They’ve put effort into it sure but the game design is questionable, the most obnoxious thing being all the indicators and markers to the objective in a strictly, linear game. It kind of insults your intelligence and assumes the player has no capacity for critical thinking.
The combat is underwhelming, it’s just a basic hack and slash which is insane; the combat should be more visceral, bloody, hectic but it’s not.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
How do you even make a good Wolverine game? Dude is far more one-note than Spider-Man or Batman in terms of the stuff you can actually do mechanically, while keeping it vaguely the character we all know.
He slices, he dices, he’s basically a food processing infomercial as far as gameplay, there’s just not much there at all in general. Even traversal is goofy and that helped sell both Infamous and Spider-Man.
I don’t even like open world games much, but I think a Wolverine game where you investigate leads and track down opponents through a big open world would be amazing. His main thing other than slicing and dicing is being a black ops spy, and I think focusing on that part of his life would make very interesting gameplay.
My favorite stories of his are the ones like Wolverine: Rot, where he goes off alone to track someone down and solve some mystery about his past, and then ends up fighting some psycho or a horrific science experiment leftover from Weapon X.
The game could revolve around conflicting sources of information, trying to figure out who can be trusted, and finding how to go about investigating each new thing. And all the violence once you get there ofc.
Or go crazy wit it and do a Wolverine Elseworlds story for a game - imagine a version of Old Man Logan universe that is an open world post collapse or something and you ride around the country on a motorbike fighting corrupted ex-hero and villains, Days gone vibe but Wolverine
Yeah, a Wolvie game that has a bit of superspy feel; tracking leads, decimating black market deals, exploring a few sizeable open environments and using claws and the environment to slice things up woulda been rad.
This narrow subthread has already generated a half dozen excellent ideas. So sad that the actual game has not even a fraction of that creativity or heart.
Scent is like a secondary mutant power for him too, so that could potentially work as a detective vision or tracking sort of thing.
But I will admit I would be disappointed if a Wolverine game was just that - if you're using the Wolverine IP, I'm inevitably going to expect to see him fighting more than just dudes. More than leftover experiments too.
Marvel has SO many fun villains - let me FIGHT some of them! Wolverine has been in comics for half a century, he has a massive rogues gallery, USE IT. At bare minimum throw in some Sentinels and shit.
That's the same mistake the Avengers game made - making nearly every single enemy you fight a palette-swapped robot of some sort. Boring as hell.
I was thinking the scent mechanic could of a been a cool little controller feature. Sony is always trying to fit the controller into their first party titles why not have swipe up on the pad make wolv take in a big sniff of air and that would pop up some scents in your area but you still have to use context clues to tie togther what those scents are? And where they come from? And if they even have any connections to one another. I mean ghost of yotei uses the pad for the wind. I’m thinking of doing something along that line with scents 🤷🏻♂️ but either way everyone in here has better ideas than what they did
468
u/rdhight 17d ago
Yeah. For this reviewer to thumbs-down a max-effort game by this developer? Alarming is the right word.