Marvel's Wolverine Reviews and Scores

Review embargo lifted on September 10, 2026, five days ahead of the September 15 release. As of October 9:

The direction matters more than the number. Metacritic opened at 77 on September 10, rose to 78 as the first wave landed, was back at 77 across 128 reviews a week after launch, and has since slid to 75 across 146. That is the lowest score Metacritic still calls Generally Favorable. OpenCritic's recommend rate fell from 72% at embargo to 69% and now 66% — the later reviews kept landing below the early ones. Our Metacritic page tracks each step.

The user score behaves exactly as a heavily-discussed character tends to: 6.7 out of 10 from 5,583 ratings, which Metacritic labels Mixed or Average. That is a wider critic-to-player gap than any other Insomniac Marvel game has carried — though OpenCritic's separate player rating sits much higher, at 80.

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

A 75 average built from perfect scores and 5/10s is not the same thing as a 75 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 15-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: 75 is still 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.