The Wolverine game may not be good but thank goodness it's weird

Insomniac’s Wolverine has garnered the lowest review scores of Sony’s entire first-party PlayStation 5 lineup, and yet it is setting PS5 sales records. Having just completed the game, I get it. Like Wolverine, this game seems to have a bit of an identity crisis, and how you feel about it seems to depend at least in part on how you feel about Wolverine, and about the campier and soapier side of X-Men lore. 

Once I got my expectations properly attuned to this game’s goofy-ass wavelength, I was hooked. Insomniac’s Wolverine does not always succeed at being fun to play (I found the combat to be a repetitive slog), nor does its plot make very much sense, but the more I played, the more I wanted to see what could possibly happen next. It feels like playing through a comic book that came out decades ago and has since been retconned, in which the characters I know and love are doing things I’ve never seen them do before and which wouldn’t really make sense for them to do in any of their other iterations.

Insomniac’s Wolverine makes it clear from its very first moments that it is not a one-to-one adaptation of any pre-existing X-Men story. Its main characters — Logan and Jean — are both played by 40-something actors and we meet them after they’ve already lived quite a bit of life (in Logan’s case, that’s upwards of 200 years’ worth). But neither of the characters’ ages line up with the backstories for these characters that you might know — either from comics, or the live-action films, or even the 90s-era animated series that’s recently been revived on Disney Plus. Insomniac’s Wolverine instead forges a rocky and at times confusing new path, taking characters whose stories we’ve seen over and over again and throwing all of that legacy out.