Marvel's Wolverine Review Scores

Review embargo lifted on September 10, 2026, five days ahead of the September 15 release. As of September 11:

Both numbers are still moving. Metacritic sat at 77 for part of September 10 before settling at 78 as more reviews landed, and OpenCritic's critic count climbs daily. Treat any figure quoted this week as a snapshot, including this one.

Metacritic user scores are not yet available — they open at release, and on a character this heavily discussed, expect that number to behave very differently from the critic average.

The spread is the story here. Scores normalised to a 10-point scale where the outlet uses another:

A 78 average built from perfect scores and 5/10s is not the same thing as a 78 built from consistent 7s and 8s. This is the former. The game is polarising rather than merely good, which means aggregate scores are a poor guide to whether you personally will like it.

The context that drove most of the coverage:

A 12-point drop from Spider-Man 2 makes this the lowest-scoring original Insomniac game in roughly a decade, going back to Song of the Deep in 2016. Kotaku framed it as currently Sony's lowest-scoring first-party PS5 release.

Worth keeping in proportion: 78 is a positive score. It only reads as a disappointment against a studio that had not shipped below 85 on this licence.

Three things draw praise almost universally, including from the reviewers who scored it lowest:

• Liam McIntyre's Logan. The voice and performance-capture work is the single most consistently complimented element across the review set.
• Visuals and presentation. Impulse Gamer's perfect score leaned heavily on this, and the PS5 Pro build with PSSR support drew specific mention.
• The violence. Insomniac's first M-rated Marvel game commits to it, and critics broadly found the brutality both well-executed and tonally right for the character.

Several reviewers also singled out the writing around Logan's relationships — particularly with Jean Grey — as stronger than the surrounding plot.

The complaints cluster tightly, which is unusual — the critics who disliked it largely disliked the same things:

• Combat wears thin. IGN's review says the combat grows repetitive by the end. Others describe it as button-mashing once the novelty of the claws fades.
• The story is predictable. Giant Bomb cited "mediocre storytelling, poor pacing, and an underwhelming amount of player agency."
• It feels familiar. MMORPG.com called it a standard third-person action game measured against the studio's earlier work.
• There is not much of it. The roughly 15-hour campaign with limited optional content drew comment at a $69.99 price.

Note the tension with the praise section: combat is on both lists. Reviewers who played on higher difficulties and engaged with the Technique rotation tended to rate it higher than those who did not, which is the clearest pattern in the split.

The aggregate is not very useful here. The more predictive question is which camp you fall into.

The high scores come from reviewers who wanted a focused, brutal, character-driven action game and got exactly that. The low scores come from reviewers who expected a step forward from Spider-Man 2 in scope and systems, and found a smaller, more conventional game instead.

If a tight 15-hour campaign that is deliberately not open world sounds like a feature rather than a shortfall, the low scores are largely arguing against something you did not want anyway.