The Marvel’s Wolverine reviews are in, landing this morning, September 10, five days before the game hits PS5.
The short version: critics like it. They don’t love it.
The combat, the gore, the visuals, and the performances draw praise across the board.
The story and the repetition take the knocks.
UPDATE 9/11: Insomniac’s writer explains the Sabretooth and Logan scene from the Washington Post review.
The Scores So Far
IGN gives it a 6 out of 10 saying it’s “okay” and that its “slick and satisfying combat wears thin well before its conclusion.”
Push Square went 8 out of 10, calling out the fast, gory combat, the brutal takedowns and team combos, and visuals the review calls “the best visuals possible in 2026.”
The story is where that review found the weak spot, with a narrative that never grabbed the reviewer.
GamesRadar+ put its verdict right in the headline: “missing that crucial X-Factor.” The review calls it an average game held back by simple combat and a story that doesn’t come together.
Destructoid mostly liked it, praising a bloodier, more linear, more narrative-driven game than Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles, though the reviewer found it repetitive in stretches.
The site says the story is “a somewhat unique take on the character that will definitely get people talking.”
PlayStation LifeStyle found it polished but uneven, with best-in-class voice acting, motion capture, and animation built on a formula carried straight over from the Spider-Man games.
The aggregates have landed. Metacritic has Marvel’s Wolverine at 77 from 102 reviews, rated “generally favorable.” OpenCritic put it at 80.
The Metacritic number slipped as more reviews came in. Industry insider Shinobi602’s early roundup had it at 78.
The spread behind that average is enormous.
Five outlets gave it a perfect score: COGconnected, Hardcore Gamer, ScreenHub, GamingBolt, and Impulsegamer. Fourteen more landed at 90. Nearly 30 reviews sat at 80.
Then look at the bottom, because that’s where the biggest names are.
IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, Eurogamer, VGC, The Guardian, Gamekult, and ComicBook all gave it a 60. Giant Bomb went lowest at 50, calling the game boring.
Polygon, Kotaku, and The Verge reviewed it without giving a score.
So the enthusiast and international sites carried the average up while most of the big English-language outlets landed in the 60s.
At 77, Wolverine sits below every Insomniac Marvel game before it: Marvel’s Spider-Man hit 87, Miles Morales 85, and Spider-Man 2 went 90.
What Every Review Agrees On
The production is the win. Reviews single out the face models, the PS5 Pro performance, and the cast.
That includes Troy Baker as Essex, and if that surname sounds familiar, it should.
Nathaniel Essex is Mister Sinister, the same character Adam Driver is playing under the name Nathaniel Milbury in Marvel’s 2028 X-Men reboot.
The knocks are just as consistent. The story doesn’t pay off the way the reviews wanted, and Logan’s toolkit — claws, parries, rage — runs thinner over a full campaign than Spider-Man’s ever did.
The Reviews Land On Eight Months Of Fighting
These verdicts arrive after a backlash cycle that has run since the game was playable.
The launch trailer took the “AAA ugly stick” hit. Jean Grey’s face has been fought over three times. A viral mocap claim fell apart on a closer look.
An Insomniac dev called the whole thing “a relentless onslaught”.
Here’s the thing about the reviews: their complaints aren’t the backlash’s complaints.
Nobody is scoring the game down over character faces. The knocks are story and variety — the two things the trailer fights were never about.
None of it has touched the numbers either way. Wolverine remains one of the biggest preorders on the PlayStation Store, trailing only GTA 6 and NBA 2K27.
Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15, exclusively on PS5.
