# Marvel’s Wolverine Is Now the Lowest-Scoring PlayStation Studios Game on PS5

By Rafiqul Islam Rabbi · Gaming · Published Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:13:14 GMT
Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/marvels-wolverine-review-scores-metacritic-insomniac

Insomniac Games has spent nearly a decade as the most reliable studio in Sony’s portfolio. Three Marvel games, three critical successes, no misses. That streak ended this week. Marvel’s Wolverine arrives on PS5 on September 15 carrying a 77 on Metacritic and an 81 on OpenCritic, and by the Metacritic measure it is now the lowest-scoring PlayStation Studios game on the console.

The more revealing number is the spread. Across roughly 106 reviews, the biggest outlets and the smallest ones are not describing the same game.

## The Scores

Outlet
Score

Giant Bomb
5/10

IGN
6/10

GameSpot
6/10

Eurogamer
6/10

VGC
6/10

GamesRadar
6/10

Metacritic average
77

OpenCritic average
81

That is an unusual distribution. When six of the largest and most-read outlets cluster at 5s and 6s while the aggregate lands at 77, the average is being held up by a long tail of smaller and international sites handing out 8s, 9s and 10s. The gap between the loudest reviews and the arithmetic is wide enough to be the story in itself.

## Against Insomniac’s Own Record

The comparison Insomniac cannot escape is with its own Marvel catalogue:

- **Marvel’s Spider-Man** (2018) — 88

- **Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales** (2020) — 85

- **Marvel’s Spider-Man 2** (2023) — 88

- **Marvel’s Wolverine** (2026) — 77

Eleven points below the studio’s Spider-Man games is not a rounding error. Within the wider PlayStation Studios lineup on PS5, God of War Ragnarok sits at the top around 94, and Sackboy: A Big Adventure had been the floor at 79. Wolverine is now beneath it.

## What Reviewers Actually Objected To

The criticism is remarkably consistent, and it is not about bugs or polish. It is about design philosophy. The recurring complaint is that Wolverine is a linear third-person action game that feels like a relic of the mid-2000s: corridor levels, gated arenas, a fixed route through a story that does not branch.

Reviewers described it as perfectly acceptable and thoroughly anachronistic, with gameplay that works without ever being interesting. That is a harsher verdict than a broken game would get, because a broken game can be patched.

There is a real irony here. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games were celebrated for traversal that made an open city feel like a playground. Wolverine deliberately abandoned the open world, presumably because Logan cannot swing between buildings, and in doing so removed the thing the studio was best at without replacing it with something equally distinctive.

### What People Liked

The positive reviews are not incoherent. TheGamer praised a memorable, emotional and high-stakes story, strong interpretations of Logan, Jean and the supporting cast, and combat it described as brutally satisfying. Several reviewers suggested the game lays foundations for a wider X-Men universe under Insomniac.

The character work seems genuinely well received across the board, including in the negative reviews. The disagreement is about whether good writing and satisfying claw combat are enough to carry a structure that reviewers found dated.

## The $70 Problem

Price is doing a lot of work in the negative reviews. At $70, a competent but unessential linear action game occupies an uncomfortable slot. It is not a budget title where a 77 reads as good value, and it is not a flagship where the production values excuse a conventional structure.

Sony’s first-party output has set an expectation that a PlayStation Studios exclusive is a system-selling event. Wolverine appears to be a good game that does not clear that bar, which in commercial terms may be a harder position than being a bad one.

## Does the Score Matter?

Commercially, probably less than the discourse suggests. Wolverine is a PS5 exclusive built on one of the most recognizable characters in comics, arriving from a studio with enormous goodwill. It will sell.

Where a 77 does matter is internally. Insomniac’s Marvel arrangement with Sony is understood to extend well beyond Spider-Man, and the studio has been building toward a broader connected universe. A first non-Spider-Man entry that lands eleven points below the house average makes the case for that expansion harder to argue, particularly in a year when Sony has been visibly recalibrating how much it spends on single-player exclusives.

## What This Means

Marvel’s Wolverine looks like a good game that arrived with the wrong shape. The narrative and combat work. The structure around them belongs to an earlier generation, and reviewers who have played every Insomniac Marvel release noticed immediately.

For players, the practical read is straightforward: if you want a tightly authored Logan story with excellent character writing and violent, tactile combat, this will deliver it. If you were expecting the studio to do for Wolverine what it did for Spider-Man, the reviews are unanimous that it did not.

For Insomniac, the more useful question is whether the linear design was a creative choice or a production constraint. The answer determines whether the next X-Men game learns from this one or repeats it.