Insomniac already proved it could do a Marvel open world with Spider-Man. Marvel's Wolverine is a different assignment — a linear, brutal, character-first campaign — and it landed September 15 on PS5 with GamingBolt handing it a 10 out of 10 the day the review embargo lifted.
## The combat is the whole pitch GamingBolt describes a “brutal, borderline unhinged temperament translated brilliantly into every encounter,” and that tracks with what the trailers promised since the first State of Play reveal. Claws-first melee, environmental kills, and a Rage Meter that unlocks takedown finishers once it fills. The twist: Logan's healing factor draws from that same meter, so burning it early for a flashy kill means bleeding out slower in the next fight. That's a real risk-reward system, not a cosmetic one.
## Twenty hours, three continents, one man's past The campaign runs about 20 hours and moves Logan through Canada, Japan and Madripoor while mutants get systematically hunted by Bolivar Trask. Old allies and old conflicts resurface along the way. GamingBolt calls it “one of the most tightly knit narratives Insomniac has ever told,” crediting Liam McIntyre's voice work for carrying the emotional range the writing asks for. No open-world padding here — it's mission-structured to keep the pace tight instead of stretching the map.
## Where it actually falls short The review isn't a pure victory lap. Enemy variety is thin, mostly Cyborgs and Sentinels on rotation, and the stealth sections read like an afterthought bolted onto a combat system that clearly got all the attention. There are minor technical hiccups too — animation glitches here and there, one reported checkpoint reload — the kind of thing a day-one patch usually cleans up. None of it seems to have moved the score.
## Why a 10 out of 10 means something here Perfect scores get handed out too easily across gaming media, which is exactly why it's worth checking what this one is actually praising. GamingBolt isn't rewarding scale or spectacle — it's rewarding restraint: a focused campaign, a character-specific combat system that reflects who Wolverine actually is, and a story that resists padding runtime with checklist open-world busywork. That's harder to pull off than a bigger map, and it's why this review reads as earned instead of hyped.
If you played Insomniac's Spider-Man games expecting the same formula, recalibrate. This is a tighter, meaner game, and the reviews so far say that's exactly what makes it work.
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## Sources - GamingBolt, 2026 - PlayStation Blog, 2026