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?
