The Washington Post’s Marvel’s Wolverine review landed at three stars, but the part getting passed around isn’t the score. It’s Sabretooth.
Reviewer Gene Park describes a scene during an assault on a military base where Sabretooth grabs the back of Logan’s head, and Park reads the moment as longing, not menace.
Insomniac says that’s exactly what it is.
“Hate And Love Are So Hand In Hand”
Narrative director Walt Williams told the Post the beat is written that way on purpose.
Logan feels the pull, gets scared, and backs off. Sabretooth feels the same pull, it hurts him, and he lashes out to push that hurt onto Logan.
“Hate and love are so hand in hand,” Williams said.
He framed the rivalry as a loop: each one wounds the other, and the shared pain is what keeps them bound together.
Williams is the writer behind Spec Ops: The Line, the 2012 shooter that doubled as a psychological thriller.
Park’s takeaway is that Insomniac left room for love inside Logan’s most violent relationship.
The Post isn’t alone on it. The Guardian’s review pointed to the Sabretooth rivalry and the developing Jean Grey relationship as the story’s most emotionally effective moments.
A Cast In Their 40s, Written With Heartbreak
The scene fits a bigger plan. Williams said every character in the game is performed by an actor in their 40s and written with a heavy history, aimed at players who have taken a few hits in life and will recognize the damage.
Park says it gives the game a more somber, tragic tone than superhero stories usually allow, and calls the writing sturdier and more confident than Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, whose characters he felt were sanded down into likability.
Freed from the Cyclops love triangle, the Logan and Jean Grey relationship gets a tenderness the comics rarely give it.
The setup: mutants aren’t public yet. Logan runs with Team X under Nathaniel Essex, voiced by Troy Baker, alongside Mystique and Sabretooth, fighting Bolivar Trask. Park calls McIntyre’s Logan great and Baker’s Essex excellent, a slippery mentor whose motives stay murky, sometimes to the story’s detriment.
The villains get thinner from there, with everyone converging on a MacGuffin device, and the ending spends its final stretch setting up Insomniac’s wider universe.
Three Stars And Familiar Combat
The gameplay is where the review lands hardest, and it lands right where the August pile-on aimed.
Park writes that if the trailers looked interesting, you have probably played this game many times already.
The fights run on a handful of proven button combos, four cooldown-gated special attacks, and standard dodge-parry-attack rhythms. The first half drags while the game withholds its best moves for progression, and it gets considerably more fun once they unlock.
He also flags too much spectacle the player only watches. One encounter longtime X-Men fans will see coming plays out mostly through quick-time prompts.
That’s the same complaint the mockery clips made in August, the ones Insomniac’s community boss called a relentless onslaught, now coming from a reviewer with 46 hours in the game.
The praise is real, too. Exquisite animation, strong enemy variety, obscenely violent with toggles to dial it down, and Tokyo’s neon streets with fights against The Hand inside temples. Park even singles out the dedicated claw-pop button as a small detail Insomniac got right.
Park’s own summary on X: he played 46 hours, liked it a lot, but called it a very standard action game with little surprises beyond a decent, sometimes messy story with a lot of heart.
That tracks with the consensus. Metacritic has Marvel’s Wolverine at 77, with the enthusiast and international sites carrying the average up while most of the big English-language outlets landed in the 60s, per CBN’s review roundup.
Park’s closing line is the one Insomniac will want to frame: the studio took more chances with Wolverine the character than with Wolverine the game.
Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15, exclusively on PS5. The claws ship Tuesday. So does the yearning.
