Marvel's Wolverine Just Broke Insomniac's Perfect Streak. A 77 on Metacritic Tells Only Half of Why

Eight years without a Metacritic score below 85 is a real streak, and streaks are made to be talked about the moment they end. That's basically what happened Wednesday morning when reviews for Marvel's Wolverine went live, five days ahead of its September 15 debut on PlayStation 5. Sixty-three critics had time with the finished game at first light; by Thursday that pool had grown past 100, and by Friday morning — with 111 reviews logged on Metacritic and OpenCritic tracking an identical number — the aggregate had settled at 77, one point softer than where it opened. On its own, that's a perfectly respectable score. Plenty of games would take a 77 gladly. But for Insomniac specifically, it's the studio's lowest mark on an original game since 2016's Song of the Deep, and the first time in three tries that one of its Marvel titles has missed the high 80s. The reason has a lot less to do with Wolverine as a character than with a deliberate decision about what kind of game to build around him — and, as this piece lays out, with a controversy that started building over a year before anyone actually played it.

A number that breaks a three-game streak

Insomniac earned this reputation across three straight games. The original Marvel's Spider-Man opened at 87 back in 2018. Miles Morales followed two years later at 85. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 topped both of them at 90 in 2023. Three games, three scores comfortably in the high 80s or better — "developed by Insomniac" had basically become shorthand for quality among superhero-game fans. A 77 doesn't undo that, but it does end the streak, and it arrives at a moment when PlayStation could really have used a clean, uncomplicated win: Bungie's Marathon has struggled to hold onto players since it launched, Sony shelved Kojima Productions' Physint earlier this year, and longtime PS5 owners have been vocal about the platform's drift away from physical media. Wolverine was supposed to be the easy good-news story of the fall. Instead it's a good one, and "good" and "easy good news" aren't quite the same thing.

What's actually happening under the hood is a real pivot. There's no city to swing through this time. Marvel's Wolverine picks up three years after Logan walked away from the mutant strike team Team X, and drags him back in once Bolivar Trask starts kidnapping mutants in service of his own belief in human superiority. The story travels through the Canadian wilderness, the streets of Tokyo, and the island nation of Madripoor, with Liam McIntyre voicing Logan and Troy Baker playing Nathaniel Essex. It's single-player, narrative-driven, and — this is the part that matters — there's no open world anywhere in it. That's a description that wouldn't have fit almost anything Insomniac has released on PlayStation in the past decade, and it's the one thing every single review has had to grapple with first. The ESRB, for what it's worth, rated the game M for Mature 17+, citing blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, drug references and partial nudity — a notably harder edge than any Spider-Man title carried, and one more sign of how deliberately Insomniac tried to separate Logan from its webslinging house style.

The thing every review keeps circling back to

Read enough of these reviews back to back and a pattern shows up fast: nobody's arguing about whether the combat lands. GameSpot described brawls that are "heavy, brutal, but still high dynamic," which is exactly the register a Wolverine game needs to hit, and Metacritic's broader critic consensus backs that up — this is the bloodiest, most physically aggressive combat system Insomniac has built, tailor-made for a character whose entire identity runs through regeneration by way of violence. The split shows up in everything wrapped around that combat. Video Games Chronicle argued the studio achieved more in a linear environment than it could have with an open world forced on top of it, and praised the character models and environmental detail as some of Insomniac's best work yet. Giant Bomb looked at that same linearity and landed close to the opposite conclusion, describing a game that felt retrofitted from the Spider-Man formula instead of built fresh for its new hero, with skill trees and collectibles that read as shoehorned into levels never designed with that kind of exploration in mind. Outlet by outlet, the numeric split tells the same story in miniature: IGN, GameSpot and GamesRadar+ all landed on 6 out of 10, reviewer Jake Baldino among them saying he came away "really sad" the game fell short of Insomniac's usual bar — while Game Informer scored it an 8.5, praising the arcade-brawler intensity and Liam McIntyre's performance as Logan.

That tension threads through nearly every review published this week — gorgeous, visceral combat wrapped around a structure some critics think never quite got reimagined for its new lead. GameSpot's reviewer admitted to repeatedly lowering enemy health just to keep the story moving, not because the fights were too tough, but, in their words, because they "wasn't engaged enough to care." Kotaku landed somewhere in the middle, calling the game refreshing in its straightforward focus for shedding the open-world bloat that's become the genre default, while still conceding that same single-track approach leaves long stretches feeling as numb as the rage that's supposed to define its hero. Nobody's calling Wolverine a bad game. Almost everybody's calling it a game that hadn't quite finished deciding what it wanted to be by the time the claws came out.

The fight that started before anyone played it

What most of this week's coverage leaves out is that Wolverine's reputation problem didn't start with reviews — it started with a trailer. When Insomniac first showed extended gameplay footage, a vocal slice of the fanbase went after the character model itself, arguing Logan's design looked too soft, too clean, not feral enough for a character built around berserker rage. The criticism resurfaced hard when new official footage dropped earlier this year, to the point that an Insomniac developer felt compelled to address it publicly, and the game's director pushed back directly on players, arguing — not unreasonably — that a segment of any fanbase will find something to complain about regardless of how the finished product actually plays. That backdrop matters for reading this week's scores correctly: a 77 arriving after eighteen months of pre-release griping about a redesigned face is a different story than a 77 arriving cold. It suggests the finished game mostly won over the critics who came in skeptical about the combat and structure, even if it never fully silenced the design complaints that started the whole conversation.