Marvel’s Wolverine claws its way onto PlayStation 5 on Tuesday, September 15 — the biggest PS5 exclusive of the year and Insomniac’s follow-up to a Spider-Man series that has sold 50 million copies. The reviews landed September 10, and they’re all over the map: a brilliant, blood-soaked Logan story wrapped around combat that critics either devoured or found mind-numbing.
The Divide
The BBC’s reviewer had a blast, saying the combat “kept me hooked the whole way through” a roughly 20-hour campaign (a colleague finished it in about 15). The free-flowing brawling is built around a rage meter that turns your surroundings grey and lets you swiftly dispatch foes — or spend accumulated rage to regenerate health. “The graphics are great,” the review adds, even if cutscenes interrupt a little too often.
Polygon went the other way entirely, calling the game “the biggest disappointment of the PS5 era” and arguing it tries too hard to copy God of War’s playbook.
The Guardian praised “a gloriously conflicted lead” before landing the blow: combat is “crude, boring battling” from “a bludgeoning production line of identical fights.” Its verdict calls Wolverine “a lovingly crafted, beautifully polished hack-’em-up” that “lacks both the bone-crunching impact of the Batman Arkham games and the balletic joy of Spider-Man” — and warns that “as the game goes on and the enemies line up, it feels increasingly like a chore.”
Kotaku’s review sits in the middle: Wolverine “feels caught between the past and present, for good and ill.” The linear, cinematic structure is “refreshing in its straightforward focus” in 2026, but that same one-track direction means it spends “large swaths of its reasonably short runtime feeling as mindless as the violent rage Logan finds himself shrouded in.”
The Story Is the Real Draw
Where critics agree is the story and performances. Set before the founding of the X-Men, the game follows a disenfranchised Logan back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. The Guardian calls the game’s interpretation of Logan “a triumph” built on “a brilliant performance from Liam McIntyre,” while the BBC singled out Troy Baker as Essex for a “memorable” turn. The X-Men’s themes of persecution and prejudice, meanwhile, land hard throughout the campaign.
No Spider-Man Open World
Gone is the open-world Manhattan of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. Wolverine is mostly linear — “thrusting us from set-piece to set-piece in a globe-trotting race against time and plausibility,” as the Guardian puts it, with richly detailed cities like Madripoor and Tokyo largely locked off behind invisible walls. Freelance critic Emma Kent told the BBC the shift is “a significant shake-up… a more curated path through the game world.”
The 18-Rating Gamble
The game carries a PEGI-18 rating in the UK — meaning children legally cannot buy it — a commercial risk the developers accepted knowingly. “Even though this character appeals to kids, making a game that is explicitly like, ‘sorry, this is not for kids’… it does reduce the scope,” game director Mike Daly told the BBC. “But I think there was no other way to do it. That was the cost of doing business.”
Should You Buy It?
If you’re here for the character piece — a moody, violent Logan story with top-shelf performances — reviews suggest you’ll be well served. If you’re expecting Spider-Man’s traversal or Devil May Cry’s combat depth, temper your expectations. Either way, Tuesday will show whether the gamble pays off for Sony.