Focus, W (New Side Quest #14)
Game Played: Wolverine (2026)
There are few games that gather this much divide in opinions and it's not even necessarily the games fault. It has fallen into the no man's land of Video Game discourse with the usual suspects complaing about wokeness and the grifters fabrication problems but on the other end legitimate criticisms about hand holding and paint inside the lines design. Between the two sides, it's hard to write a legitimate review when I feel like I've seen and been influenced in so many ways. Personally I've got the most reason to be annoyed at Insomniac, given that they're a Marvel factory and I have to wait years between Ratchet & Clank titles. All of that said… you'll have to pardon the faceoutious referential title, as I thought Wolverine was pretty decent for the most part.
Moderate to Major Gameplay and Story Spoilers.
Reader Discretion is advised
I have a very limited knowledge of X-Men (which isn’t nothing) but this is a new story set in Insomniac’'s Spider-Man universe but still completely removed beyond a vague reference. Wolverine returns to Task Force X to help save old mentor and friend Nathaniel Essex from anti mutant human supremacist Trask. Later encountering Jean, Wolverine discovers his past and faces an uncertain future yada yada.
The story starts off quite strong, with Wolverine finding the group of mutants on the run and his interactions with them and Essex as well as his developing relationship with Jean. It’s almost a more grounded story here and I quite enjoy that. Things start to go down hill a little once it gets to Japan and The Hand are brought in. Even then, the story is still fine if you take out the Wolverine/Jean reincarnated lovers angle. The teases and reveal of Apocalypse could have been a bit better too.
Gameplay and combat wise, there’s not a whole lot you can do with Wolverine as he has his claws and that’s it. To the games credit, they offer some special moves that can be unlocked in it’s refreshingly stripped back skill tree. There’s vague variations of combos but the best strategy is just spamming Square and parrying attacks (which is a little harder than you’d expect). When you have an NPC companion with you, they’ll get involved with attacks - highlights include Sabretooth knocking you out of the way just to rip a poor enemy limb from limb.
Boss fights are a generally pretty good - the weakest is the Prototype Sentinel which is a complete boring slog. The rest however range from decent to pretty good even if the first fight is the best of the lot. The issues I have with the games camera are exasperated in boss fights since it doesn’t matter whether you’re locked on or not, the camera will always focus on the boss making general movement more difficult than it needs to be.
As alluded to above, the games launch was marred with discussion over the game being linear but still presenting several ways of the player not losing their way, the most egrigous being a blue mist or ‘Fart Gas’ as it’s come to be known that is ever present. This didn’t annoy me too much but there are still some of the modern gaming stuff with the marked walls for interactions, characters musing out loud about what they need to do the moment they get into the scene. There’s some odd dialogue in places like where one of the Reavers describes a weakened Wolverine as Cooked (I have friends who say things like this, I feel like this might just be like seeing mobiles in The Simpsons - something to get used to). Character faces weren't as bad as people were claiming. (except Wolverine who sometimes looks like a gormless toddler and Lady Deathstrike who looks like an asian woman’s skin pasted over some kind of muppet).
All in all I liked the game but the laundry list of complaints the game has garnered are all entirely legitmate. If you can look past the games faults like myself, you’'ll find a decent game. Not good, but decent. I don’t tend to delve into pricing conversations but I will say if the game was £10/£20 cheaper then it’d be more palatable for a lot of people. The games $300 Million budget also needs analysed as there’s enough bugs and questionable design decisions here to bring that into question. A perfect storm of ‘It’s alright, but…’. I liked it more than Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2 but Insomniac still havent hit the heights of their original hero outing.
