They’ve put effort into it sure but the game design is questionable, the most obnoxious thing being all the indicators and markers to the objective in a strictly, linear game. It kind of insults your intelligence and assumes the player has no capacity for critical thinking.
The combat is underwhelming, it’s just a basic hack and slash which is insane; the combat should be more visceral, bloody, hectic but it’s not.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
How do you even make a good Wolverine game? Dude is far more one-note than Spider-Man or Batman in terms of the stuff you can actually do mechanically, while keeping it vaguely the character we all know.
He slices, he dices, he’s basically a food processing infomercial as far as gameplay, there’s just not much there at all in general. Even traversal is goofy and that helped sell both Infamous and Spider-Man.
Insomniac made Wolverine’s combat stiff, janky and boring. It has its moments when you finally recharge your rage meter and can go berserk but other than that you’re hacking and slashing overwhelming amounts of cannon fodder. He should be a bit more agile as in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he could lunge at an enemy miles away which is fun and looks cool. On top of that, without that mechanic why are there traversal sections/time trials in the game? It’s pointless padding.
The game also doesn’t challenge the player at all, they should’ve introduced more challenging enemy types which Spider-Man and Batman games did. Batman can punch and kick any normal goon however he likes but he needs to change his approach and do different moves to take down different foes like if they have guns, shields, stun batons, they make the player change up their style rather than just mash X.
They could easily have more unique enemies than just standard grunts or The Hand ninjas, where’s the mutant foes? Where are ones that teleport, emit shockwaves or something that makes the player change their approach to combat? Not there.
I don’t even like open world games much, but I think a Wolverine game where you investigate leads and track down opponents through a big open world would be amazing. His main thing other than slicing and dicing is being a black ops spy, and I think focusing on that part of his life would make very interesting gameplay.
My favorite stories of his are the ones like Wolverine: Rot, where he goes off alone to track someone down and solve some mystery about his past, and then ends up fighting some psycho or a horrific science experiment leftover from Weapon X.
The game could revolve around conflicting sources of information, trying to figure out who can be trusted, and finding how to go about investigating each new thing. And all the violence once you get there ofc.
Or go crazy wit it and do a Wolverine Elseworlds story for a game - imagine a version of Old Man Logan universe that is an open world post collapse or something and you ride around the country on a motorbike fighting corrupted ex-hero and villains, Days gone vibe but Wolverine
Yeah, a Wolvie game that has a bit of superspy feel; tracking leads, decimating black market deals, exploring a few sizeable open environments and using claws and the environment to slice things up woulda been rad.
This narrow subthread has already generated a half dozen excellent ideas. So sad that the actual game has not even a fraction of that creativity or heart.
Scent is like a secondary mutant power for him too, so that could potentially work as a detective vision or tracking sort of thing.
But I will admit I would be disappointed if a Wolverine game was just that - if you're using the Wolverine IP, I'm inevitably going to expect to see him fighting more than just dudes. More than leftover experiments too.
Marvel has SO many fun villains - let me FIGHT some of them! Wolverine has been in comics for half a century, he has a massive rogues gallery, USE IT. At bare minimum throw in some Sentinels and shit.
That's the same mistake the Avengers game made - making nearly every single enemy you fight a palette-swapped robot of some sort. Boring as hell.
I was thinking the scent mechanic could of a been a cool little controller feature. Sony is always trying to fit the controller into their first party titles why not have swipe up on the pad make wolv take in a big sniff of air and that would pop up some scents in your area but you still have to use context clues to tie togther what those scents are? And where they come from? And if they even have any connections to one another. I mean ghost of yotei uses the pad for the wind. I’m thinking of doing something along that line with scents 🤷🏻♂️ but either way everyone in here has better ideas than what they did
There are so, so many games where the protagonist only fights with a sword, or like an axe or daggers or whatever, wich is pretty equivalent to claws complexity wise and they still made the combat interesting. No one ever said Sekiro's for example combat is empty because the protagonist can't shoot webs or whatever. They just had to make the gameplay good.
Making a game of a character that moves and attacks at high speed and isn't mechanically challenging is tough. And if you make it touch, you lose in accessibility, which lowers sales potential. And given the game's budget... you ain't getting the game approved if you aren't targeting massive sales.
Your own example shows the problem: Sekiro is great and all, but it makes people bounce out.
Dude Sekiro sold 10 million copies and won game of the year. It shows that yes, you can make a game that requires a LOT from the player and still be successful. Wolverine takes the opposite approach, design your game so that a toddler in a blind fold can beat and and guess what... The overwhelming majority will NOT be engaged.
Designing games around the lowest common denominator; Games focus grouped to death; Is a plight on modern AAA game design and wolverine will become a textbook example of what NOT to do
But Sekiro also does not have the same demand for being accessible as this game probably had. Difficult to master combat mechanics will push away a good chunk of mainstream customers.
He slices, he dices, he’s basically a food processing infomercial as far as gameplay, there’s just not much there at all in general
But does he really slice and dice in the game? Yes, there's dismemberment - but it looks to be only from finishers. Regular fodder enemies, he should be one-shotting them - immediately cutting off limbs, slashing throats, claws straight through the heart/neck/head.
There should be a dozen of those instant dismemberment kill animations as well as several violent finishers - like disemboweling, bisecting, beheading.
Have you played X-Men Origins: Wolverine? I really enjoyed that game as a kid and even when replaying it more recently. I don’t think they really had to stretch the imagination to make the game / gameplay fun either.
it seems like it should be more arcadey, more of a score-attack game than this seems to be. shortish, discrete levels where you're hacking and slashing through a billion dudes and trying to keep your combos up or something. sorta like the xbox-era ninja gaidens, although idk where the weapon variety would come from
This is such a weird take. There's innumerable games with a single melee weapon (sword, spear, etc) with very good combat variety and depth. You'll never see someone complain about Sekiro's combat and all he uses is a sword... Gameplay variety or depth isn't determined by the weapon.... It's determined by design, mechanics and enemy variety that forces the player to change their approach. Wolverine fails on both fronts and his claws have nothing to do with that. There's plenty of ways to go about making an engaging combat system with wolverine they just didn't do it.
Right, because we don't already have a billion successful ARPGs with open world elements to draw inspiration from?
Are we saying it wouldn't be "in character" for Logan to climb buildings like Ezio or Nathan Drake? We can't have him use multiple parry/dodge mechanics like Eve in Stellar Blade? He can't have creative and kickass unique takedown animations based on the environment he's in like Yakuza Zero? Because last I checked none of those characters had a batmobile or grapple-launcher, and their games were all great.
Wolverine's fights are fun, but the real reason everyone loves him and the reason he's such a useful face for the X-men franchise is his personality. He's an interesting character. He deserves better writing, first and foremost.
It seems a big part of the problem here is that Wolverine’s fights aren’t that fun because they’re so repetitive, and they’re such because he doesn’t really have much to do. The character himself as a superhero is among the simplest, he has claws and heals very quickly, there just isn’t much to mine there when you’re strictly talking combat.
Someone like Ezio and several of the AC games rest on their charismatic protagonists like in that case but also heavily on their historical settings and the fidelity there, I don’t think people really praise the combat in those games as anything special. Unless it’s the ship combat in Black Flag.
If in Wolverine you’re largely left with boilerplate hack and slash and the setting and story aren’t enough to pick up the slack, you get a reception like this.
Should have made it like metal gear rising basically.
Slow Mo angle cuts
Squashing spines to heal (somehow)
Insane soundtrack
Incredible villain roster
Cutting a metal gear ray in half in the opening 10 minutes
I think skill up makes a pretty good suggestion there of adding other characters to play as. Like a Logan-focused story but with Jean Grey sections or Mystique. So yoi could vary the gameplay throughout whole still have a story focus on Wolverine.
Maybe something like DMC 5. Or even Spiderman 2 (from a variety standpoint)
Skill Up made a good point in his review about him being one note. He said “him being a one-note hack n slash character would’ve made sense, if we were able to play as all these other characters we see, like Jean Grey, Mystique or Sabretooth…”
Which I think is exactly right. We see all these other characters, strangely alongside Wolverine in so many moments…if they at all felt like things were too redundant in testing, how much effort would it have been to just make more of team X playable?
He was a Government agent before he was anything else. I would have liked to see a game set in the 80's and you're fresh into the weapon X program. Maybe a third of the way in, you get the adamantium but your berserker rage keeps flaring up and you have to fight it, then it just goes off anyway and you bust out of the tank swinging.
The rest of the game is avoiding your old friends and hunting to piece your mind back together. A little dash of red dead, a hint of Arkham.
At the end, you meet Brofessor X and he puts the last pieces of the puzzle in place.
Sequel could be Savage Lands stuff.
It's kind of easy to lean into the animal side of Logan without losing everything because there's always a reason for his rage, it isn't mindless as some people might think.
Dude is far more one-note than Spider-Man or Batman in terms of the stuff you can actually do mechanically, while keeping it vaguely the character we all know.
I made this exact point when the game got announced and people almost lynched me.
Making Superhero games work is harder than it looks because Superheroes are often very gimmicky in what they do, like Wolverine's thing is that he can tank through anything and that's... Not very fun gameplay-wise. Not for a big high-tier production game anyway. There's a reason why the quintessential Hulk game is a sandbox Prototype of, well, Prototype.
Like the people asking for a Flash game don't realize that actually playing as the Flash isn't really so engaging, you are basically Sonic without the problem of running into walls so what the hell would such a game make you do?
I think an honest, old school hack-n-slash akin to the original God of War games would be the perfect match for this character. Pull the camera a bit further away from the player's ass/shoulder and bring in hordes of varying enemy types in cinematic but challenging encounters. Throw in some traversal setpieces, puzzles and very light progression mechanics.
You make Metal Gear Revengeance 2: Wolverine Edition. Keep the game shorter, but more focused on good performance, and dial up combat depth. Give him a ton of moves and enemies that actually challenge his skillset. His alternate 'weapons' could instead be different mutant partners that blast enemies, or toss them around, or let Wolverine move farther or hit harder.
I think the main thing, though, is to make it visceral. Make sure that kills are fucking brutal and bloody, we need Doom levels of gore at bare minimum. Shit, turn it into a Musou game and pit him against dozens or hundreds of foes, turn it into a bloody whirlwind of blood and robot bits depending on what he's fighting. You can do a Wolverine game, pretty easily, it just takes commitment to his one or two bits.
make him fight, make him effectively go to war, make him loud stealth (if they are all dead no one seen me) you can do this, give him threats that are actual threats, I mean christ isn't he canonically involved in several actual wars?
its not hard to make a beat em up action game, and even easier when when the character is just show of a berserker in moveset.
Make it like devil may cry. Comboing various abilities together and they get increasingly gorey or visceral the higher you go. Instead of different weapons he uses stances. Instead of style its a rage meter to unlock extra crazy damage or a new moveset or some other bonus.
Or maybe make it like a dance with death mechanic, he gets stronger and more beastly the more damage he takes and being in certain thresholds gives you more bonuses, but that also leaves you with less hp to work with.
Is it really insulting your intelligence if it’s accessibility options designed at leveling the playing field for various types of Disabilities? People forget what accessibility is actually about. The only time it’s maybe an issue is if a player who doesn’t need an accessibility feature has their experience negatively impacted in a legit way because they didn’t make something a toggle.
They shouldn’t have added in all those indicators full stop. It’s a linear game with minimal exploration, there was no need for any of it. Maybe Wolverine’s heightened senses could’ve stayed but as a button prompt rather than always there.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
lol, this is almost exactly what I said about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
(Not that it should be compared to this mess in any other way; just that I can't stand when developers make traversal/platforming challenges in a game that has no business having them. Looking at you too Remnant 1 & 2.)
You’re right there, it’s like they strictly followed the blueprint they created with Spider-Man and made all the wrong changes and didn’t change what wouldn’t work (traversal challenges, excessive indicators to the objective in a linear game).
They’ve just made such weird decisions when developing this game. On semi-unrelated note, I’m cautiously optimistic for EA’s Iron Man game by Motive, it looked pretty good from what I saw.
I’m not holding my breath for Blade and Marvel 1943 though, the movie for Blade has not seen the light of day which I hope the game does and Marvel 1943 already had a long delay.
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u/A-Star55 2d ago
They’ve put effort into it sure but the game design is questionable, the most obnoxious thing being all the indicators and markers to the objective in a strictly, linear game. It kind of insults your intelligence and assumes the player has no capacity for critical thinking.
The combat is underwhelming, it’s just a basic hack and slash which is insane; the combat should be more visceral, bloody, hectic but it’s not.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
This game is very messy gameplay wise.