Marvel's Wolverine is fine, but not the best at it what it does

I'm glad I avoided all the Wolverine drama before I sat down to review it.

By the time I got my copy, I was buried under the Toronto International Film Festival and couldn't break away to play anything until I was safely back home and with more than three hours of sleep under my belt. By then, most of the hubbub had died down, and I could approach Wolverine on its own terms.

I was excited, too. I'm a huge fan of the developer, Insomniac Games, and especially their superlative work on the Spider-Man franchise. I even enjoy Wolverine, despite Marvel and Fox running the character into the ground with their IP milking. As the game booted up, I figured I was in for about twenty hours of a fun, if undemanding, rampage.

Fifteen or so hours later, I got the rampage, but I'm still uncertain about the fun.

Wolverine is an original story that follows all the familiar beats from the comics and films. Everyone's favorite Canadian gets to play to his strengths as a big ol' drama queen with lots of yelling, lost loves, and betrayals. For the most part, it's delightfully cheesy fun, exactly what you'd want out of this character. Smartly, Insomniac has steered clear of the darker, edgier aspects, which sounds a little silly considering the colossally brutal body count you rack up during gameplay.

But there's no Old Man Logan, no mutant apocalypse, nor any of the silliest aspects of Chris Claremont's epic comic book run. The big set pieces are there for show, and even the bleakest aspects (mutants are still treated like cattle) make way for heartwarming bits where Wolverine tries his damnedest to guide the next generation toward a better life. Elements about shared destinies, found families, and the ability to rebuild a new life make the story more poetic, nuanced, and moving than most others in this genre. I admire its scope and ambition, even if not every bit works as intended.

It's also nice to play through a story that doesn't dredge up Xavier and Magneto yet again, instead mining the rich history for surprisingly fun deep-cut references and character beats. Yes, it still goes the depressingly familiar Jean Grey/Wolverine angle, but I don't think we'll ever escape that one.

The problems come down to two things: pacing and length. Wolverine is a surprisingly long game (around 15 to 20 hours, depending on play style), and a lot of that is cutscenes, drawn-out guided sequences, and needless exposition. At its best, it kicks into high gear with terrific linear action set pieces, where the entire focus is on beating the snot out of everything and anything in your way. Like the fondly remembered X-Men Origins tie-in from the mid-2000s, Wolverine works best when it sticks to the basics.

At first, it feels like any complaints about Wolverine are drastically overblown. The opening act, where Wolverine, Sabretooth, and Mystique raid Bolivar Trask's compound to save Nathaniel Essex from captivity, is great fun. The mechanics are clear, gameplay is fast-paced, and you're constantly doing something cinematic and cool. It's an immense thrill for the first hour or so, and Wolverine looks, feels, and plays like the anti-hero fantasy we've dreamt of for almost two decades.

Then, almost immediately, Wolverine slows to a crawl and continues in fits and starts with oddly paced missions that stumble between semi-open and strictly linear areas without rhyme or reason. Enemy variants are limited, and despite borrowing liberally from Uncharted and Tomb Raider, Wolverine never finds a rhythm between arena combat and cinematic adventure.

For example, one level sees Logan make for his old cabin somewhere in Canada. To get there, the level opens up a sprawling path through dense trees and open fields that Mystique has used as a training ground in his absence. Only it isn't open at all: there's one linear route, and all others have invisible walls or fade-outs, forcing Wolverine back on track. Stray even a little, and Wolverine immediately chides you for exploring. Sure, there are collectibles, but even those have loud sound cues and big visual markers, so you can't miss them on the route to the next plot point.

Similarly, every return to the Essex mansion, which serves as a base of exposition, grinds the game to a halt. It's a reasonably large area, but rarely open for anything resembling free exploration or discovery. Instead, Wolverine slowly marches along with other characters as they explain the new plot developments, and there's never a chance to discover anything organically. Almost everything that happens here could be a cutscene, and it would only help with momentum. At another point, we simply follow a new character from one room to the next, only for the game to jump to a cutscene after a few steps.

These moments repeat throughout, and I kept thinking how much more I would have enjoyed them if I didn't have to "play" through each one. After all, these are not participatory events. At most, you push forward to follow a character, listen to dialog, and the scene ends. Instead of a crafted cinematic, these scenes hit a dull middle ground that's neither fun nor visually interesting.

Then there are the quick-time events, which have received their fair share of ridicule in the last month. At random intervals, players have to hit specific buttons to advance action sequences, like clawing out tires or dodging punches in a hectic battle. The only problem is that none of these are mandatory or have any fail states. If you don't press a button, the game continues as if nothing happened. At one point, I pressed the wrong buttons on purpose, and Wolverine still rewarded me with the correct action.

In other areas, such as a dire timed event with Sabertooth in a melting-down core, are so poorly staged that button prompts change without warning, resulting in frustrating failures when there's no reason for them.

Elsewhere, Wolverine has locations that feel like they were designed for much larger exploration sequences, only to be cut down at the last minute. Madripoor, in particular, has points where I'm certain I should be able to continue much further into the city, only for a poorly placed invisible wall to block my progress.

Whatever the cause, the results are always the same: I spent most of my playthrough frustrated with Wolverine's pacing. Like a car filled with bad gas, it sputters at every turn.

This applies to combat as well, which ranges from exciting to downright boring. At first, it's a blast to slice and dice goons. Then, it turns out there's not much more to things than repeating a handful of attacks, and the villains are all carbon copies of each other. Skill and mutant abilities feel oddly limited, and there's none of the grace or inventive fun of Spider-Man's gadgets or mobility anywhere. The world is oddly static, save for a random environmental hazard, and almost all combat scenarios repeat the same pattern. Even the mandatory parry mechanic feels half-baked, and fighting off large groups ends up with Wolverine spamming the block button to avoid getting knocked back and dazed.

Wolverine is a fairly large game, and the sprawling storyline takes a good while to comb through, but I honestly would have preferred a shorter, more streamlined experience. At around twenty hours, Wolverine overstays its welcome by a good half, and so much of that is dead air. Add to that some half-baked nightmare trial sections, where Wolverine fights against time limits to beat bad guys or race through obstacle courses, and even the bonus missions feel lacking.

I realize that game development costs require a return on investment in terms of scale, and gamers demand longer and longer games for perceived value, but not everything needs to be an epic. A mid-budget Wolverine game with one finely-tuned mechanic would be just as welcome as anything else.

Wolverine is not a bad game; it's remarkably OK in almost every regard. Insomniac Games is so packed with talent that they couldn't make a bad game even if they tried. I like Wolverine a lot; I just don't love it, and I really want to. It has superlative moments and delivers just enough action to warrant a playthrough, but it's also a frustrating and, frankly, often dull experience.

Wolverine is overstuffed and, like its titular anti-hero, suffers from an identity crisis. It can't remember what makes the character so compelling in the first place. So, instead, it tries everything it can, and only some of it feels like the right fit. Wolverine doesn't need to be Spider-Man, Nathan Drake, or Lara Croft. It just needs to be Logan.

And like Logan, a shorter experience doesn't mean a lesser one.