The short version: Marvel’s Wolverine is out now, critics like it less than any other Insomniac game in a decade, and almost nobody who actually bought it seems to care. The PS5 exclusive launched on September 15, 2026, and by the end of its first week it was sitting at 77 on Metacritic and 79 on OpenCritic, the lowest scores an original Insomniac game has posted since 2016’s Song of the Deep. On the PlayStation Store, the same game is sitting at 4.8 out of 5 stars, with well over 90 percent of buyers handing out the full five. That gap between what the press wrote and what players are typing into a star rating box is the actual story here, and it says as much about how this generation reviews games as it does about Wolverine himself.
Quick answer
Marvel’s Wolverine launched September 15, 2026 exclusively on PS5 for $69.99, or $79.99 for the Digital Deluxe Edition. Critics landed around 77 to 79 out of 100, citing repetitive combat and a predictable story, while players are rating it 4.8 out of 5 on the PlayStation Store. The campaign runs about 15 hours, closer to 20 to 25 hours with side content. There is no PC version announced, and Sony has signaled it may stay that way.
That split is unusual even for Insomniac, a studio whose Marvel games have historically pleased critics and players in roughly equal measure. Marvel’s Spider-Man sits at 87 on Metacritic, Miles Morales at 85, and Spider-Man 2 at 90. Wolverine landing at 77 is not a disaster by any normal standard, a 77 is still a perfectly playable, generally well reviewed game, but it is a real step down for a studio that has not missed with a superhero license since it started making them, and it is happening on the one console where Sony badly needed a clean win this fall.
The scores, side by side
Here is the gap in numbers rather than adjectives. Every figure below reflects where the aggregates stood in the days after launch, and both Metacritic and OpenCritic were still absorbing late reviews at the time of writing.
77
Metacritic, PS5
79
OpenCritic, “Strong”
4.8/5
PlayStation Store, players
OpenCritic places Wolverine in the “Strong” tier with 69 percent of critics recommending it, which is a respectable outcome for most games and a noticeably softer one for a studio used to sitting in the low 90s. GameSpot and IGN both landed at 6 out of 10, and both reviews describe the same problem in different words. IGN wrote that the game “fails to layer something special atop its initially satisfying action, which wears thin well before the conclusion,” while GameSpot called it “a surprisingly average game let down by basic combat, a messy story.” Other outlets were considerably warmer.
| Outlet | Score | The gist |
|---|---|---|
| Hardcore Gamer | 5 / 5 | Called it an intense, unrelenting ride carried by Logan’s character work |
| DualShockers | 8.5 / 10 | Praised the brutality of the combat and the presentation |
| TheGamer | 4 / 5 | Solid superhero action, if familiar to anyone who has played Insomniac before |
| IGN | 6 / 10 | Satisfying action that wears thin before the credits roll |
| GameSpot | 6 / 10 | An authentic Wolverine experience let down by basic combat |
| Giant Bomb | 2.5 / 5 | The most critical of the major outlets, calling the loop repetitive |
Full aggregates are moving in real time on Metacritic and OpenCritic as more reviews land.
Why critics and players are seeing two different games
Almost every critical review agrees on the same two things: Liam McIntyre’s performance as Logan is excellent, and the combat is brutal and satisfying for the first several hours. Where the reviews split from the player reaction is repetition. Critics who play a game start to finish in a few sittings for a deadline notice when an enemy roster or a mission structure repeats itself far more acutely than someone playing in hour-long sessions over a couple of weeks. Several reviews specifically call out that the moveset and enemy variety introduced early rarely expands, which reads very differently in a marathon review session than it does for a player enjoying a few claw fights after dinner.
There is also a simpler explanation sitting in plain sight. Review scores measure a game against the rest of the year, while a PlayStation Store rating mostly measures whether a fan of Wolverine, Marvel, or Insomniac’s past games got what they were expecting. On that narrower question, Marvel’s Wolverine is delivering. It launched among the best-selling games on the PlayStation Store in multiple regions in its first days, similar to the reception The Blood of Dawnwalker received when it launched into a crowded September calendar full of ambitious singleplayer games competing for the same players’ time.
Know before you buy
The most common complaint across both critics and unhappy players is not quality, it is value. The main story clocks in around 15 hours, and reaching full completion with collectibles and Nightmare Trial doors takes 20 to 25 hours. After the review embargo lifted, some players said online they were cancelling preorders or waiting for a price drop, arguing that a $69.99 asking price is steep for a campaign roughly half the length of Spider-Man 2’s.
A world where the X-Men do not exist yet
The setup is the most interesting swing Insomniac has taken with a Marvel license so far. Marvel’s Wolverine takes place before the X-Men have formed, in a timeline where mutants are still hiding rather than operating openly the way Spider-Man does in Insomniac’s earlier games. Logan is a former member of Team X, a black-ops mutant unit from the 1970s that also included Sabretooth, Mystique, and Sunfire, and the story follows him trying to protect a world that mostly fears or hunts people like him.
Why it matters: narrative director Walt Williams has said the choice was deliberate, explaining that the team wanted to remind players that “existence for a mutant is not safe. It’s hard. It’s scary.” Skipping the X-Men lets the story treat Logan as an outsider rather than a superhero with a safety net, which several critics singled out as the strongest part of the game even when they were unimpressed with the combat loop around it.
It is a sharper, bleaker tone than Insomniac’s Spider-Man games ever attempted, and it lines up with a busier year for Sony’s exclusive lineup generally. The studio’s September State of Play spent real time on what is coming to PS5 through the rest of the year, and Wolverine’s grim mutant-black-ops framing stands out as the darkest thing in that lineup by a wide margin.
Price, editions, and platforms
| Release date | September 15, 2026 |
| Platforms | PlayStation 5 only, no PC or Xbox version announced |
| Standard edition | $69.99 |
| Digital Deluxe edition | $79.99 |
| Campaign length | Around 15 hours for the main story, 20 to 25 hours for full completion |
| Multiplayer | None, single player only |
| Notable tech | Supports PS5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling for higher resolution and steadier frame rates |
Is Marvel’s Wolverine coming to PC?
Not yet, and maybe not for a while. Sony has been shifting its first-party singleplayer games toward staying console-only for longer, rather than the near-simultaneous PC ports it experimented with in recent years, and Wolverine launched as a pure PS5 exclusive with nothing announced for PC, Xbox, or last-gen consoles. That said, Sony has a track record of eventually bringing its biggest exclusives over: Spider-Man 2 launched on PS5 in October 2023 and did not reach PC until January 2025, roughly fifteen months later. If Wolverine follows a similar timeline, a PC release is plausible sometime in 2027, but nothing has been confirmed either way.
Buy it now if
You want a darker, R-rated take on a Marvel character after years of family-friendly Spider-Man
You mainly care about combat feel and presentation over story variety
You already own a PS5 and are not waiting on a PC release
Wait for a sale if
A 15 hour campaign at full price feels thin to you
You are sensitive to repetitive enemy encounters over a long session
You are hoping for a PC version and would rather wait it out
Frequently asked questions
What is Marvel’s Wolverine’s Metacritic score?
Marvel’s Wolverine sits at 77 on Metacritic and 79 on OpenCritic in the days after launch, both still updating as more reviews come in. That makes it the lowest-scoring original game Insomniac has released since 2016’s Song of the Deep, and lower than all three of its Spider-Man games.
Why are player reviews so much higher than critic scores?
Players on the PlayStation Store are rating the game around 4.8 out of 5, with more than 90 percent giving it five stars. Critics generally praised the same things players did, the combat feel, the story’s tone, and Liam McIntyre’s performance, but scored it down for repetition and a short campaign that critics playing in long sessions for review notice more sharply than casual players do.
How long is Marvel’s Wolverine?
The main story runs about 15 hours. Reaching full completion, including collectibles and the game’s Nightmare Trial doors, takes closer to 20 to 25 hours.
Is Marvel’s Wolverine coming to PC or Xbox?
No version has been announced for PC, Xbox, or PS4. It is currently a PS5 console exclusive, and Sony has not said whether or when that will change.
Do you need to play Insomniac’s Spider-Man games first?
No. Marvel’s Wolverine is a standalone story set in its own corner of Insomniac’s Marvel universe, with no direct plot connection to the Spider-Man games required to follow it.
Is there a multiplayer or co-op mode?
No, Marvel’s Wolverine is entirely single player.
The bottom line
Marvel’s Wolverine is not the disaster a “lowest Insomniac score in a decade” headline might suggest, and it is not the slam dunk its PlayStation Store rating suggests either. It is a good action game with a genuinely bold story angle, wrapped around a combat loop that a lot of critics wish did more with its back half, priced in a way that is making some buyers wait. Whether it deserves to sit closer to a 77 or closer to a 96 percent five-star rating mostly depends on how you play games in the first place. Reviewers marathoning it for a deadline and players savoring a few missions a night after work are, in a very real sense, playing two different versions of the same 15 hours, not unlike the split reaction that followed Capcom’s Onimusha revival earlier this month, where critics loved the combat but flagged the same kind of late-campaign repetition.
How we compiled this: scores and quotes above are drawn from Metacritic and OpenCritic’s aggregated critic reviews, published reviews from IGN, GameSpot, TheGamer, Hardcore Gamer, DualShockers, and Giant Bomb, PlayStation Store player rating data, and Insomniac’s own comments on the game’s story direction. Figures are accurate as of the days immediately following the September 15, 2026 launch and may shift as additional reviews are published.
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