We wanted a great Wolverine game.
That should not be a controversial position. Wolverine has claws, a healing factor, a legendary temper, and decades of comic-book material to pull from. Give us a brutal action game with heavy combat, nasty finishers, memorable villains, and a version of Logan who actually looks and sounds like Logan.
Instead, the early footage has us asking one question:
What happened?
Wolverine Should Not Look This Soft
The first problem is Logan himself.
This is Wolverine. He should look like a human bulldozer who has been stabbed, shot, thrown through walls, and dragged through several wars. He does not need to look like a bodybuilder, but he should have some physical presence. Some danger. Some sign that he spends his life fighting people with swords and laser beams.
The version shown here looks strangely soft and polished. His face has the same smooth, overly sculpted quality we have seen in a lot of modern game characters, where everybody looks like they were designed in the same digital beauty lab. Logan is supposed to look rough. Weathered. A little unpleasant.
Instead, he looks like he has never lifted anything heavier than a PlayStation controller.
And then there is the facial animation. In one clip, only one side of his face seems to move while he talks. Maybe it is unfinished footage. Maybe it is a technical issue. Either way, it creates the exact wrong impression. Wolverine should be intimidating before he even says anything. Here, he looks like he is trying to remember where he parked.
Lady Deathstrike Has Seen Better Days
The character designs do not improve from there.
Lady Deathstrike appears in the footage, and the reaction is immediate: who is that supposed to be?
The armor, the face, the proportions, the general presentation—all of it feels off. This is a character who should walk into a scene and instantly make the player uncomfortable. She should feel dangerous, obsessive, and unmistakably connected to Wolverine’s world.
Instead, she looks like somebody’s grandmother wandered into a cyberpunk cosplay convention and took a wrong turn.
That may sound harsh, but the design is doing the game no favors. When fans have to stop and ask whether a major villain is Psylocke or Lady Deathstrike, the problem is not the audience. The problem is the design.
The same issue appears with other characters. Mystique is supposed to be one of the most visually striking women in Marvel. Jean Grey should be recognizable from a glance. Sabertooth should look like an animal wearing a man’s skin.
Yet the footage keeps presenting characters who look flat, awkward, or oddly aged. Wolverine’s world is full of extreme personalities and iconic silhouettes. The game seems determined to sand all of that down into the same generic modern-realistic sludge.
The Combat Looks Like It Is Afraid of Wolverine
The combat may be the biggest disappointment.
Wolverine should be a perfect fit for a violent action game. His claws are built for close-quarters combat. His healing factor gives developers room to let the player take punishment. His berserker rage should make encounters feel frantic and dangerous.
Instead, the gameplay shown looks repetitive and strangely limited.
The claws come out, enemies react, blood sprays across the screen, and the whole thing feels less like a savage fight and more like a basic combat system wearing a Wolverine costume. The blood especially looks like paint. It splashes onto enemies in broad, artificial streaks instead of making each attack feel sharp and physical.
Apparently, the gore can be adjusted or turned off through accessibility settings. That is fine in principle. Players should have options. But if the violence was built around a toggle instead of being designed as an important part of the combat experience, that explains why it looks so weightless.
You can disable gore. You cannot add fun through an options menu.
Compare that with a game like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where cutting through enemies is the entire point. Every slash has force. Every enemy feels like something you are physically dismantling. Wolverine should have an equally satisfying combat identity.
Watching him swipe at enemies in these clips does not make us feel like the best there is at what he does. It makes us wonder whether the game is holding back because somebody in a meeting decided that Wolverine needed to be broadly accessible to everyone.
That is how you end up with a game about a man who cannot stop healing, yet somehow feels sanitized.
A Huge Budget Needs a Huge Hook
The financial math also raises questions.
The reported development budget has been placed around $35 million based on leaked internal documents, although exact figures are difficult to confirm. At a $70 price point, the game would need to move millions of copies before marketing, platform fees, manufacturing, and other costs are even considered.
Wolverine is a major enough character that the game will probably sell on name recognition alone. People will buy it because they love Wolverine. Some players will buy it because it is a PlayStation exclusive. Others will simply hope this is the great solo Wolverine game they have been waiting for.
But that does not mean the game can coast.
The character is doing most of the work already. The developers do not need to convince people that Wolverine is cool. They need to prove that their version understands why he is cool.
So far, the footage suggests a game that has the license, the budget, and the recognizable names, but not the attitude.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
This is the larger problem with modern blockbuster games. Everything is expensive, technically polished, and designed by committee, but the characters often feel less distinct than the icons they are based on.
The result is a strange kind of creative cowardice. Wolverine is a violent, angry, complicated character, yet the game appears terrified of letting him be any of those things for too long. His enemies look generic. His dialogue feels flat. His combat lacks impact. The visuals are detailed, but the identity is missing.
A Wolverine game should make us want to pick up the controller immediately.
This footage makes us want to wait for reviews.
Maybe the final game will surprise us. Maybe the rough facial animation will be fixed, the combat will open up, and the finished version will have more personality than the material shown so far.
But first impressions matter. Especially when the first impression is Wolverine standing in front of us looking like he needs a glass of water and a better character artist.
We wanted the best there is at what he does.
Right now, what he does appears to be staring blankly, waving his claws around, and making us nervous about the launch price.
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