd. The most telling one turns stored rage straight into health, and it sets up the best decision in the combat. Heal now, or hold on to the meter as a spare life. Even Logan’s drinking habit feeds into it. Whiskey bottles tucked just off the main path make room for more adaptations, small perks like a wider parry window or health back on a clean parry, and several come with a short story from Logan attached. The arenas chip in as well. Break a container of molten metal and his claws glow hot for a while. Furnaces are for throwing people into. Walls and scaffolding come apart as the fight moves through them, and by the end, the room looks about as bad as the people in it. All that rage, and the man at the centre of it is a softie. That’s the surprise. He jokes with the kids at the mutant refuge and joins in their games. He makes time for Leech, a young mutant whose power switches off everyone else’s, which makes him a lonely kid to be around. McIntyre never leans on the growl to prove who he’s playing, and in some scenes the facial animation does all the talking. This is a world without X-Men, without Xavier or a school. Logan runs with Team X instead, next to Sabretooth and Mystique, and the team answers to Nathaniel Essex. Read a handful of X-Men comics and that name should worry you too. Troy Baker plays him warm and calm, with a soft English voice, and the warmth is what makes him so uncomfortable to watch. He sounds like the mentor these people need, and he never tips his hand early. It’s Essex who pulls Logan back in. Bolivar Trask, rewritten as a billionaire with Sentinels and ugly plans for mutants, has taken him, and Logan, who had walked away from the team, comes back for the rescue. From there the trail winds through Canada, Tokyo and Madripoor, runs into Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike and the Hand, and slowly bends back towards the parts of Logan’s past he can’t remember. Jean Grey turns up along that trail and becomes the other half of the story. Krizia Bajos plays her as someone who has spent years finding mutants and hiding them, and the tiredness shows. Her thing with Logan moves fast and runs on chemistry more than logic. It worked on me. They’re at their best when they have to behave. One mission puts Logan in a tuxedo and sends the two of them into a formal party, disguised by Jean’s telepathy, to get answers without starting a fight. Logan spends the whole evening visibly trying not to pop his claws. I want a lot more of that Logan.
Marvel’s Wolverine releases on September 15 on the PS5 for Rs 4,999. Because it’s the only thing keeping him alive, in the fights, the anger is yours to manage, and it has to be kept topped up,. Mashing buttons won’t get anyone far in there.
She also keeps offering to fly him wherever they need to go, and he keeps turning her down to climb instead. It’s a convenient excuse for the level design, sure. McIntyre plays the stubbornness so straight that it ends up as one of the more charming threads in the story. The rest of Team X is less gentle about things. Sabretooth is loud, mean and very funny about it, and every jab he throws at Logan comes with decades of history. Mystique is harder to read. Both turn out to have more going on than their first few scenes suggest. Underneath the banter is a world that has turned on these people. Mutants are rounded up and shoved into vans. Trask calls them a threat to ordinary life, even though they make up less than one percent of the population. Walter Langkowski, a Team X doctor whose X-gene has never switched on, is treated as lesser by his own side. None of it comes with a speech. It sits in the background of scenes, and it gives all that rage something to be about. There’s no city to swing across this time, and no map full of side jobs. Marvel’s Wolverine is linear, closer to Uncharted and the older God of War games than to Spider-Man. That gives the studio control over every beat, and it uses all of it. Logan crawls along the outside of a plane as it comes down. He chases targets over Tokyo rooftops and fights from a motorcycle on rain-soaked streets. One boss fight begins right after his eyes are torn out, and the screen sharpens bit by bit as they grow back, while the fight carries on. Another drops him in front of a Sentinel taller than the buildings around it. Arriving at any of these at your own pace in an open city would take the air out of them. In between, things slow down. Logan climbs, clears gaps, rides ziplines and follows scent trails. Madripoor and Tokyo open up enough to wander around and listen to the team talk, while Canada asks him to climb and keep quiet. Keeping quiet is where Logan is least himself. Stealth comes down to crouching in tall grass, waiting for a guard and pressing a button. The takedowns look great, but once he’s spotted, going loud is the smarter call and, with a rage system this good, the more fun one. The regular enemies start to repeat in the back half too, mostly soldiers and Sentinels in different sizes, which is where the bosses step in. The optional Nightmare Doors are where everything he has learnt gets tested. Behind them are long wave fights and timed parkour runs, and each one cleared hands back an adaptation and a piece of Logan’s past. By the time the credits rolled, the fighting still hadn’t worn thin, and that felt like the right place to stop. Those set pieces are also where the claws come all the way out. After three Spider-Man games built around a hero who doesn’t kill, the studio stops holding back. Limbs come off. Bodies pile up. Logan’s clothes shred mid-fight and stay shredded. In the heavier story moments his skin tears away to show the metal underneath, and the camera stays on it. Logan gets no special treatment either. Big fights leave him burned, cut open and limping into the next cutscene. Watching those wounds close in a few seconds of story is the healing factor doing for free what the combat makes you pay for. None of it tips into shock for the sake of it. The killing is quick and efficient, a man doing an ugly job and moving on, and oddly, that fits the gentle Logan of the cutscenes. The suits are where things lighten up. Crates in each level hold materials for costumes pulled from across his history in comics, films and animation, and every one crafted adds a bit to his maximum health. So Logan can bleed through a tender moment in bright yellow spandex. It’s silly, and people will go looking for it anyway. A falling plane, a Sentinel the size of a building, a boss fight with his eyes still growing back. Logan came through all of it, and every time, the rage meter decided whether he would. Insomniac gets there by splitting the job. In the cutscenes, Logan gets to be patient, funny and kind. That split is also the oldest Wolverine story there is. For decades, the character has been about a man trying to keep the animal in him under control, and here it becomes the way he plays. Around the kids at the refuge, around Jean, around a team that keeps testing him, Logan works hard to stay calm. He survives a fight only by letting go. The campaign asks for both, back to back, right up to the credits. It’s also why the softer Logan works. A gentle Wolverine could easily have felt like a writing choice that nothing else backed up. Here, the combat spends hours making the player responsible for his rage, and then the cutscenes hand him back to be kind. That contrast lands every time a fight winds down and he goes quiet again. Logan still gets back up every time. Now it’s on you to make sure he can. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.