Superheroes don’t often fall under our horror umbrella, but if there’s one hero who’s both Bloody and Disgusting, it’s Wolverine. Violence and gore tend to follow a man whose powers include knives on his hands, so I gave Insomniac’s new Marvel’s Wolverine a shot to put together a list of the bloodiest moments from the new blockbuster.
Before getting into the list, how is the game? In brief, it’s pretty good. Marvel’s Wolverine very much feels like a game from an older era where things were more straightforward and linear, but mixed with some of the more annoying handholding that modern AAA game design is occasionally guilty of.
It definitely provides some new twists to the standard Wolverine lore, throwing him into a world where X-Men don’t exist. As part of Team X, run by Nathaniel Essex, he works alongside Sabertooth and Mystique to save other mutants who are being hunted worldwide.
If you’re looking for a solid superhero story and don’t mind the brutal combat being a bit repetitive by the end of the 15-hour campaign, the big budget story offers some fun Marvel action.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Marvel’s Wolverine.
Anti-Aircraft Assault
From the opening mission, Marvel’s Wolverine makes it clear that you’re going to be in for a bloody ride. You begin by raiding a facility run by Bolivar Trask, an anti-mutant scientist who is working on building mutant-hunting robots known as Sentinels. After Wolverine drops in on them from a plane (jumping without a parachute, of course), he tears his way through a plethora of armed guards before running into his first big obstacle.
As a way of teaching you about the game’s Last Stand mechanic, which allows you to come back from losing all your health as long as you have your rage bar filled to a certain point, Wolverine is stopped dead in his tracks by an anti-aircraft cannon. After trying to shoot down Team X’s plane, the massive weapon gets turned directly on Wolverine, blowing chunks of flesh off of him in a disgusting manner. Kneeling in pain, with his metal skeleton exposed by this missing skin, you jam on the Square button to push past the pain and get your Last Stand. It’s a great moment that immediately shows you that they aren’t pulling punches on the gore, putting to ease any concerns that their lighter, more traditional comic book work on Spider-Man would hold them back.
The End of Omega Red
Marvel’s Wolverine puts him up against some of his classic rivals, and the first of these that you face is Omega Red, who is operating with the Reavers as mercenaries hired to protect Trask. Acting as the game’s first boss, your confrontation with Omega Red is a long battle with two phases, featuring a classic pattern recognition-based fight that makes good use of the admitted basic combat mechanics.
After the knock-down, drag-out brawl, Wolverine rips Omega Red’s signature arm tentacles out, one at a time. He follows it up by leaping on Red, pinning him to the ground and stabbing him in the chest. With his opponent at his mercy, a quick-time event pops up for you to fully disarm him by slowly, brutally ripping off his arm with your claws and killing him. Many fans worry about the possibility that Disney’s ownership of Marvel might water down its characters, but this execution of Omega Red shows that Wolverine isn’t playing around in this interpretation.
Fire in the Hole
As Logan pursues Trask through another research facility later in the game, he follows his scent, a big mechanic in the game that puts a Dead Space-style line in the world for the player to follow, into what appears to be a dead end. Mystique, who is accompanying you on the mission, transforms into Trask to activate a computer, revealing that this is not, in fact, a dead end, but a teleportation portal. In order not to lose the trail, Wolverine jumps through, and well… it doesn’t work out great for him.
Instead of finding himself face-to-face with Trask, he’s in the middle of a long hallway. As Trask monologues to him over a speaker, we find out that it’s not just a hallway; it’s a jet engine testing area. The engine roars to life, cooking Wolverine alive as he slowly crawls his way towards the end of the facility to save himself. Gameplay-wise, this sequence is mostly quick time events, forcing you to push the correct buttons to muster the strength to drag yourself through the fire. The way his skin burns as he moves inch by inch is truly grotesque, looking like something out of a Mortal Kombat fatality. While the game often highlights Wolverine’s powers by showing what he can do with his claws, this part shows you what he’s capable of by demonstrating how much punishment he can take.
Telekinetically Twisted Trask
When Team X finally gets their hands on Trask, Essex joins them in the field for their triumphant moment. As far as the team understood, the mission was to kill Trask, but it appears Essex had other plans for him. This version of Essex, who is known better in comics as his villainous alter ego Mr. Sinister, has telepathic and telekinetic powers, and he unleashes them in a way that upsets even Wolverine.
Essex telepathically lifts Trask into the air and begins monologuing about the plans. He wants to keep Trask alive but broken so he can watch as Essex takes everything he built and uses it for the mutant cause. As he’s doing it, Essex is slowly, telekinetically twisting Trask’s limbs, breaking them one by one to torture him for every mutant he’s killed. This becomes too much, even for Wolverine, who stabs Trask through the chest to finish him off. Essex feels like a true horror villain at this moment, showing a level of sadism that we don’t see from anyone else at this point. It’s a moment that divides the team, fracturing the group while also hinting at Essex’s upcoming turn towards villainy.
Fight to the Death with Lady Deathstrike
Given that one of Wolverine’s most famous solo stories takes him to Japan, it’s no surprise that a large portion of this game is dedicated to him slicing his way through scores of Hand ninjas. The Hand ends up with a key piece of technology that Essex is looking to acquire for his master plan, and this series of missions ends with an epic confrontation with their leader, Lady Deathstrike. I’ve always been invested in Deathstrike vs Wolverine fights going all the way back to the 90s cartoon show, so I was happy to go claw to claw with her in this game.
The climax of the boss fight ends with the two of them brawling in an area surrounded by lava, making for a dramatic conclusion to this section of the game. After viciously slashing Wolverine over and over again, leaving him a bloody mess, Deathstrike stabbed all of her long bladed fingers directly through his chest in brutal fashion. As she tightens her grip, he writhes in pain before finding the strength to slice off her cybernetic arms. Staggering back, she falls into the Helix Engine, the mutant-activating chamber that Essex wants to get his hands on. Wolverine sees an opportunity and activates it, burning her to ash immediately as the engine rejects her for not having the X-gene. It’s a little surprising that Insomniac decided to decisively take her off the table by killing her, but it felt like a great conclusion to the Japan section.
Sabertooth Savagery
If it’s a Wolverine story, you gotta have an encounter with Sabertooth, right? While he starts out as an ally on Team X, when Essex breaks bad in the third act, Sabertooth follows suit. After arming a revolution against Reaver occupation in an area called Lowtown, Wolverine is trying to hunt down Essex before getting confronted by Sabertooth. Not only is he after Logan on behalf of Essex, but he also has a grudge with him for all the times he left the team to go off on his own. It’s an interesting emotional wrinkle to the relationship, even if it doesn’t really get explored a ton.
Most of these boss fights have a mid-battle cutscene, and this is where the Sabertooth fight gets the most violent. These two legendary rivals are throwing each other through city streets, cutting into each other, leaving both of them covered in blood. As Wolverine gets slammed into a bar, Sabertooth gains the advantage by grabbing a bottle, breaking it, and jamming it straight into Wolverine’s neck.
Even with the myriad of stabbings Wolverine has done leading up to this point, this still felt shocking, especially when watching him crawl down the street, holding his neck and coughing up blood. This sequence ends in a disgusting manner, with Sabertooth digging his fingers into Wolverine’s eyes, leaving him temporarily blinded for a cool little gameplay beat. I’m glad the folks over at Insomniac treated this confrontation like the special fight it needed to be, and made sure to push things in both gameplay and violence.
In addition to these standout cutscene moments, the gameplay itself is plenty brutal, especially when you fill Wolverine’s rage meter to level 3, unleashing execution after execution on the enemies around you. Given the sheer number of fights you get in throughout the game, it can start feeling a little repetitive, but you can’t say Insomniac didn’t work hard to make it a bloody good time.
Do you have any favorite moments from Marvel’s Wolverine? Shout them out in the comments below!