Insomniac Games’ upcoming title Marvel’s Wolverine finally took center stage at Sony’s 2026 State of Play showcase after a years-long promotional campaign that has primarily consisted of small teasers. But after the game’s latest, yet very familiar showing–and as its September release date inches closer–I can’t help but wonder if there’s little more to Marvel’s famous clawed superhero than oodles of viscera and tired action-adventure tropes.
During Wolverine’s longest demonstration yet, we were treated to a number of familiar sights and sounds. The demo kicked off with the game’s titular hero atop a roof as he gauged the evolving situation before him, namely the armed guards standing between him and his objective. From there, he plunged from the roof, fangs (claws) bared, and eviscerated one unsuspecting schmuck with an aerial takedown. He then made short work of another enemy before ducking into cover behind a crate, stealthily plunging his adamantium implements into yet another guard, and pulling their limp body over his makeshift cover in order to hide the evidence.
What follows is about eight minutes of the most perfunctory action-adventure gameplay many players will ever see: Wolverine, who’s often called Logan, flits between stealth maneuvers and boisterous (not to mention graphic) shows of combat prowess before stumbling into an all-out melee, at which point another significant member of the X-Men–Jean Grey, of course, given the two characters’ frequent entanglements–joins him. At one point in the scuffle, Wolverine glows red while the world around him turns white, as if the player has toggled a strength-enhancing God of War-like berserker mode. And of course, the whole encounter ends with a set piece involving jumping from moving vehicles, like a scene straight out of a blockbuster movie… or y’know, Uncharted 2.
All of this looks perfectly fine. Fun, even, and especially brutal. But it also looks like everything else and nothing in particular. It inspires nothing. It looks and sounds like every other AAA action-adventure game before it, and like every other AAA action-adventure game that will come after it. Why? Why does one of fiction’s greatest and most distinct superheroes’ titular game look like that?
After about a decade of developing Spider-Man games, all of which have maintained the friendly neighborhood hero’s sanitized image, it is indeed fun to see Insomniac swing back the other way and pursue an appropriately grotesque direction with Marvel’s Wolverine. Wolverine’s dismemberment of his foes immediately recalls games of Insomniac’s past, like the cartoonishly overblown violence of Sunset Overdrive as well as the grittier Resistance franchise. It’s a fun wheelhouse to see the developers in, but I just expected that if we wound up back here, it might look a bit more distinct.
Insomniac is a studio that’s typically adept at giving its franchises a unique feeling or aesthetic–distinct visual identities and mechanics that set them apart from one another, as well as the rest of the pack. Think of Spider-Man’s freedom and motion while swinging through the city, Sunset Overdrive’s punk attitude and fourth-wall-breaking script, or even the iconic weapons of both Resistance and the studio’s esteemed Ratchet & Clank series. Many of the team’s games have overlap that play to the studio’s strengths, like crafty weapon designs or exceptional movement tech, but it is also skilled at weaving these techniques and aspects into greater, more imaginative tapestries.
With Wolverine, it feels as though Insomniac Games has run out of room to experiment. That the studio, which has become the workhorse upon which Sony’s empire of console-exclusive blockbusters is built, might need room to breathe and create something entirely new. To imagine bolder worlds and characters. In the meantime, it is pushing out whole franchises in the time it now takes Naughty Dog to make one game, and that seems to be slowing the team’s ability to meaningfully iterate between projects.
Instead, it seems to have settled. The mold that Marvel’s Wolverine is attempting to fit into–and is seemingly exceeding at doing so–reads like a trap. The prestigious (not to mention bloated) AAA action-adventure genre is tired and rudderless, and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t. Its freedom of choices and all-encompassing nature–qualities born from the genre’s design for the broadest appeal possible–are crowdpleasing to an extent, but increasingly come across like a fear to commit to a direction and be bold. And why shouldn’t Wolverine, of all characters, be bold?
Logan has, across comic books, TV shows, and movies, lived a thousand lives. He has faced off against samurai and the yakuza. He’s survived the Canadian wilderness and fought in both World Wars. He has grown old enough to see his friends and family die time and time again, jumped into other realities, and even lived on the Moon. In other words, there’s significantly more to the guy than the superhero moniker, wanton bloodshed, and his innate ability to shred people to ribbons, even if that is pretty gnarly in action.
That Marvel’s Wolverine–likely to be one of 2026’s biggest games this side of Grand Theft Auto 6–appears to flatten him this much, given his bountiful past, feels like one of the greatest indictments of this moment in gaming’s history and trajectory. A Wolverine that plays like Nathan Drake, James Bond, Batman, Spider-Man, or any of the dozen protagonists of the Assassin’s Creed games feel like a startling compromise. I can imagine several kinds of games and genres that might play to Wolverine’s strengths as a character–the things I’d do for a stealthy survival game in a sprawling open environment that casts Wolverine as a hunter are innumerable–but instead he is every other action-movie hero, every other action-adventure protagonist and, seemingly, not himself. I can’t say I’m surprised that Insomniac’s upcoming game feels so reined in, but I am increasingly disappointed at the fact that its ambitions appear so tame.
The biggest studios behind the high-impact games in the medium feel like they should be able to swing for the fences. And yet, it feels like the most ambitious teams are instead being made to hedge their bets, which only hurts the rest of the industry. It certainly seems to be the case with Marvel’s Wolverine, which despite earning its M rating, looks pedestrian. I’m sure it’ll be a crowdpleaser–the aforementioned State of Play demo seems to have bowled over most fans–but I’d like more from a blockbuster game and studio for whom the sky has typically been the limit. Wolverine can certainly still prove me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder if it will.
