Marvel's Wolverine Review Discussion

0:00Speaker 1:Hey everybody, welcome to the Giant Bomb video review for Marvel's Wolverine, the PlayStation 5 game. I'm your host for this one, Sean McDowell, aka TurboSean. I reviewed the game for GiantBomb.com. You can read my written review over on the website where I gave it. Two and a half out of five stars. A smack dab in the middle of our review scale there because I think that's fitting of why I consider a mediocre game, unfortunately. Eventually it ramps up and the combat becomes fun and there's some enjoyment to be had towards the later portion of the game, but...

0:35Speaker 1:A lot of Wolverine is it's bafflingly boring. It's a game where they took the Spider-Man structure, ripped out a bunch of things. And so you're left with a very linear game that is very focused on these slow paced cut scenes and walk and talks and things that you kind of just don't necessarily want to do or associate with Wolverine. At least I don't. But hey, surely I can't be the most negative one on this game here at Giant Bomb. Isn't that right, Dan Reichert?

1:06Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, I, you know, I'm not necessarily known as being the Marvel guy around these parts or any parts, uh, but I did really like, like, I've loved Insomniac games in the past. I really liked that for Spider-Man. I loved Miles Morales. I thought that one was great. I kind of liked the more kind of bite-sized, uh, but still with all the open world and everything. Um, two, Spider-Man 2, I bounced off of, uh, because it had like just a lot of those flashback sequences, those walk and talks, the Mary Jane sequences. So I did get, Pretty far into two, and I backed out at one of those slow sequences.

1:39Speaker 3:And then I play Wolverine.

1:40Speaker 2:I'm very excited. I love character action games. Sean, you and I both love, like, Metal Gear Rising Revenge and Spangetta, these types of games. So it's like, okay, this seems like this might be up my alley. And those Spider-Man games are really good. But it's like, if you took all the things I really loved about those Spider-Man games, all of the fun, mobility, exploration, the open world, you took all of that out. And then it was only the Mary Jane missions and the stealth missions and the flashback sequences and everything. So, boy, it is deeply not for me. It has serviceable combat that kind of punctuates in between all these walk and talks. But, you know, I totally backed out of Spider-Man 2. I did get to a point three or four hours into this game where some idiot alien kid was drawing a bunch of pictures of cat pirates. And it wanted me to walk around the base for a long time, finding drawings of cat pirates.

2:30Speaker 3:And I said, I think I'm done with this.

2:32Speaker 1:Yeah, that is unfortunately, I would say just the worst part of the game in terms of forcing you to like engage with the story in a very slow paced way. And I think it's very unfortunate because that kind of stuff gets better as the game goes on. I don't think it ever gets particularly interesting, but it is a huge knock against it. Now, Dan did bounce off it. But Will Crosby, I did you finish the game? I believe you finished it, didn't you?

2:58Speaker 4:I didn't.

2:59Speaker 1:I tried.

3:01Speaker 5:I tried to make it to the funny number, but the main menu says I'm 59% of the way through this game.

3:07Speaker 1:Ah, failure.

3:08Speaker 5:And I just couldn't play it a second more. I was playing it over the weekend, and I just said, why am I spending my spare time playing a game I do not like?

3:23Speaker 2:That feeling of like I could be doing anything else that could be bringing more value to my life.

3:26Speaker 4:Yes.

3:28Speaker 5:So I like Spider-Man. I never beat the first Spider-Man. I beat Spider-Man 2 inexplicably. Really enjoyed that. Everything Dan says, those sections didn't impact me as much in those games because you've got the Spider-Man open world. You're flinging around. You're doing crazy stuff. You're having a fun time going around New York City. And then in this game, it's just like, hey, what if we had none of that? and we had linear levels, and those levels are so confusing that we constantly tell you that there's a hint button that you can hit whenever you want, and it just tells you exactly where to go.

4:01Speaker 2:Well, wait, no, Will, you're talking about his scent ability, where he can, like, smell a trail of where to go, except for all the times where he's like, ugh, I'm next to the ocean, there's a bunch of salts messing up my scent receptors, like, ooh, all this sand, yeah, all this sawdust is messing with my smell receptors, my smell buds are all fucked up.

4:17Speaker 5:Like, but you can still smell whiskey so at least there's whiskey to find.

4:22Speaker 2:Well when you want to reflect on your past trauma yes of course of course yeah.

4:25Speaker 5:So there's the smell trails but then you just hit is it r3 to just point exactly where you need to go and which is a blessing because so many of these areas i was just like can i go down this alley i can there must be a reason i can go down this alley there isn't it's just an alley uh All that sort of stuff. Sean, you mentioned in your review getting to those upgrade canisters. And that was the one point that I just wanted to scream. Because there's a section where you're, like, booking it through this hallway. The thing's going to explode or something. Something's happening.

4:58Speaker 5:You've got to get to the end of the hallway. And there's just offshoots in the hallway to little canisters all the way at the end of them. And I'm like... stopping the alarms going off, walking over, hitting a canister. It's just a lot of stuff that worked in an open world game because you had the time and the of like, oh, I'm bored. I don't want to go to that mission right away. Let me go get a box. Let me go get a backpack. Let me go break open this cube, fight some guys on the ground. And all that stuff is stuffed into a linear level one after the other. And it just doesn't work.

5:31Speaker 2:Yeah, it reminds me, and Grub, I want to hear your overall thoughts, but I thought of you, Grub, while I was playing this, because I think you and I both shared our thoughts on Red Dead 2, where it's like, oh, you know, going off of kind of the path, and then being like, no, fail, you're the mission, that's not what we want you to do. This was like, there was a part early on, I think we probably all played this part, where there's like a base, and Sabretooth is there, and a bunch of stuff is blowing up, and there's lasers and turrets and gunfire, and I'm trying to like run, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to try to go to the left and try to find some cover there and sneak around the left, and it like insta killed me and I was like well that's weird and I was like okay let me try to go to the right and I went to the right around this thing and oh insta killed me and I realized no the game is like no what you have to do in this is you run straight at the gunfire so you can watch Sabretooth come in and do his thing and he's gonna flip the truck and he's gonna do this thing and it's like oh okay this

6:16Speaker 2:game has a very specific idea of how this plays out down to like all the platforming stuff that's like Press X to jump now. Press circle to slide now. This is how this platforming section plays out. So Grubb, I was thinking about like almost the red dead thing of like deviating from the path a little bit.

6:29Speaker 3:It's like, that's not what we had in mind.

6:31Speaker 4:I was going.

6:33Speaker 1:To say, I was definitely thinking of Grubb while playing this and how you said actually in relation to GTA 6 specifically of... If the game is just there is one correct answer and you need to do that and there's no other way you can win a level, that's embarrassing in 2026. And so that was in the back of my mind as Wolverine has a lot of these moments where you don't do exactly what they want you to, even where there's like a lot of platforming elements where you engage with.

6:57Speaker 4:Nope.

6:58Speaker 1:If you didn't pick the right one, game over. But yeah, speaking of, we do have Jeff Grubb on the show as well. Grubb, how far did you get real quick before we get to your thoughts?

7:07Speaker 4:Not too far. I'll say that I kind of reached that. I want to put this down pretty early. And I'll walk you guys through it, actually. Sean and Dan, you guys kind of gave me forewarning about the nature of this game. And it's like, yeah, I knew going into it, it wasn't going to be great. open world so that expectation that at any moment I can make my choice about how to approach something that's diminished and I want to like throw that out there because you know this is this review is going to go up before people get a chance to play it and when we say stuff like that we're going to hear a lot of what were you expecting I was expecting exactly what this game was and And through that entire first section of the game, which is like this extended long intro, it's not even an intro. It just is the game at that point where you're kind of meeting the characters. I'm like, OK, well, this is cool, but I can't wait for the game to really start and like kind of like really put me in like what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the game. And I like as it kept going and I got past that past that saber

8:02Speaker 4:tooth part where you're supposed to just watch them and the game continues. I'm like, oh, this is just the game. You're going to be going through these linear sections. And even when it does go into these open zones, it's very clear. You're just supposed to kind of like approach it from one objective to the next. Okay. All right. Obviously, maybe that can get more complicated. And then the game comes to a screeching halt when you get to the first walk and talk Mary Jane like section. And you are in this HQ, this base, and you're meeting the other characters and And it just it slows down to such a trudging degree. Like it's so like in molasses that it's like, man, what what do they want me to feel as a player in this moment? Are they do they want me to be appreciating all of the characters that are in here, all the all the detail that they put in all the references? Because all I feel is an insane amount. like, like clasp at my wrist as I'm trying to enjoy a video game. And it's like, no, you got to see this at our speed, which is Wolverine. Logan's going to walk very slowly through the space. So you don't miss the opportunity to have

9:02Speaker 4:all these conversations. And I'm like, I, I still felt like the game hadn't even started yet. I'm like, this is like, when am I going to be playing the cool video game? I was promised. Look, the combat, I think from the beginning was pretty solid. Like it's pretty good. I was having a decent time and I could tell it like, oh, it's going to build up and be even more interesting. I just, I don't think I could get myself to like get over those walk and talk sections.

9:28Speaker 4:And I was someone that didn't mind the Mary Jane ones all that much in Spider-Man. They were annoying, but I'm like, yeah, I think, Will, you said it. You just know the open world's waiting for you on the other side. Here, the promise of what was waiting for me on the other side is not anywhere close to as enticing.

9:42Speaker 2:So that's the thing, Grubb, is like, I think the walk and talk stuff is the most damning stuff of like, oh, man, screeching to a halt. But then that part you said about like waiting for the cool video game on the other side. The thing is, there are parts of this game like, you know, the combat. I do think the combat was pretty solid. It's kind of arkhamish to me it's got some really fast-paced uh combos and kill animations and everything the tag team stuff from spider-man is good and everything yeah but then it's like the cool video game parts like the motorcycle part where you're on a motorcycle or you're hopping between trucks and stuff like that it's cool it's fun it looks good but it's nothing that like uncharted 4 didn't do better over a decade ago Oh, yeah.

10:16Speaker 4:Wow. That's a really good poll, actually. Comparing this to Uncharted 4 really is a little bit damning.

10:20Speaker 1:Yeah, I was definitely thinking of Uncharted when I was playing a variety of this game. And I think it brings out some of the worst aspects that have, you know, modern AAA games in general. But I also think there is like a bit of a PlayStation house style where they do like to do, you know, some of the same elements in a lot of their games, whether it be The Last of Us or... on or uncharted whatever it is this i know i know i only named two studios there but it does like sort of permeate a little bit because it is the kind of thing that a lot of casual audiences do like because it is approachable but like specifically regarding the uncharted like nature of some of this game so later on the game you'll do a variety of uh set pieces And it'll be really cool looking things like I'll just say there's an airplane thing that happens. I won't. There's a lot of spoilers around that. So I won't say that if people want to experience it. But there's there's something where like an airplane is going down and like you need to fight off some enemies. Anytime that you're not explicitly fighting off the enemies, the correct thing to do is

11:28Speaker 1:literally just hold the analog stick forward and then press a QTE button. Like this incredible cool thing is happening and you have zero control over it other than to hold forward. And there's other moments that I won't even mention because it would be way too much of a spoiler for the story where I was like, wait, what am I supposed to be doing here? And I realized, The correct answer is to literally do nothing with my controller rather than hold forward. And the game will not progress unless I do that.

11:54Speaker 2:Versus we're talking big set piece airplane moments. Like compare that with like first light 007 where it's like, not only is it this cool, big set piece airplane thing, but you are kind of combating your way through it. And then you like hack the plane and you're making the plane go back and forth. So you are doing fun things.

12:08Speaker 3:You have agency.

12:08Speaker 4:You're not just doing fun things. You're doing James Bond things. They are using the mechanics to get at what could James, what could, what could you do that could express the idea of 007? And they figured that out and they made that like the key to each one of those segments. Here, what I felt very early on is like, man, I think they have one idea of what Wolverine is and it's stabbing dudes. And yeah, that's important. And they did get the stabbing right. But the dream of Wolverine's got to be a little bit more than that. And that's where like the smell-o-vision stuff comes in. And I just, none of that really works.

12:39Speaker 1:Right. Or even do something where it's like, you got two claws, you got L2 and R2. Let me do the like scaling walls manually during those set pieces. Yeah. They try to put a little bit of that in there with the QTEs where it will line up where, oh wait, he's slashing now alternate L2R2, but it's not, you're not specifically like, yeah, moving or doing anything that makes you think I'm Wolverine in this moment.

13:00Speaker 4:You're hitting the play button.

13:01Speaker 5:You also don't have to hit the right buttons.

13:04Speaker 3:I learned.

13:05Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, you don't.

13:07Speaker 1:You don't have to write either one. Yeah, that was a weird revelation. But to bring a little bit back to what Grubb was saying about like the sort of what what would you expect? What do you expect from this game? And I did expect a more linear game because when we knew that. It was giving insomniac making Wolverine game. It's not going to be the same as Spider-Man, but I didn't expect them to just take the structure of Spider-Man to realize, oh yeah, we can't have an open world and take the elements of the open world.

13:36Speaker 1:They even take it out. They doled it out throughout the game. And so it's like in Spider-Man, you know, you will get into these chance encounters of you'll beat up thugs in order to get more experience points and unlock stuff.

13:48Speaker 4:Yeah.

13:49Speaker 1:How is Wolverine going to do that? The nightmare cabin, y'all, where like a manifestation of Wolverine's mind will randomly appear throughout a level, just like randomly tree branches sprout up and go to the nightmare cabin, which is like if you ever play a Persona game and like you see the door that pops up out of nowhere and you go in there to go somewhere else. It's like that where he walks in there. and you're given a very simple obstacle course or a really long gauntlet battle of enemies of like, I think if I wanted to, I would have to go back and do the actual math.

14:23Speaker 1:If I wanted to get the highest tier reward for one of those gauntlets, I think where it was placed in the game, it would take me like, maybe 15 plus minutes of just wailing on basic enemies in order to get it it was yep insane it was an insane ask um spider-man will like find various sort of like chests around uh new york they can open up you know get some xp or like some um some materials to craft a suit with or something like that how's wolverine get that's where the alleyways that uh will kind of mention come in Random alleyways just in a level.

14:55Speaker 1:We'll just have one of those and you got to go over there, grab that, get back on the main path and then progress forward. They tried to take the things that make the open world very fun to explore in Spider-Man and put it in a linear game.

15:07Speaker 4:They shoehorned it in.

15:08Speaker 1:They shoehorned it in and it does not work.

15:12Speaker 5:The nightmare cabin, too. It's like, oh, come in here, go into this little race or whatever, like, you know, different types of events beat it. And then you get this, unlock this little statue and it's like 1803. I'm in the drift of the glaciers. And I'm like, motherfucker, why isn't the little thing I just played 1803 me in the glaciers? That'd be a fun little vignette to walk around.

15:35Speaker 1:That sounds exciting. Give me a cut scene.

15:37Speaker 5:Why am I doing this crazy thing?

15:39Speaker 1:Yeah, but no, it's just Logan gets a wood carving of something that triggers, because part of the story is he's lost part of his memory, and that triggers a memory, and he just... tells it to you, you know, it's and I say in my review, I stand by this. The performances themselves, I think, are actually very good. And these these actors, the voice actors slash performance artists are doing their best to like sell a script that isn't very good. And like they're trying to sell a story that isn't very good and is like kind of meandering and kind of all over the place, and that is unfortunate.

16:17Speaker 4:You guys know there was a mutant that looks like Troy Baker?

16:19Speaker 3:Damn it, I was expecting Troy Baker. You beat me to it, Grub. I was going to say, try to guess which character.

16:26Speaker 1:Is Troy Baker. Yeah, Troy is in there, and another actor is in there who, I'm sorry, I'm unfamiliar with, but I'm like, oh yeah, this is a real person. I can tell that they did, like, you know, modeled after the likeness of the voice actor. Yeah.

16:39Speaker 4:Yes, definitely.

16:40Speaker 5:As someone I'm unfamiliar with a lot of Marvel stuff like X-Men, especially the lack of introduction to anyone in the game where they're just like, hey, here's your little biography menu. You can read about all these people. And I'm like, I don't want to read about I want to like I vaguely know. I mean, I know who Wolverine is. I have no idea who Troy Baker's character is. I have no idea who Jean Grey is.

17:04Speaker 2:Well, like what you say, it's insane. There's one part where it's like, I kind of know X-Men, but there's a part early on. I won't name the character or anything, but like they reveal someone like kind of like the back of a van opens up or whatever. And someone shows up and it's like, oh, this must be a big character. And then they just get shot. And it's like, oh, wait. And they're treating it like it's this really important thing. It's like, wait, you just showed this character for the first time and then shot them. And everyone's really sad.

17:29Speaker 2:It's like, can you explain who this is? Which I think that is the the the actor that you're referring to.

17:34Speaker 4:That is.

17:35Speaker 1:Yeah.

17:36Speaker 4:Modeled after.

17:36Speaker 5:Yes.

17:37Speaker 1:OK, actually, yeah, she was she was shown in a trailer at this point already. Deborah Wilson's in the game.

17:42Speaker 5:But she's later on. She she comes back like she's not.

17:46Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just weird for me who doesn't know who her character is to be like, I'm here.

17:52Speaker 3:And then she's shot and everyone's like.

17:53Speaker 4:What the fuck happened?

17:55Speaker 1:Also, there's there's some relations relationship stuff in this game where and don't worry, all the actual Marvel fan of the website, Jan is going to be playing on the site. So, you know, I'll see what his opinions are on the game once it comes out. But for those of us who are maybe, you know, a little more casual of a Marvel fan or you're not a Marvel fan, you just want a good action game or you just like that's those spider-man games and you want to try well i mean try the next one of these it often does not do a good job of explaining things i will say there is one thing that i cannot mention where they actually play with that and oh you don't know who that character is that's interesting we're gonna do something interesting with that there's a fun twist there and but that's the one time that they really take advantage of that otherwise it will be like Okay, why are these two characters interacting this way? And yeah, like if we're saying like, well, you really don't know a lot about the X-Men lore and stuff like that. If you don't know Wolverine and Jean Grey and like the relationship

18:49Speaker 1:that is there or sometimes there. Okay, it may be a little confusing of what, why are these two characters like in this like rom-com situation that feels a little out of place? Just call each other by the hair color. Yeah. Those are red.

19:02Speaker 2:He picks up her hair and that's supposed to be a thing. And it's like, all right, I guess this red haired lady has like psychic powers, I guess. So they don't really.

19:07Speaker 1:Yeah, it's yeah, it's a lot more meaningful if you know what they're going for there with those two characters specifically, but is more more wink and a nod that I think maybe a game geared towards a casual audience should be.

19:19Speaker 2:But that's the thing is like, I actively don't like Spider-Man as a character. I tried watching those, like the last four or five movies that everyone likes, whatever. And I hated all of them. So like, I don't like Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man two, the, the old one back then. And then I love the, the first insomniac Spider-Man game and Miles Morales, all of that. Like I can just appreciate a good game, even if I don't like the characters. Um, I, and I actually kind of like Wolverine as a character from like the X-Men stuff I've seen. I used, I liked X-Men origins, Wolverine, that game. I liked it a lot more than this game. So like Wolverine as a character is kind of cool.

19:50Speaker 4:To me.

19:50Speaker 3:This, uh, did not overcome that whatsoever.

19:54Speaker 4:Also, uh, How do you guys feel about the way it, like, looks? I mean, obviously, maybe this has been tainted. Okay. Am I tainted by, like, just not enjoying the game very much, and so I'm being extra critical?

20:04Speaker 1:No, I.

20:04Speaker 4:I look like Sabretooth. I'm like, I just don't enjoy looking at you. I think you look poor.

20:09Speaker 1:There's a couple issues here, yeah.

20:11Speaker 4:Yeah, Omega Red, yeah.

20:12Speaker 1:Yeah, some of the models are better than others, but I actually do mention this in the review, something I normally wouldn't do, but... Most people are going to play this on a base PS5. I played it on a base PS5. I think, what, did everyone except Dan play it on base PS5? I was on a pro, yeah. Okay, gotcha. They're doing something weird with the image here. Like, there's not a good upscaler in place on the base PS5.

20:33Speaker 4:Does it look smudgy? There's something to it. Fizzily.

20:37Speaker 1:Like, the image is constantly breaking up. Fizzily, yeah. I think they might just be using FSR, AMD's FSR or something, because there's a very low quality upscale on the base console. And, you know, I have an image that I took. Maybe I'll do a couple images in the review when I post it to the site. But... There's a lot of fine detail on a lot of different characters. Wolverine in particular. Logan, you know, he's a hairy little guy. You know, he's got like a lot of locks that flow up top.

21:03Speaker 1:He's got a variety of body hair. You know, he has facial hair. He sometimes wears like sort of the lumberjack kind of shirt. And so he's got like body hair here and there. That's a conscious effort that they decided on, but whatever they're doing with upscaling, it makes all of that fine detail fizzle constantly. And it's to the point that distracted me. And if you're going to spend a lot of the game saying, look at this character rather than play him like rather be fast paced and you can be a little forgiving of that no look at these cut scenes and even in cut scenes he looks weird with like a constant fizzling all across his body depending on the scene one of the main characters i mentioned this one of the main characters uh has a fishnets on her outfit that's part of the outfit And the fishnets like can't get or they disappear with the upscaler. So it looks like her clothes are constantly clipping through her body and she looks weird and like really serious cut scenes. So the image quality is very off, at least on the base model.

21:56Speaker 2:I will say playing on the pro, this is not something I noticed. It's not impossible that I just didn't notice it. But I do remember thinking about the visuals and thinking like, oh, this game at least.

22:04Speaker 3:Looks really good. So maybe the pro does some heavy lifting on that.

22:09Speaker 4:I'm sure it does. But I think even like design wise, like in terms of the art style, I don't know. I think I'm a little bit less inspired by taking comic book characters and making them look realistic and putting them through that filter of, well, what if they really existed in a real world, which has been done to X-Men very frequently, kind of going back to those movies in the 90s and the early 2000s. And I just I don't think it works anymore. I'm not inspired by these character designs for the most part.

22:37Speaker 2:I appreciate that it does the Spider-Man thing where it's like, and I'm sure it's cooler if you're a comic fan where it's like, here's a bunch of very specific Wolverine outfits.

22:44Speaker 3:You can unlock.

22:45Speaker 2:I thought the claw thing didn't work because it's like they also kind of look like claws, you know?

22:49Speaker 4:Yeah.

22:50Speaker 5:The bone claws always creep me out. I will say you get far enough into this game. You do get a token suit for Mr. Wolverine and it makes the game 30% better because you're just looking fucking awesome in the token art style in every cut scene and every fight. It never removes it or changes your outfit, which it does with other outfits. Uh, yeah, it's, it was the highlight when I got to that. Cause I kept looking through the suits and I'd be like, okay, it's just the same Wolverine, uh, in this suit, same Wolverine in this suit. And then it's like, Oh, in this section, you can't put a mask on. So it's just the different suit body parts, but it nothing ever like screamed. Oh, like with the Spider-Man suits, like here's the robot suit.

23:38Speaker 5:Here's the, and I think a bit of that has to do with the full body suit that Spider-Man gets. Cause you can really mess around with that. But I thought as far as Wolverine, like other than the token suit, I thought just the base one, it makes you unlock in the tutorial and, was the best looking one. And because the other ones just look silly out of they're more Easter eggs than they are like a Spider-Man suit using.

24:00Speaker 1:Yeah. Oddly, I did find myself actually wanting him to look like Logan more than Wolverine. I think any time that they try to make him look like Wolverine in the story, he actually looks bizarrely out of place because they are going for a more grounded, realistic art style. Overall, it's a darker game. So they try to like, I think, stray away from maybe some of the bright comic book designs a little bit more. There's still color in this game. There's still like beautiful vistas and stuff like that.

24:25Speaker 4:But it's not Marvel's Avengers. But I also don't think it's that far off from that Square Enix game in terms of the way I felt about the visuals for that.

24:31Speaker 1:It's closer to that.

24:32Speaker 5:Yeah.

24:32Speaker 1:All right. We talked about a lot of the negatives and hey, that's just what it is. We have a lot of them. There are some positives here, though. And I do think that the big one that at least eventually becomes a really shining part of this game is the combat. The combat frustrated me because when it starts off, Like, look, it's just Metal Gear Rising. It's just mash square to do light attacks, use triangle for contextually appropriate heavy attacks, and then you can parry basically everything, except for when an enemy flashes, then you gotta dodge. It's almost the exact same system as a Rising there. But what frustrated me about that is that there's nothing else to the combat Until later on in the game, you are just encouraged to do, you know, the barrage is what they call it with a capital B. It's a proper noun.

25:18Speaker 1:They want you to do the Swiss cheese and like really like shred someone. But that's what the entire combat system focuses around until you unlock special abilities. But special abilities are on a cooldown. They're on a cooldown timer that go away slowly, very, very slowly over time in the beginning of the game. But it's like I would say I started unlocking the passives once like I realized what I was supposed to do. You're supposed to do in the other skill tree, the one that's like his DNA.

25:47Speaker 1:You unlock cooldown reduction abilities. They're like passives. That changes combat up drastically because then it's an if-then-stay map. If you knock out a... If you kill a staggered enemy, because some attacks will stun an enemy, almost fighting game style. If you kill one of them, there's a reduction of the cooldown of one of your abilities. And so you can mix and match which ability is assigned to which face button. And then which. The abilities you unlock will reduce the cooldown relative to that face button. So if you're like, okay, this one is the easiest to do because of my play style.

26:25Speaker 1:Like if you're like the one that kills staggered enemies, I'm going to put my most used ability on that one so that way I can use it a bunch. And then my lesser used one that I need occasionally, like the healing boosts, I'll put it on the one that's like dodge strong attacks, because like that one, you're not going to be doing as much. But once you unlock those cooldown reductions and more abilities overall, more combo enders, that kind of thing, then it gets really fun. And then you can like string this stuff together. And it does feel like Wolverine is going around a battlefield, sort of zipping around, slicing people up, working with another hero, maybe.

27:00Speaker 1:The problem is it just takes too damn long to get to that point where everything clicks. You realize that gameplay loop because the game does not really explain to you that like that. That's the loop. Like once you figure that out, at least I felt that is when the game becomes complete, becomes whole. And it's never really explained to you. You sort of have to find your own fun. I think that's why the combat gets satisfying. But at least for me, it spends way too long being a little boring. I.

27:26Speaker 2:There were two elements of the combat and they're pretty basic, but I really did enjoy them. Um, I liked the pounce, which X-Men origins Wolverine did that too.

27:34Speaker 3:I think it was on LB and RB. But this one is just triangles.

27:36Speaker 2:So it's like, you know, within a certain range, you can just hit triangle and like pounce to someone, which can be fun. And one of these combat encounters where there's like snipers up here or whatever. So you're like doing the barrage on one guy down here. You kind of spot in the corner of your eye a sniper and you hit triangle to kind of like dive up there, fuck him up and move back down.

27:51Speaker 3:It's cool.

27:51Speaker 2:It's kind of a kinetic pace of the combat. And then a minor one was you can do the fucking like 300 kick. And anytime I can just kick someone off a cliff. or into lasers like you can in this game i'm going to be spamming that like crazy and it's funny every time to me um but not enough to make this feel like this it's revengeance light uh it made me think revengeance a lot and even in the way that a lot of things in the environment just feel like light and meant to be broken and like you see a jeep or whatever and you go up to it and you can kind of like street fighter it a bit and like things are falling off and getting chopped up and like i always like that any kind of destructibility especially in a game like this But it's just not enough to make these like if this is the high point of the game is the combat. It's not good enough to where it's like I'm going to keep trudging through all these like walk and talks and all these slow cut scene things to get to them. They're just not good enough to warrant all of that.

28:41Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm like trying to imagine like the version of this that I would have been like super into. And it's like, you know, how about them adapting pretty clearly the revengeance combat and then. taking their open world stuff and putting that into a linear world. And it's just like, what other games like similar to this that have worked? And I do like Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is one where it's like, have they maybe taken that route of, you know, the combat could be mostly this, but maybe you upgrade a little bit faster and you're in a light Metroidvania 3D world or a couple of environments that are like that. that could have really worked for Wolverine.

29:16Speaker 4:But it really just, you know, they kind of just messed up the pacing here where early on it's like, I get this combat and I get it. And like to hear that it like takes a long time for it to be more than that is yet another reason I'm discouraged to keep playing. But Will, you were going to say something.

29:31Speaker 5:Yeah, I was pretty disappointed in the combat. I just felt like nothing really clicked with it where you're Wolverine, you have Wolverine's claws. You're cutting through airplanes. You're cutting through stuff. These, like, base enemies... And I know you're fighting some, like, higher tier enemies. But there should be that level of enemy there that it's just, like, one hit cutting through them, killing them. The next enemy up... Like, I'd love to see a bit more, like, these guys...

29:59Speaker 5:It was sort of like the way enemies are bullet sponges. They're just claw sponges. Where I'm like, hey, show me, like, I'm going to attack this guy and my claws, like, go in a little bit. And, like, there's a bit, like, I'm ripping armor off and stuff like that. And sort of elevate the entire combat one more section so you have those enemies you can just slaughter. And then, to Sean's point, like, the cooldowns were way too long. I wanted those group attacks to happen a lot more cohesively, a lot more fun, and just get in there and slice them up where it felt like I'm... I'm punching people with claws attached and it's the punches that are killing them. The claws aren't doing anything. So it just felt lackluster where I, I just wanted to just murder a room full of guys, not murder five guys slowly.

30:48Speaker 4:Yeah. I will say like when I, when I got the ability to like somewhat block projectiles with my claws, that, that opened it up for me a little bit where I'm like, Oh, I enjoyed that feeling. That looks cool. It feels cool. And it made me feel a little bit more survivable. But you're right, man. All the enemies, even early on, are really just claw sponges. Yeah, they take way too... Like, the fact there is no satisfying enemy that just falls apart. Yeah, that does hurt this game early on.

31:16Speaker 2:Imagine, like, I remember in Titanfall 2, there'd be the little NPCs that you could just smoke super easily. Imagine if a bunch of those dudes were running around and you could just, like, half-strike through them, you know?

31:24Speaker 4:Just one claw swipe.

31:26Speaker 5:Those bonus big, you know, L2 hit one of the face buttons... Like, I just want to spin around in a cloud of blood. And it's not like every time I use one of those, it's not killing the guy. And what's the point of this attack? Even there's that dive, which I really like. You can end up doing like two in a row of those. And it's just you're diving full blender mode into a guy and not killing him. And it's just mind-boggling.

31:53Speaker 3:I kind of thought it was going to be more brutal from that.

31:55Speaker 2:Like, they showed that trailer at a State of Play a couple months ago, and I was like, oh, fuck, yeah, it's going to be this, like, hyper-violent.

31:59Speaker 3:Like, yeah, it's bloody, it's gory, but it almost seems tame.

32:02Speaker 4:Logan gets bloodied up all the time.

32:04Speaker 5:You get to that point, but the point, like, it's only when you kill the enemy, they're, like, being dismembered and stuff. Like, I want that, what was it, Star Wars Jedi Knight? Just, like, cut the guy's arm off, and he's still attacking me with a.

32:18Speaker 4:Sword or something.

32:19Speaker 5:It just, it was... It was more canned animations than it was, you know, in the old days of ragdoll guys fighting you.

32:27Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that was probably a decision to make it, you know, even if it's going to be an M-rated game, maybe an M-rated game that could be more mainstream. And once you get too gory, I think that that is where you'll turn some people off. I'll actually say that like the level of violence, I kind of appreciated the approach because it to me that that feels like how comic books are often portrayed. I know they can get very dark and grisly and gruesome. But it feels to me like is more about like blood flying everywhere than like maybe lingering on gore necessarily. So to me, I was OK with that. But something that you brought that I definitely agree with, Will, is that Wolverine's powers are like his usage of his powers, a scale in the moment to what they need to tell the story where almost every problem in the game can be solved. If Wolverine puts his fist up below someone's chin, And lets the claws rip and just like kills them. But there's so...

33:24Speaker 1:so many problems causing this game and the story in like the cut scenes and even in the gameplay sometimes where, Hey Logan, why didn't you just stab this person in the head? You stabbed that person in the chest. I wonder if this enemy is going to mess you up now. Oh, they messed him up. Cause he didn't just kill them. Like there, there's some baffling, like a dissonance there of why didn't you just use your powers in the obvious way? And that's, that's one of my biggest frustrations actually with the story is, Hey Logan, There's an obvious answer here. Oh, no, he didn't do the obvious thing. And now we have problems.

33:56Speaker 1:Now we have like two levels caused by this problem. All right.

34:01Speaker 5:Sure.

34:01Speaker 4:Whatever.

34:03Speaker 5:Smell out the problem.

34:05Speaker 1:Not if you're close to the ocean!

34:07Speaker 4:Yeah, not if you're by the Pacific. That's going to be a problem, actually.

34:10Speaker 2:For the record, that's not a problem throughout the game, but there was two in close proximity, and I was like, how many times... Oh, there's a candle lit. I can't follow the path, you know?

34:20Speaker 5:I know.

34:20Speaker 4:There's a really sticky guy in this bathhouse. Yeah, I guess... It's more noticeable in a game like this, where it's like you're... You could see them piecing all the ideas together to get a video game out the door. And when you start noticing that stuff because you're not distracted by the game being so good, it becomes more obvious. And I think this game is going to be guilty of that a lot.

34:38Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess one last thing I will talk about there is that there is sort of a you realize this early on where like Wolverine can't break through a door. Why? Because adamantium, like the strongest metal on Earth, can't break through the new MacGuffin metal instead. And so that's that's kind of their approach to how do we hinder Wolverine's progress as well.

34:58Speaker 4:You got lamps.

34:58Speaker 3:We also got lamps.

34:59Speaker 1:Yes, the inhibitor, the inhibitor lamps are everywhere.

35:03Speaker 3:They're everywhere.

35:04Speaker 1:It's like, oh, we need to make you weaker. We'll just introduce one of these. Yeah, it's like an auspice.

35:10Speaker 5:Osborne metal oz it was not osmium but i i feel like they named it after the they may have spider man osborne yeah uh like oh of course he came up with the better metal.

35:19Speaker 1:Yeah it's i suppose it's very comic book of just like oh you know how do we what what's superman's weakness kryptonite what do we need to do what we need to weaken superman kryptonite it's kind of feels like that here with wolverine of what do we need to do when we need the heroes to be in trouble inhibitors just turn on the inhibitor ray and suddenly everything goes to hell Uh, it's frustrating. It's frustrating narratively. And every time you get to just another combat arena, because they decided we need to slow you down a little bit.

35:48Speaker 1:So we'll put them a guff in your way. Yeah.

35:50Speaker 4:Just quick question. Uh, okay, good.

35:53Speaker 5:Well, first, this is more of a joke, but Wolverine can't swim. Cause he heavy.

35:57Speaker 4:Is that, I guess.

35:59Speaker 5:I fell in water a couple times and it was like the he's like oh no Wolverine he.

36:06Speaker 1:Drowned I did that with like 6 feet of water and as we all know Wolverine is 5 foot 2 so he's done for.

36:15Speaker 5:Let me fall in the lava too and then like come out and I'm just like an adamantium skeleton like I don't know why that wasn't happening but.

36:24Speaker 4:That's very cool Will you should make games um The healing factor, the way it was presented, like where I'm at is kind of almost a Sekiro dies twice. Like you die once and then you hit the X button and then come back. And then if you die again, can you tell me how that evolves over the course of the game, the healing factor and coming back?

36:42Speaker 1:It doesn't.

36:43Speaker 5:So you can also die multiple times.

36:46Speaker 1:Yeah, basically. So the combat does have like a rage meter where it has three stages. And as you go throughout the game, you do unlock things of like, oh, if you are in rage level blank, blank is enhanced and so one of the things can be healing um you can unlock an ability that is enhanced healing that more plays into like what i mentioned with the cooldowns but i believe there is also a passive where if you are in rage whatever level probably two or three that you do have enhanced healing as well but yeah the whole like um if logan is at least in uh would that be math wise because it's like when you have one full bar so i guess when you're in rage level two beyond that then yeah, if you die, you can burn all your rage to come back one time.

37:28Speaker 1:That is kind of just a loop though, is that get into rage level two. Okay, I basically have an extra life. Oh no, I lost that. Well, I'm healed back to full, but now I need to build my rage back up.

37:38Speaker 4:Get that rage back.

37:38Speaker 1:Yeah, and various moves will give you various amounts of rage, but doesn't grow past that really. There's small things here or there, like I mentioned, but it's not like, there's not an interesting game mechanic beyond that at least.

37:51Speaker 4:Okay.

37:52Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, I think we'll just close out here then. We'll just finish with any final thoughts that we have. And I'll just say that it's kind of a... I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed situation of I was bummed out how boring I felt the game was across the board for too much of its runtime. It's not a particularly long game. My PS5 said that I spent 13 hours to finish the main story, which is about what I expect. Like, I feel like that's what the main story was roughly for the Spider-Man games. I think two may have been a little bit longer, but two.

38:24Speaker 3:Is pretty long.

38:25Speaker 1:Yeah, that's that's what I would have expected from this being a bit more linear and everything like that. And I just think it's unfortunate that it takes way too long to get going with the combat. And then the story... The story never goes anywhere particularly interesting. There's like, like I said, one neat plot twist if you don't know who a certain character is. But outside of that, like it's, you know, for example, it's a mutant story. They don't really say anything about mutants that's new or interesting in 2026, where we're dealing with a lot of things in the world with fascism and everything like that. And that's what they talk about in the story, but they don't address it in any meaningful way. And so it's sort of just to buy the numbers. Racism, bad. Let's go kill the racist story. Always a good moral, sure. But the story is not doing anything particularly interesting.

39:11Speaker 4:And so we've had a lot of stories like that that do have a lot of juice. And I'm not getting that from this game.

39:15Speaker 1:Yeah, I never felt that that was the case. And they also do tend to focus on other things a lot as the story goes on, like Logan and Jean. They really focus on.

39:23Speaker 3:That one later on.

39:25Speaker 1:And it's just never in a way that I particularly found interesting. um do you guys have any closing thoughts before i got here dan i.

39:31Speaker 2:Mean i was ready to like i thought this one was for me like the early trailers and stuff like i just love character action games and like linear is not a bad thing to me like you know revengeance devil may cry bayonetta even x-men origins wolverine all games that were linear character action games that i liked a lot more than this um you know, I've never liked the walk and talk stuff. And this one really went way too far with it. And again, I could have overcome that if the combat was good enough on the other side, or if those set piece set piece moments were really good. But like I said, with the uncharted comparison, like all of this stuff has been done better elsewhere.

40:02Speaker 2:Why would I trudge through all this stuff that I think is actively bad just to see a lower tier version of what I like.

40:08Speaker 1:Right. Yeah.

40:09Speaker 4:I think for me, this is a, a little bit of a worry about PlayStation's way of making games, maybe coming home to roost a little bit, where it's like, it does feel like they are trying to force that house style to a point where it has broken one of these games, where it's like they did not have, the character that they were working with and what they were going for could not withstand, like, hey, we got to make sure it feels like, you know, it feels like Uncharted. It could feel like, you know, like a Naughty Dog game. And then it's like, with Spider-Man, you have the open world to match that with. that opens it up and gives you all this other stuff to do that you either forgive it or you can get into that other stuff. Here, it just felt like they forced it to the breaking point and it's obvious in those first couple hours, first four or five hours, what is happening here and that it doesn't really work.

40:53Speaker 1:Right.

40:54Speaker 5:Well, yeah, what Grubb said is exactly what I was going to say. It feels like they took the one unique thing for the Spider-Man games, not one unique, but, you know, the big open world, New York City, got rid of that, put in the blender with every other Sony franchise first party game, blended it up, poured it out. And it was like, oh, here's this. And especially I remember opening up one of those crates and it's just like, oh, the pick up the thing, put it vaguely where your pocket is, turn around, camera spin, say something quippy. And it's just like, oh no, this has infected this game now.

41:27Speaker 5:I was also very much looking forward to it. And just to not even... The voice in my head isn't even whispering, hey, you should finish a game because you always finish video games. That's not even whispering to me right now.

41:40Speaker 4:I'm... clean my.

41:43Speaker 2:Hands never had an easier time uh just being like nap i'm good you know.

41:47Speaker 1:Yeah i think and you know maybe you know maybe that's us maybe that's the way we like games but i think it's kind of damning that like i as the reviewer was the only one who felt compelled to finish it out of everyone here who played it and that's that's a real bummer and i do think that If your tastes do lean more towards the narrative stuff that PlayStation has been doing, which there is a lot of in this game, you may be more tolerant of that stuff. You may even like some of that stuff.

42:14Speaker 1:But I think that the structure of it is not what I want out of a game like this. It's not why I wanted a follow up to Spider-Man. It just wasn't interesting to me. And that's why my review reads the way it does. I feel the way they do about the game, which is a bummer. But hey.

42:31Speaker 4:It is what it is. Can't change how I feel. Let's get back to Ratchet and Clank.

42:34Speaker 1:Hell yeah. Give me a Ratchet and Clank, please. Honestly. I'm going to grind down some rails.

42:38Speaker 3:Yeah, let's do it.

42:39Speaker 4:Fuck yeah.

42:39Speaker 1:All right. Well, thanks for watching and or listening to this one, everybody. And we'll see you in the next one.