Insomniac Games' long-awaited Marvel's Wolverine arrived to a mixed critical reception this week, ahead of its September 15 launch on PS5. The game holds a Metacritic score around 77 to 78, and according to Kotaku that makes it Sony's lowest-scoring in-house game of the PS5 era, scoring below even Sackboy: A Big Adventure.
The complaints are strikingly consistent across outlets: the presentation dazzles, the story lands, but the actual business of fighting as Wolverine wears thin.
Great Characters, Dull Combat
Reviewers agreed that the narrative and cast are the highlights. VGC's Jordan Middler, who scored it 3/5, singled out Logan's relationship with Jean Grey and Troy Baker's turn as Nathaniel Essex, and praised Liam McIntyre's take on Wolverine as "an authentic, comic book-influenced rendition of Logan" rather than an impression of a certain famous Australian actor. He also called the visuals best-in-class.
The problem, critics said, is what you do between those story beats. Middler wrote that by the end he was "legitimately sighing when more enemies would appear," and delivered the line that has ricocheted around social media: "I don't feel like Wolverine is using claws, it feels like he's got blunt kitchen knives on the ends of his fists."
Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell, also at 3/5, described the game as "a repetitive, overlong, and overfamiliar slog" with "little to no invention throughout." He noted that after the fourth, fifth, and sixth wave of identical enemies "you just start to glaze over a little." IGN's Simon Cardy, at 6/10, said the combat needed a stronger sense of progression across its roughly 15-hour run, while The Guardian's Keith Stuart (3/5) compared it unfavorably to Insomniac's own Spider-Man games.
The Linear World and the 'Fart Gas'
Unlike the open cities of Spider-Man, Wolverine is a linear game, and reviewers found the locations frustratingly sealed off. Stuart lamented visiting richly detailed places like Madripoor and Tokyo only to find "roads closed off and invisible walls directing us back to the action," calling it "almost cruel."
That sense of the game steering players around fed into the week's most viral debate. As Kotaku recounts, a clip from YouTuber Ralph "Skill Up" Panebianco highlighted layers of on-screen signposting, including a scent trail Logan follows to track Jean Grey. The Washington Post's Gene Park dubbed it "fart gas," and the term stuck.
A fight then broke out online over how much of the hand-holding could be switched off. Some players pointed to accessibility menus that disable waypoint icons and navigation assist. But Park and Kotaku's own reviewer, Kenneth Shepard, both reported that the scent trail itself stays on even with those options turned off. As Kotaku puts it, for now "the fart gas is a feature, not a bug," though a day-one or post-launch patch could change that.
What This Means for Players
Marvel's Wolverine reaches a market where brutal Soulslikes and deep RPGs set expectations, and Kotaku argues the game may sit in an "uncomfortably archaic middle ground" between the open-world Ghost of Yotei and the tight arcade action of Ninja Gaiden 4. If you were hoping for a definitive Wolverine action game to top 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the consensus suggests you'll get a gorgeous, well-acted story wrapped around combat that stops evolving early. Buyers eyeing the September 15 release may want to check patch notes for whether Insomniac loosens the signposting before deciding.
