Grade: B
If you’re the sort of person for whom ‘SNIKT’ – the sound-effect that, by ancient tradition, accompanies the unsheathing of Wolverine’s adamantium claws – is music to the ears, you may have been looking forward to Marvel’s Wolverine. You may, even, have perked up as you saw a poster for it sail by on the side of a bus.
Alas, I’m here to report that it is, if not exactly a dog, not quite a wolverine either. Industry rumour has it that the developers originally hoped to produce an open-world game along the lines of the successful franchises for Spider-Man and Batman. They were thwarted when they realised that the character doesn’t really lend himself to that. Spidey can traverse a city in all three dimensions with his thrilling web-slinging aerial acrobatics, and Batman can whoosh and glide and rappel and suchlike. Wolverine is pretty much stuck with running along the ground and chopping off people’s heads withhis claws.
So no gadgets, no aerial action, no fancy traversing, and not much, even, to mix up the combat. Accordingly, they pivoted to a running-on-rails mêlée battler with stealth sections, and it’s decent of its kind – well acted, lovingly animated – but not much more than that. A rage-meter lets you build up to some fancy attacks, the skill tree gives you a bit of scope to shape a combat style – and you’d have to be a churl not to enjoy snarling at Sabretooth and kebabbing half a dozen Reavers at a time, but it doesn’t quite have what you’d call the X-factor.
Contra the catchphrase, our man isn’t even the second best at what he does. Still, what he does is quite nice.
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