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Wolverine's 77 Metacritic and the Spider-Man Curse
Wolverine's 77 Metacritic and the Spider-Man Curse
The divide is already visible, and it's brutal. Marvel's Wolverine has landed at a mid-to-high 70s Metacritic score—officially "Generally Favorable" but technically precarious for a major studio release. The game releases today exclusively on PlayStation 5. What should have been Insomniac's moment of franchise dominance beyond Spider-Man instead reads like a conditional pass, and the critical commentary makes clear why: reviewers praise Liam McIntyre's Logan and the game's presentation, but nearly every complaint is structural—a shorter, more linear campaign, thinner enemy variety, and guidance systems critics say remove player agency the Spider-Man games never had to solve for.
For context: Marvel's Wolverine has scored notably lower than Insomniac's recent Spider-Man releases, making it the lowest-rated original Insomniac game in a decade.
What critics actually liked
The combat work itself has not been dismissed. Nearly every critic, favorable or not, praises combat feel and Logan's characterization. Where the Spider-Man games rewarded evasion and aerial acrobatics, Wolverine's combat is built around taking hits and pushing forward, with the camera close over Logan's shoulder and hits landing with weight. There's a heaviness to his Adamantium claws that distinguishes this attack system from the free-flowing combat found in Marvel's Spider-Man games. The Rage system and the visible healing factor (where wounds close on-screen as Logan regenerates) add signature mechanical flavor.
This is still solid technical craft. But it's also where the trouble starts.
The linearity problem
Marvel's Wolverine is a single-player, narrative-driven action-adventure game that is not set in an open world. That's a deliberate structural choice. But in a release cycle where open-world action games set the player-freedom expectation, and where Insomniac itself built its reputation on web-slinging explorations in New York, a contained, guided corridor feels—to many reviewers—like a step backward.
Critics note guidance systems like the scent trail remove player agency the Spider-Man games never had to solve for, which is a design-philosophy gap, not an execution failure. Combat gets plenty of praise for its weight, gore, finishers, and how aggressively Logan tears through enemies, but many critics note its repetitiveness and front-loaded progression, and enemy variety is being panned by most.
What happens next
This suggests Insomniac's open-world Spider-Man toolkit doesn't automatically transfer to a contained, linear brawler, and it's a live question for whatever Insomniac ships next under its multi-game Marvel deal with Sony: reuse this same guided, corridor template and risk the same critique, or rebuild the traversal-and-freedom formula that made the recent Spider-Man releases successful.
User reviews will arrive immediately on PlayStation's user-facing pages, and that score may diverge sharply from the critic average. But the structural problem—whether Insomniac can do standalone Marvel properties as successfully as it does Spider-Man's already-established sandbox—is now live. Wolverine releases today, and the question of what that score means for the studio's next move is immediate.
Our take. Wolverine is not a bad game, but it's the first major Insomniac superhero release to land below the studio's own track record, and the criticism is specific enough to matter: a shift toward linearity and guided design cost it the player freedom and variety that made recent Spider-Man titles successful. That's a design choice, not a bug, but it's a costly one.
What to watch. Player scores launch immediately today and will stabilize over the next two weeks; a sustained gap between critics and players would confirm that the structural choices are genuinely divisive rather than just a critic consensus. Beyond that, when Insomniac announces its next Marvel game, watch whether the studio leans back into open-world structure or doubles down on the linear, story-focused model.
Bottom line. Insomniac's Marvel reach extends beyond Spider-Man, but the cost of that franchise flex is a lower Metacritic score and a structural lesson that will define its next superhero release.