Reviews for Marvel's Wolverine are out and it sits at 77 on Metacritic. That is lower than any other Insomniac Marvel game, and the word "flop" is already going round. I went into the aggregate itself, and the picture there is different: the game has exactly zero negative reviews.
What the aggregate actually shows
The 77 on the PlayStation 5 version comes from 105 reviews. Count every platform and it is 108 reviews for the same score. Metacritic labels that result Generally Favorable.
- 77 reviews are positive, which is 73 percent.
- 28 reviews are mixed, 27 percent.
- Negative reviews: zero. Not few, zero, out of a hundred and eight.
Which leads somewhere simple. The average of 77 came out of a split verdict rather than a savaging. Some outlets handed it a hundred. COGconnected writes that playing as Logan is unlikely to get better than this for many years, and Hardcore Gamer calls the game an absolute triumph in nearly every category, doing for the character what the first Spider-Man did for Spider-Man.
At the same time twenty eight outlets landed in the middle of the scale. That quarter is what drags the average down. This is how Metacritic arithmetic works: two raves and one restrained seven average out lower than three steady nines.
Lowest of the studio's Marvel games
What you cannot argue with is the comparison inside the family. All four Insomniac games based on Marvel comics, side by side: Spider-Man 2 at ninety from 145 reviews, the first Spider-Man at eighty seven from 116, Miles Morales at eighty five from 89, Wolverine at seventy seven from 105.
Thirteen points below Spider-Man 2 is a lot, and for a studio that held the bar above eighty five for nine years running, the drop is worth noticing.
One honest caveat: I compared only the Insomniac Marvel games, because that is how the question was posed. I did not go through the studio's whole thirty year catalogue, so I am not going to repeat the line about the weakest Insomniac game ever. The weakest of the Marvel ones, yes.
What the game is and when it lands
It arrives on 15 September 2026 and only on PlayStation 5. Sony has announced no PC version, although going by its usual habit one will turn up in a year or so.
It is an open world action game with an original story rather than an adaptation of a particular comic, rated M for mature. Insomniac Games develops, Sony Interactive Entertainment publishes. Reviews went up five days before release, so the scores you are looking at were given on pre-release copies.
My own take on this. Seventy seven is a decent game, worth buying if you like Logan and worth skipping if you were waiting for a second Spider-Man 2. The problem is not the game. The problem is that the studio taught everyone to expect nineties.
Sources
Average score, review count, the split between positive and mixed, release date, developer and rating: the Marvel's Wolverine page on Metacritic, checked on 10 September 2026.
Scores for Spider-Man 2, the first Spider-Man and Miles Morales: their own Metacritic pages, checked the same day.
The COGconnected and Hardcore Gamer quotes are taken from the excerpts on the Metacritic review page.
