To date, Marvel’s Wolverine has an average critic score of 77 on Metacritic, which is a far cry from Marvel’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, which are at 87 and 90, respectively.
To put things in perspective, Marvel’s Wolverine is sitting at a 77 on Metacritic now, and the last time any single-player game from a Sony first-party studio scored this low was Days Gone by Bend Studio way back in 2019, when it got a measly 71 Metacritic average.
In comparison, here’s how the single-player PlayStation-developed games fared critically over the last few years:
SAROS (PS5, 2026) – 87
Ghost of Yotei (2025) – 86
Astro Bot (2024) – 94
The Last of Us Part II Remastered (2024) – 90
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 ,(2023) – 91
Horizon Forbidden West (2022) – 88
The Last of Us Part I (2022) – 88
God of War Ragnarok (2022) – 94
Returnal (2021) – 86
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021) – 88
Ghost of Tsushima (2020) – 83
The Last of Us Part II (2020) – 93
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020) – 85
Days Gone (2019) – 71
Mind, this doesn’t even include PlayStation-published titles such as Death Stranding and its sequel, Stellar Blade, Demon’s Souls Remake, and more, as these were developed by external studios.
This isn’t exactly an honor Insomniac wants to achieve, and something surely no one expected. That said, a 77 average does not mean it’s a bad game. Is this significantly lower than what Insomniac and Sony were expecting? Probably. Also worth noting that in the massive Insomniac leak that outed the studio’s roadmap of releases, it also mentioned (then) that Insomniac’s target critical average was 90.
Days Gone was my open world dream zombie game come true so for me, it was an excellent 9.5/10 and my 2019 game of the year. So damn underrated in my opinion.
As for Wolverine, I’ll see how it is when I play it tomorrow night. I will say that even lower rated games like Lost Soul Aside which Sony published and funded was an 8.0/10 for me. Really enjoyed the combat/gameplay and the music/audio was great. Graphics were a mixed bag and while I enjoyed the story and thought it was good, it was the weakest aspect of the game in my opinion.
Honestly without 1st party what does Sony really have to make them better then any other platform holder?
I’d say they are the worst of the lot being their hardware is not anything special, their customer service sucks and their services are just meant o exploit people and nickel and dime you to death
Why are people so bran washed to Sony like a cult?
Metacritic doesn’t matter, BUT Sony made it a metric to judge of a game’s reception, even making it a condition for bonuses and other advantages for some of its first party studios. So the question is what happens now ? Is it still relevant for Sony or they’ve changed their views on MC scores ? And what if a score doesn’t translate to sales like SAROS or Ghost of Yotei ?
What I don’t understand is people cancelling their preorders because of reviews. Not bad reviews, just a 70-80 rated game which is normal. Did these people read previews, watch gameplay videos before preordering ? This is bizarre, like I can’t imagine cancelling a preorder for a game I’m interested in unless it’s an absolute mess, which Wolverine doesn’t seem to be.
I guess it’s more that given the length, on-rails nature of it (invisible walls etc) and the reviews not being glowing, they’re thinking it’s not worth the AAA RRP that PlayStation are demanding and instead wait for a sale - that’s unfortunately what less than rave reviews can do.
Whereas The Blood of Dawnwalker for example, the rave reviews made me pull the trigger the other way…
The stupid gaming culture of everything below 9 sucks. They should change the scale to 9-10 great, everything below sucks and you should go to internet rage on devs, cancel your pre-order, burn you console, etc…
Yeah, so they blindly preordered without a second thought ? Previews, gameplay videos were showing how the game was playing and people were already pointing out the problems. I don’t know what people expected from reviews, that the game was more than what was shown ? I think the preorders were more about the social aspect of the product than the game itself, which is a shame.
There was a thread on Resetera about whether the reviews affected people’s hype for the game and there were a handful of posts with the sentiment of basically, I’m not a particular fan of Marvel or Wolverine or beat-em-ups, I just like buying Sony’s AAA bangers. To me there’s something weirdly hollow about that, having no opinions or preferences about the actual game itself beyond the publisher and the review score. And since it turns out this game isn’t a Metacritic-certified Sony banger™ after all, you’re no longer interested.
It makes a lot more sense to me for someone to say, I’m just such a fan of the Wolverine character that I think I’ll enjoy this game anyway even though it’s kind of a mid game.
I’d be surprised if that wasn’t just the vocal minority making a stink of everything on the internet. Most people who pre-order aren’t following reviews and vidoes to decide whether to cancel it or not. They’ve already made their decisions to buy the game, already spent the money, and will be playing it regardless.
You’d probably want to check comic book and marvel spaces for that. Under the comic book YouTubers I follow I’ve seen mixed sentiment since it was first announced this wasn’t getting a PC release. Sony kinda drew a line in the sand with that decision. Without a PC release it then becomes that a customer of this game has to be a cross section of a PS owner & a Wolverine fan or at least be a PS owner as a prerequisite even if they aren’t a Wolverine fan. That’s just a smaller group of people passionate about this game and also a very different group of people passionate about this game then if it had been a full multiplatform release or just on PC as expected for that massive gamer audience. This was also as console prices were rising, so I saw a lot of people in the comments under comic book YouTubers complaining about how they couldn’t even buy a reasonably priced PS5 if they wanted to for Wolverine. The amount of Wolverine supergeeks who can care has been restricted by Sony’s choice, but the amount of Sony apologists/hardcore Playstation fans hasn’t.
Wolverine feels like the amalgamation of all those Sony 1st party design tropes but without excelling at any particular aspect in an interesting way. Ghost of Yotei for example while being a fairly formulaic map game, it was the most refined of its kind, was designed more tightly than the average Ubisoft style world, and had a very beautiful and distinct art style. Wolverine feels like everything is just an ok level, even the graphics which are great fidelity and technically don’t stand out and look very by-the-book. You can still enjoy a game like this, I’ve enjoyed many, it’s fine to do that, however don’t pretend it’s otherwise, and don’t dodge that criticism so that AAA devs might actually pay attention and be less safe and predictable in their games.
And also wish to God insomniac can escape the Marvel factory phase asap.
Yeah, I think this should serve as a wake-up call to the higher-ups at Insomniac and PS. Whilst the backlash was initially dismissed as part of the negativity spiral that drives social media, listening to reviews without the hyperbole shows there are some legit issues with their approach.
We knew they’d succeed with Spider-Man because of the traversal in Sunset Overdrive, but Wolverine is a pretty different beast. I don’t think he’s worthy as a headliner, however popular he may be, and they perhaps should’ve made it a proper X-Men ensemble game.
It flopped, but the Avengers game from Eidos had some legit fun gameplay (apart from indoor Iron Man), which was all let down by the GaaS stuff. A single-player X-Men game that took cues from that would be quite cool imo.
Watched the latest DF Direct and they’re all in on the defense that people only don’t like this game because it’s a simple and linear brawler instead of an ambitious open world AAAAA masterpiece.
“It’s a really good game just not a boundary pushing one, and people should be okay with that”
I don’t think that’s really what a 70s MC represents but maybe that’s just me.
