Wolverine is too easy. Not just in terms of combat, per se, as that’s an easy fix with multiple difficulty levels, but rather the idea that Wolverine is almost a parody of games that hold players’ hands too much. While this was a point raised in a number of reviews of Wolverine , it essentially took over the social media onversation due to the most-viewed review of them all from SkillUp on YouTube, a video that now has 3.6 million views , more than almost any actual Wolverine trailer.

That spawned discourse about smoke (“fart”) trails leading to destinations, among other things. I was skeptical that it was quite as bad as it was being made out to be, but now that I’ve played the game, I have to admit that yes, it’s too much. I do not think it sinks the game as a whole, no, but it’s overkill without question. There are toggles for some things but not others, and in general the “default” experience doesn’t just hold players’ hands; in many instances, it practically carries them entirely. Such as:

  • Navigation may in fact be the most over-the-top part here. There is the traditional yellow paint, of course, in this case white paint, to show you climbable areas. There are often also little circles showing you where you should be leaping to. On top of that, that smoke trail is a direct line toward your target and it does appear fairly often. If that’s not enough, you can click R3 to give you a yellow arrow and turn you toward where you need to go. To find hidden collectibles, if you get even remotely close to them, they will emit a giant pulse. Finally, if all of that isn’t enough for you, Logan will simply tell you what to do, often after only just 5-10 seconds or so
  • While some of these navigation ideas are in other games, the complicating factor here is that this is a linear game, not open world, and it really should not be necessary to pile all this on. And while you can turn some of these off, like the R3 look, there are others to make it easier like climbing magnetism. There’s a blurred line here between accessibility options and so many of these being woven into the core game for all players.
  • No-fail states are bad. There have been a number of viral clips showing a chase segment where Wolverine is on a motorcycle, but you do not have to press a single button. You auto-accelerate, but even without steering and plowing into rails and cars, you will not die. I did this myself, and not holding the controller for about three minutes did get me to the cutscene at the end of a run. Having no animation at all for say, plowing into a truck and falling over a railing, is a miss here.
  • Then there ars QTEs. Some will autocomplete, but I also found if you hit the wrong button, it still works. For instance, a prompt that says R2 will not fail if you hit any other button by accident, it will stay on the screen. But hitting L2 will actually complete the QTE, despite being wrong. That’s just silly, and if you are going to have QTEs at all, again, you need consistency and fail states. If people don’t want that, they can turn on the autocomplete option in settings. Having it like this by default is goofy.
  • Additionally, I find the game keeps giving me the most basic tutorials in random moments, telling me that I need to press forward on L and hit X to leap, something that it was supposed to stop telling me 15 minutes into the game, and I do not know why these pop up eight hours in.
  • As I said, default combat difficulty is easy. Big parry windows, easy health regeneration in like four different ways, and an infinite number of interrupts. I won’t go too hard on this, however, as moving into the highest levels of the game, a choice anyone can make, does fix most of this.

I am not a “ Elden Ring needs an easy mode” person. I do believe in having lots of accessibility options in games. But to make the default experience like this, and in higher difficulties, most of this stuff is still in place, seems like Insomniac has swung needlessly in one direction, especially for a brutal, M-rated game that isn’t being played by perhaps less experienced kids. Not that any of this is getting patched at this point, but it does leave a certain mark on the game, to be sure.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .