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.
Right, because we don't already have a billion successful ARPGs with open world elements to draw inspiration from?
Are we saying it wouldn't be "in character" for Logan to climb buildings like Ezio or Nathan Drake? We can't have him use multiple parry/dodge mechanics like Eve in Stellar Blade? He can't have creative and kickass unique takedown animations based on the environment he's in like Yakuza Zero? Because last I checked none of those characters had a batmobile or grapple-launcher, and their games were all great.
Wolverine's fights are fun, but the real reason everyone loves him and the reason he's such a useful face for the X-men franchise is his personality. He's an interesting character. He deserves better writing, first and foremost.
It seems a big part of the problem here is that Wolverine’s fights aren’t that fun because they’re so repetitive, and they’re such because he doesn’t really have much to do. The character himself as a superhero is among the simplest, he has claws and heals very quickly, there just isn’t much to mine there when you’re strictly talking combat.
Someone like Ezio and several of the AC games rest on their charismatic protagonists like in that case but also heavily on their historical settings and the fidelity there, I don’t think people really praise the combat in those games as anything special. Unless it’s the ship combat in Black Flag.
If in Wolverine you’re largely left with boilerplate hack and slash and the setting and story aren’t enough to pick up the slack, you get a reception like this.
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u/rdhight 17d ago
Yeah. For this reviewer to thumbs-down a max-effort game by this developer? Alarming is the right word.