Marvel's Wolverine Metacritic Score

Metacritic's bands are fixed: 75–100 is green and labelled Generally Favorable, 50–74 is yellow and Mixed or Average, below 50 is red. A 78 sits three points inside the green band, so the colour is doing a lot of work here — it is a positive score, but not a comfortable one.

The Metascore is a weighted average, not a plain one. Metacritic assigns higher weight to outlets it judges more significant, and it does not publish the weights. That is why the figure can differ from a simple mean of the scores you see listed.

The embargo lifted on September 10, 2026, five days before release. The score did not land at 78 immediately:

• Through part of September 10 it sat at 77, on a smaller sample.
• It settled at 78 as more reviews were counted.
• The critic count has kept climbing daily and is now at 113.

Expect one or two more points of movement in either direction as late reviews land, and treat every figure quoted this week — including this page's — as a snapshot rather than a final number. Aggregates on a launch-window game typically stabilise around two weeks after release.

The other aggregator disagrees slightly, and the gap is instructive:

One point apart on very different sample sizes. OpenCritic uses an unweighted average and publishes its full outlet list, so a one-point gap between the two suggests Metacritic's weighting is not pulling the number meaningfully in either direction here.

OpenCritic's "72% recommend" is the more useful figure of the two. It says roughly seven critics in ten would tell you to buy it — which is a clearer statement than any average drawn from a set this polarised.

A 12-point drop from Spider-Man 2 makes this the lowest-scoring original Insomniac game in roughly a decade. Kotaku framed it as currently Sony's lowest-scoring first-party PS5 release.

Keep it in proportion. Plenty of well-liked games score 78. It reads as a disappointment only because the studio had never shipped below 85 on this licence, and the comparison — not the score — is what drove the coverage.

Metacritic user reviews open at release, so there is no user score before September 15, 2026. Any site quoting one today is quoting something else.

When it does open, expect it to behave very differently from the critic average. Wolverine is one of the most heavily discussed characters Marvel has, the game is a platform exclusive, and the critic scores are already contested — all three conditions historically produce a volatile user score in the first 72 hours, in both directions.

The practical advice: give the user score two weeks before you read anything into it, and check the volume of reviews as well as the average.

A 78 built from consistent 7s and 8s means something different from a 78 built from perfect scores and 5s. This is the second kind: Impulse Gamer gave it 10/10 and Hardcore Gamer full marks, while IGN, GameSpot and GamesRadar+ all landed on 6/10.

That spread means the average describes almost nobody's actual experience of the game. The more useful question is which camp you fall into — see our full score breakdown for the outlet-by-outlet list, and what players are saying for the non-critic side.