Marvel’s Wolverine Review Scores Are In: Why Insomniac’s Newest PS5 Exclusive Split Critics and Players
Marvel’s Wolverine launched exclusively on PS5 on September 15, 2026, and it arrived with one of the more unusual reception stories of the console generation. The Insomniac Games title, priced at $69.99 for the standard edition and $79.99 for the Digital Deluxe Edition, debuted with a Metacritic score of 77 from more than 100 reviews. That makes it the lowest-rated first-party PlayStation Studios release of the PS5 era, yet players have embraced it far more warmly than critics.
Critics Praise the Combat but Question the Structure
The review embargo lifted five days before launch, and the verdict was split from the start. Reviewers agreed that Insomniac had nailed the fundamentals: combat feels weighty, animations are sharp and the cinematic presentation is strong. The criticism centred on what surrounds those strengths. Many reviews called the game highly linear, pointed to repetitive encounters and complained about a user interface that guides players too tightly.
The comparison with Insomniac’s own history was unavoidable. Marvel’s Spider-Man holds an 87 on Metacritic, Spider-Man: Miles Morales sits at 85 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 reached 90, so Wolverine’s 77 stands out. Another aggregator placed the game closer to 79 to 81, with roughly three-quarters of critics recommending it, which suggests the overall verdict is positive but unspectacular.
The game’s contained structure also divided opinion. Some reviewers felt a more focused, linear design suits a character like Logan, even if the combat system never reaches the depth of the Spider-Man titles. The story follows Logan alongside Team X, with Sabretooth and Mystique in the cast, in a version of the Marvel universe where the X-Men do not exist and Professor X never appears.
Players and Sales Tell a Different Story
While critics were lukewarm, early audience feedback was strong. On the PlayStation Store the game launched with a user rating of 4.85 out of 5, with 92 percent of more than 15,000 voters giving it the top score, which makes it one of the best-received PS5 launches among players that week.
Commercial signs were also encouraging. Market-research data showed Wolverine recorded PlayStation’s biggest physical launch in the UK in 2026, taking the top spot on the all-formats chart in its first week and displacing Onimusha: Way of the Sword. On boxed PS5 sales it ranked as the third-biggest UK launch of the year, behind Resident Evil Requiem and 007 First Light but ahead of Saros and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. Its physical debut was roughly three times the size of Death Stranding 2’s.
On the technical side, the game supports PS5 and PS5 Pro, with a 60 FPS performance mode that enables ray tracing by default and a 30 FPS fidelity mode with higher internal resolution. Photo mode was set to arrive through a launch update.
For PlayStation, the lesson is that review aggregates and audience expectations can drift apart. Wolverine will not be remembered as Insomniac’s highest-scoring game, but strong early sales and enthusiastic player ratings suggest it has found its audience. Anyone considering a purchase should weigh the polished combat and cinematic storytelling against a more linear structure than the studio’s earlier hits
