‘We're incentivizing you to be aggressive.’ I got up close and personal with Marvel’s Wolverine and left covered in gore | Tech Radar

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‘We're incentivizing you to be aggressive.’ I got up close and personal with Marvel’s Wolverine and left covered in gore

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It took 127 blood-splattered minutes for 2024’s outrageously violent flick Deadpool & Wolverine to reach a kill count of 178. In my two-hour preview of Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine, I’m pretty sure it took even less time to match it.

The game starts with a delirious murder spree against the forces of human supremacist Bolivar Trask on the Asian island of Talenbang, who has taken Team X’s leader Nathaniel Essex captive.

I’m soon slicing arms off in brutal finishing moves and pummeling their insides into paste with barrage attacks. When I get to staggering foes into the blast radius of a nearby grenade, turning them into a mushy pile of goo, it’s abundantly clear this isn’t your friendly neighbourhood Wolverine.

It’s an impressively percussive, weighty combat system. With Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton in mind, I’d describe it as heavy metal combat.

At first, soldiers are summarily dispatched with a chain of light attacks and a heavy attack finisher. Later, in Canada, shield-bearing Reavers demand an initial kick before a five-knuckled skewer to the sternum. And the Hand, red-gowned ninjas recently spotted in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, come with longer blades of their own, sometimes left lodged in Wolverine’s body to impede him until it either falls out or he rips it out to furiously stab an enemy.

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The environment plays an important role too, whether you’re knocking hapless enemies off a rooftop or slamming them into a wall to leave them vulnerable to a barrage attack sure to relieve them of their entrails. Those enemies often come prepared, with mutant power inhibitors locking Logan’s regeneration unless you target the machines first — either by stealth or all-out assault.

Wolverine’s slower speed meant I took a few more hits than I needed when I couldn’t cancel attacks to dodge an incoming blow or use a Hurricane move to clear my vicinity. But once I’d adjusted to the pace (and learned how crucial the leap attack is for staying in combat), I was stringing together brutal extended combos to the point that Devil May Cry’s style meter wouldn’t have gone amiss.

In my one-man blood donation campaign, I’m building up my rage meter. As it ascends through tiers, you first unlock the Last Stand recovery mechanic, next enhanced finishing moves, then, lastly, the ability to trigger all-out carnage.

All of a sudden, environments fade away into monochrome irrelevance. The bodies of enemies pulse bright and ripe for shredding. Instakills become available with one squeeze of the trigger buttons.

It’s a thrill of delirious violence, and delete-on-sight kills comparable to Ninja Gaiden 4’s immensely satisfying Berserk mechanic last year.

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Jess Reiner-Reed, Senior Project Director, tells me that turning players into frenzied berserkers was always the plan, but balancing that aggression with Wolverine’s rapid healing ability required some mechanics to shapeshift in a manner worthy of Mystique.

“When people think of Wolverine, they say, ‘How are you going to make a video game about a guy that doesn't die?’ We had some versions that didn't work very well — versions where we were incentivizing the player to hide and have their health regenerate, like an FPS mechanic. But then we really landed on this version where we're incentivizing you to be aggressive.”

After years producing family-friendly fare in the Spider-Man series and Ratchet & Clank, the exact degree of this aggression and its gratuitous violence surprised many. Reiner-Reed gleefully reminds me that Insomniac isn’t new to this after the M-rated Resistance series.

“In Spider-Man, we always had to make sure Spider-Man doesn't kill people, because that's not Peter Parker; he webs guys to the side of the building. In Marvel's Wolverine, we get to kill people in the face.”

Focusing up close rather than tearing through Manhattan at 60mph meant Insomniac can lavish attention on details that would pass in a blur for Spider-Man. The game’s richly detailed levels look fantastic, with a focus on satisfyingly physics-driven destructible objects.

One moment in the demo particularly looked like it could have come straight out of Ratchet & Clank, and not for the better. I was pitted against the Proto Sentinel, a giant armoured robot boss rooted in place and limited to pummelling fists, laser-eyes and missile launchers. The somewhat formulaic boss battle was bested by dodge rolls and sprinting from clearly telegraphed blast zones. Despite Team X’s occasional interventions to enliven the fight, it felt like a dated chore compared to more recent similar battles like Clive’s fights against Final Fantasy XVI’s Eikons.

I found the Nightmare Doors sequences similarly deflating. These are portals into Logan’s Canadian wilderness cabin, where he unlocks forgotten memories by navigating a timed obstacle course, scrambling up tree trunks and leaping from eerily suspended shipping containers. The two examples I saw felt like perfunctory diversions compared to the far superior storyline chases.

Wolverine can throw hands with the best of them, but does the unrelenting focus on its excellent close quarters have legs? With no weapon mixups, ranged abilities, or a wide suite of movement abilities evident so far, the variety must come from elsewhere.

Reiner-Reed reassures me that variety will be found through build variations created through the player’s chosen special moves and custom augmentations to shape their build, whether they want to focus on stealth or accelerate into a raging rampage.

Moment to moment, it certainly has the X-Factor you’d expect from the X-Men’s headline act; I catch my pulse racing at the end of my demo, and the Team X team-up attacks with the gigantic Sabertooth and Mystique have me itching to see what punchy combinations await.

But in the space of two hours, I was craving more movement options and could already feel the leap attacks become a crutch.

Insomniac has far more to offer than just Deadpool & Wolverine’s glib humour and sadistic mayhem, as much as Reiner-Reed relishes team meetings to discuss blood physics. Off duty in a trademark flannel shirt and a cowboy hat, as Wolverine, I got to visit Lowtown for some R&R in the lawless slums of Madripoor.

The sequence provided ample opportunities for Liam Mc Intyre to show his range between macho posturing with Sabretooth and self-effacingly confronting his inability to find a suitable gift for Jean Grey (despite the advantages he gets from sniffing out her trail).

But it was a simple yet artfully composed game of Never Have I Ever at the bar with Mystique that impressed me most. Logan confronts his misdeeds and inner demons through the bottom of a glass. As I choose to drink and not drink at some of Mystique’s revealingly probing interrogations, I can safely say this: never have I ever been so struck by just waiting to see if Logan’s hesitant outstretched arm raised the cup to his lips.

“I love Logan as a character and always have because I found him one of the most emotionally complex characters,” says Liam Mc Intyre, the gravel-voiced Aussie actor who’s demonstrating Logan’s unfettered rage and nuanced regret in even these quieter moments.

“He doesn't want to go and high-five people in New York City; that's not his deal. He wants to stay off and be remote and do what he has to do and not make a big deal out of it [...] He feels the most grounded of the superheroes to me.

Mc Intyre does such a fine job making Wolverine a character you want to spend time with; I was almost disappointed when The Hand’s intrusion brought this lull to an abrupt close. Although crossing blades with them on an exhilarating rooftop chase that closed out the demo soon banished any momentary disappointment. The single-minded narrative momentum I saw here can remove any fears Spider-Man’s open world would be missed.

Both Mc Intyre and Reiner-Reed point to the game's ending as the moment they're most looking forward to seeing players’ reactions. If it can top what I saw in the first act’s (unfortunately embargoed) rollercoaster climax, I’m eager to see how Marvel’s Wolverine can top it when it arrives on Play Station 5 on September 15.

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