The recent Marvel’s Spider-Man games have become so tightly interwoven with the character’s core that they’ve been cited, by both actor Tom Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton, as an influence on this year’s blockbuster film Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Now the same development studio – Sony-owned Insomniac Games – is taking on one of Marvel’s other most recognisable characters in his first video game-starring role since some deeply mid-tier film tie-ins back in the 00s. So can they pull off the same trick with Marvel’s Wolverine?
Storywise it certainly takes a similar approach, once again grabbing ideas from a wide selection of inspirations and remixing them into a brand-new continuity. We first meet this version of Wolverine as he is discovered: wild-eyed, wilder haired and practically nude. Before we see his saviour’s face, we hear a well-spoken voice (provided by legendary game actor Troy Baker) promising a safe place “for people like us”.
Surely this is Charles Xavier? It’s Nathaniel Essex, better known as Mister Sinister – the very same character who has just been unveiled as the villain of the first MCU X-Men movie. Here, though, he’s something of a father figure to Wolverine, and operator of the mutant-liberating Team X.
There are no X-Men in this universe as such. That idea’s component parts are split between Sinister’s Team X and the Mariposa School for mutants, run by Jean Grey. It’s not hard to imagine where this might all be going, not least because Wolverine’s current teammates include traditional baddies Sabretooth and Mystique, while all signs point towards a Wolverine-Grey romance.
Still, it makes for a distinctive status quo that Insomniac can build on. Foregrounded as the narrative might be, it’s ultimately not what will most occupy you here. In the Spider-Man games, your time was divided between fighting crooks and – much more memorably – web-slinging through the skyscraper valleys of New York.
In Wolverine it’s almost entirely the former. This makes sense given the iconic resonances of each character. Spider-Man is the lithe, always-late city boy; Wolverine is the violent berserker with knives for hands.
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