Marvel’s Wolverine landed on PS5 yesterday with a 77 on Metacritic, Insomniac’s lowest aggregate in a decade. After a full launch-day session and far too many review threads, my verdict is simple: the number is fair about the flaws and wrong about the game. Critics spent embargo week measuring a tight, violent, 15-hour brawler against Spider-Man’s open world, then docked it for losing a race it never entered.
The basics, because they frame everything. This is a single-player, linear action-adventure, not an open world, and Insomniac never pretended otherwise. You get 13 to 20 hours of story for $70, a genuinely great performance from Liam McIntyre under the claws, and visuals that on PS5 Pro are among the best the console has produced. Even the base machine holds up, with the usual performance and fidelity modes and only a handful of launch bugs.
That’s also where the praise tends to stop. The recurring complaints are legitimate. Combat opens as a bloody, satisfying power fantasy and slowly reveals a low ceiling, with the rage meter and parry loop wearing thin by the back half. Levels are corridor-tight. And the game holds your hand so firmly it starts to feel like a lack of trust.
The scent trail is the story nobody led with
Here’s what stands out after launch day, both in my playtime and across the community threads I’ve been following: the thing players can’t stop talking about isn’t the combat or the story. It’s the navigation. Wolverine highlights ledges, flashes prompts, and sends you sniffing after objectives with a blue scent trail the community has already nicknamed fart gas. It’s funny until you notice how often it fires. In my first six hours I could count on one hand the stretches where the game let me read a space on my own.
This matters more than any aggregate score suggests. A linear game lives or dies on whether its spaces feel worth moving through, and Wolverine keeps interrupting that pleasure with GPS logic. Players are asking for a simple toggle. Insomniac has pointed out that the scent trail is player-activated in some contexts, which sidesteps the point. The problem isn’t who pulls the trigger, it’s that the game never lets you be lost for thirty seconds.
The other argument running through launch threads is whether 77 is even fair. One camp says reviewers punished the deliberately small scope, treating restraint as a flaw. The other calls $70 steep for a campaign this short in a September slate crowded enough that Wolverine is already fighting for attention. I land closer to the first camp. I’d take 15 confident hours over 35 padded ones, and exclusives like this are exactly what decides platform wars, a lesson Microsoft learned during the Xbox Series X/S launch when record hardware sales still couldn’t match Sony’s software pull.
What the score gets wrong, and what comes next
There’s also a gap between the pre-launch noise and what players are actually saying. Insomniac publicly pushed back before release against what it called an unprecedented wave of criticism. Since launch the tone on the ground has been warmer: solid performance, strong facial animation, and plenty of people having a great time on the harder difficulties. The repetition complaints aren’t wrong. The hate-campaign framing never matched the game people actually played.
If you’re picking it up, play it on the highest difficulty you can handle and take the ray tracing mode on PS5 Pro. Day-one New Game+ and replayable challenges give it a second life, though the linearity caps how much you’ll want to rerun. And it’s worth remembering which machine this is selling on, the one that keeps outperforming Xbox Series X where it counts.
The question worth sitting with is bigger than one number. If a focused, polished, 15-hour single-player game from one of Sony’s best studios can’t clear 80 in 2026, reviewers have effectively told every publisher that only open worlds justify $70. That’s a standard I don’t accept. Insomniac built something sharp, brutal and refreshingly restrained, then wrapped it in a tutorial that never ends. Patch the prompts, trust the player, and this is an 85. Until then, 77 reads like the score of a great game apologizing for itself.
