Written by: João Silva <br>The *Marvel's Wolverine* review embargo lifted on the morning of Thursday, September 10, 2026, five days before the game's official PlayStation 5 release on September 15. The first impressions, still largely based on hands-on sessions rather than complete reviews, are already circulating, and the emerging pattern is more interesting than any individual score: none of the early coverage treats the game as the natural successor to *Marvel's Spider-Man 2*, which finished 2023 with a Metascore of 90. It's a difference Insomniac probably expected, but it still changes how everything that follows should be interpreted. ## What the Early Reviews Say and What We Still Don't Know It's important to separate what has actually been confirmed from community speculation. Reactions published so far describe combat scenarios that **progressively escalate into a state of "full rage,"** highly destructible environments, and a combination of movement and combat that reviewers generally consider well executed. However, no complete, scored reviews had been published by the time of this analysis. * **Spider-Man 2 (2023)**, the most direct comparison because it was Insomniac's most recent Marvel game before Wolverine, finished with a Metascore of 90. * The consensus among early impressions, including coverage from outlets such as GameSpot and the Metacritic coverage hub, describes the game as "competent cinematic entertainment" without claiming that it reinvents the genre. * One criticism appears repeatedly: the **Nightmare Gates**, optional timed combat and platforming challenges that reward players primarily with narrative documents, are described more than once as the weakest part of the experience. * In score prediction discussions, which had been circulating for weeks based on early trailers and closed demos, community expectations ranged from 75 to 90, with the highest concentration of predictions landing around 84 to 86. None of these points tells the whole story on its own. But together, they suggest a clear pattern: nobody is expecting, or necessarily rooting for, another 90. ### Insomniac Replaced the Agile Hero With a Savage One, and That Changes the Evaluation Criteria I've followed Insomniac's evolution since the early *Ratchet & Clank* games rebuilt for PS4, and there's a pattern worth identifying here: the studio builds its games around the physical personality of the protagonist, not just their mechanics. Spider-Man works because the entire city is a vertical playground designed around web-swinging. The game *is* movement. Wolverine doesn't have that luxury. He's slower, more contained and focused on close-quarters combat. That forces Insomniac to sell something different: weight, impact and visible regeneration in real time. It's a game that has to convince players through tactile violence rather than aerial fluidity. That's a much harder balance to get right because the experience can become repetitive more quickly if the basic combat loop isn't strong enough to carry twenty or thirty hours of a campaign. That may explain why none of the early coverage is trying to push the game toward the 90 range. It's not necessarily a sign of failure. It may simply mean critics understand, correctly, that these are two games built around different kinds of pleasure, and that judging Wolverine by Spider-Man's standards would be a mistake. The problem is that the game's own marketing has repeatedly encouraged direct comparisons with *Spider-Man 2* over the past few months. And that's exactly the kind of expectation the publisher itself helped create. The final Metacritic aggregate does not yet exist. The first complete, scored reviews are expected to begin appearing over the next few days, potentially before the game's launch weekend. Until then, one thing is already clear: the conversation around *Marvel's Wolverine* is no longer about whether it will beat *Spider-Man 2*. It's about whether it can, on its own, justify why a studio with such a strong track record decided to bet on a character who does almost the exact opposite of what made Insomniac famous. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1wclrsi/marvels_wolverine_review_thread/