Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Marvel's Wolverine Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

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Hello, gamers. Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast for Thursday, September 10th, 2026. I am Andy Cortez, and I am joined by Tim Geddes. Let's him host. Jordan Midler. What time host? Greg Miller. Among us. Okay. I get it. I hate it for you. That's an interesting way to say it. You hate him for you. four-time back-to-back-to-back-to-back kind of funny game

Showdown, the champion. It's crazy you would make fun of my disability like that, like just bad memory and stuff like... That's not a disability. No, no, no. The ADHD, that's a different thing. Bad memories, just bad memory. He's being so ablest.

If you're watching live, be a part of the show by super chatting on YouTube.com forward slash kind of funny games. Remember, we couldn't do this without our producers on patreon.com forward slash kind of funny. So thank you. Mega Buster, Delaney the Somb-twining, and Michael Pessavento. Let's get into it, gamers.

It's been a long time coming. For now, let's begin with the topic of the show. Wolverine. Insomnia made it. Show did. Oh, he's got some bars to drop on it. An upcoming action-adventure game. Published by Sony.

Based on the Marvel Comics character, Wolverine. The aforementioned Wolverine. It's a standalone entry in the Marvel Spider-Man series telling an original self-contained story that shares continuity with Insomniac's other Marvel games currently sitting at an open critic's score of 81 and Metacritic of, we got to give it up for Greg Miller, 77.

We had a conversation yesterday. Dude, he was like, I would be worried about it. Like, Barrett's all worried because it's on his fantasy teamball, and you were like, I think it'll be, it'll net out of 83 or something. I was like, I think it's gonna be 77. He fucking crushed it. Crushed it.

Wow. Wow. You nailed that shit. Releases September 15th, 4.69, 99, exclusive to the plate station five. Who wants to start? There's been a lot of just discussions and a lot of scuttle butt on the office. A lot of hushed in the office. Yeah.

We discussed this. A lot of people are saying that. A whole lot of discussions. And, you know, to be honest with you, if I could just be real selfish right here in this moment. I'd love that. Jordan Miller, after hearing just a lot of the scuttle, but I go, that's one less game that I, you know,

that maybe I don't have to commit to because it's really, really packed right now. We're playing lots of stuff. Review season. Review season is everywhere. I would like to start with Tim Gettys. Thank you, Andy. Mr. Marvel. I do really, really appreciate that.

Mr. Insomiac. I love, love the output that they've had this generation. I have platinumed every insomniac game this generation before review. Like I've been so into and I've loved those experiences. I go back to the Spider-Man games and even Ratch and Clank Rift Apart often. And any excuse to go back, I've loved that there's been, you know, PC ports. There's been PSSR upgrades to those games over the years.

There's been costume upgrades coming back. So I always enjoy any excuse to go back. and, you know, play just for a little bit because Insomnia games are so fun and I love them so dearly and they give me a amount of tasks that I want to do for an amount of time that feels very satisfying.

Easily digestible. And just, yeah, it's like I enjoy 100% of these games. Wolverine is the first Insomniac game this generation that I did not platinum before review. I'm very close. I will platinum it. You want to, okay. I will.

There's a couple things I need to check off. I need to replay a couple missions. I don't want to, Andy. I just don't want to. As I was playing through this game, there were multiple times that I was like, man, I can't believe I have Wolverine, and I'm not thinking about it every second,

and I feel like I'm having to schedule and make time to get through the game, to make sure that I see it all the way through to the end, and I can't believe I'm saying that about a Wolverine game, a Marvel AAA video game, and it's more than anything, an insomiac game. I'm giving Wolverine a 6.5 on the kind of funny scale. it's okay. It is okay. It is not a bad video game. I've seen some people be way harsher than I am. And I do not agree with them. I do think that this is okay and almost to good. I feel like there's a lot of, there is a lot of good in this game. But I think that all of what I want to see from an insomniac game, a PlayStation 5 game, a follow up after what we have seen before, this misses the mark in a lot of ways. And it's hard to not be disappointed in what the Wolverine experience.

is from a gameplay perspective and from a story perspective. Again, I don't think that any of that is bad. I just don't think that it is ever great, even. Definitely not amazing. I think there is a lot of good here, but I think more often than not, I'm finding myself being like, man, this is okay.

I'm having an enjoyable time with it, but I'm more disappointed than anything. And we'll get more into specifics throughout the review. But I overall, by takeaway from this is, I haven't been this disappointed in a video game since Devil May Cry 2. And that's always kind of been my big example of, oh, wow, there's no way that I'm not going to like this. Other people might not like it, but there's no way I'm not going to be super into it.

And for me to not be thinking that Wolverine is at least an 8 out of 10, big disappointment. And I want to clear, this game's not as bad as Definitely Cry 2. Sure. But my expectations were, I think, very, very high for a reason for what Insomnia has built the last generation. They have quite the pedigree. They put out bangers and bangers and bangers.

Let's go over to Jordan Midler from patreon.com forward slash video games chronicle and video games chronicle.com. It's BGC News. VGC. News. VGC.com. News. VGC. dot news. Yeah, Wolverine is an interest in one because kind of picking up on Tim's point there.

When Spider-Man 2 came in for a review, I finished that game in two days because I could not stop playing it. like I loved every minute of the Spider-Man too kind of experience. Whereas with Wolverine, I felt like I was doing the platinum, the platinum admin throughout the entire game. There was no point where this felt like a fresh new experience to me. Even at the start, I was like, okay, the combat's a little basic, but surely we're going to pick up some steam here.

And the combat is essentially the same from hour one as it is at hour 12. It's kind of baffling how repetitive this game is. And not only is it repetitive, the things that are repetitive. are so dated that I make the point in my review. For a long time, everyone was referencing the Raven Software Wolverine game, the X-Men Origins Wolverine. And this game's identical to it in so many ways.

Apart from the fact that it's absolutely beautiful, from a gameplay perspective, it is so similar to games of that generation that I can't help but feel massively disappointed. It's also so patronising to the player in so many different ways that we'll get into. It just feels like a game that came together very quickly.

I mean, there was very famous leadership change over there in the past couple of years, and I think you can see that all across this game. There's elements of it that feel like this was once a much more open game that they decided to put invisible walls up and kind of cut off. For me, I'm setting at like a 6.5.

I think that there's stuff in this game I do like. I like the characterization of Logan specifically. As I said, I think it looks great, but as someone who completes games at an absolute rapid pace for work, I found myself really struggling towards the last couple of hours of this game thinking I cannot believe I'm doing another fight against a big kind of tall enemy. So I'll just use all my powers against them to kill them instantly. There was no there was no fun.

There was no challenge. It's really, really lackluster. I do have the platinum because I have a sickness, but it wasn't enjoyable. It was not an enjoyable platinum. Greg Miller Hi Andy Man The king of the scuttle butt

I've just been getting all the scuttle butt From me about what I do You know what I mean Thank you for giving me A lot of hints As to whether I should like Boot this sucker up or not

Yeah no problem Greg Miller Yeah Give me a little top level thoughts On Wolverine Along with your review score Please And also how long did it take

Tim to beat? I think it was at like Maybe around 20 Jordans Like play with the 15, something like that. And I'm talking about like doing all, like, my going back and getting to the,

okay, got you. Almost platinum, man. My PlayStation clock says 15, so you know, imagine that it's like 12, 13. So there, the thing always is a little wonky for what it's doing.

Um, man, I've talked a lot about this in my head and done this opening a few different times, right? And I think for me, at a top level of you is that at my core, I'm always going to be like Jordan, a writer in terms of how I come at a video game review.

And as you guys know, I live and die by whatever, review scale rubric I'm on, whether it be IG and whether it be here, whether it's five stars, whether it's 20 point scale. And so Kevin, if you go wide and show it with the review score underneath me, please, like, I've gone around and around with this one. Because everything you said, Tim, is true. Wolverine is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, right? Like, it is not broken. It is not cheap. It is not poorly made. It's not any of those things. But it's definitely not good. Like, it is not a good game. And so then you really get into,

who I am and how I come into a video game review. I don't care about numbers. That's not what it's about for me. It is about the adjective I'm attaching to this, right? As I talk about what this game is. And if you're talking to me, and obviously when you talk to someone about a video game, it's far different, the words you use, blah, blah, blah.

But to have okay and mediocre in front of me, I have to go mediocre. And so I have to give this game a 5.5. And that sucks because I feel like I know what a 5.5 reads to the audience. Now granted, you're our audience. you're a different kind of audience. We're not on Metacritic. It's none of that shit to worry about.

But it is the idea that it is not a bad game, but the definition of mediocre, of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance. Like, that's where we're at. Like, I can't, I can't sit here and talk about any of the verticals of Wolverine, whether we're talking about stories, whether we're talking about performance,

whether we're talking about characters and performance being actor performance, by the way. We'll get into all that when we get going. And I don't mean specifically, Logan, but again, we'll get in all that. Gameplay, gameplay loop, none of that is like, well, there's the shining thing. There's the thing that I truly enjoyed that rises,

it brings the whole tide up and rises, or raises all boats. I just don't have that with this game. Like, it's a disappointment across the board in terms of, man, I was never excited to sit down and play it. You know what I mean? I was never like,

ah, fucking nails on a chalkboard. Were there other review codes in this September? Just like there's other games for you to go spend $70 on that I think do things like that this game tries to, way better. Yeah, of course. But I was never like, oh, God. Nor was I ever playing it being like, this is cheap, this is bullshit, this is whatever. It was like,

cool, I'm fighting through this room full of bad guys again with the same moves and the same moverset again to get to the next cut scene in a story I already find disappointing and don't think it's going anywhere interesting and shockingly, I don't think it did. And we do that over and over and over again through the entire thing. Tough. This sounds like whenever we do an in-review movie

Tim and it's like a movie we don't give a shit about really? You know, playing through this game, I thought about Captain America Brave New World. Like many, many times. Like, I look at them like... Even the 40x viewing of it? Yeah. Like, I'm different than a lot of people

where I don't like look at a lot of the MCU movies and go, I fucking hate it. This is fucking trash, whatever. I'm like, I'm more disappointed that it's not amazing. But I'm like, that was fine. I enjoyed the good parts of it and we can move on. That's kind of how I feel about this. I'm just that to me at this point means a lot more for a big PS5 exclusive game from Insomniac than what I expect from the MCU at this point in the phases.

But yeah, I do think that we're at a point that is it's just okay. And like I don't that's not great. Like that's like like it's really especially when there are so many things coming out around it. But like that I that's one thing that just gets in the way. I think that, you know, there's definitely merit to. talking about the place and time that Wolverine is coming out right now. But I think remove that from the conversation. If this game came out,

it was the only thing in September, I still think we would be feeling this way. Oh, of course. I think that it is really the, like... To Jordan's point, right, of like how archaic this feels. Like, this is... These are old mistakes. The archaic side of it is not inherently a bad thing.

I bring up Captain America Brave New Worlds, and, you know, obviously there... You get what I'm saying with the limitations there. I do think that is a bad thing. The thing about this is... I also was thinking a lot playing this of Marvel Cosmic Invasion, a game that I love. Very simple game,

very archaic game in terms of its design, where you are just going left to right and punching things a lot, and it's very repetitive. And every once in a while you get a kind of cool set piece. But even that, I didn't review that highly because I feel like I was a little disappointed by the lack of the bigger set pieces and big wow moments. But you're having fun just kind of going and slashing and jumping

and shooting, whatever it is you're doing there. The thing here is it's the exact same type of gameplay. Like this game is so ridiculously linear of every. It's like it feels like pre-uncharted one in some ways. You are in this hallway to this hallway to this hallway. There's not collectibles anywhere. And if there are collectibles, you know because they are glowing and screaming at you.

And there are multiple things pointing to them. I sure love Wolverine being comic accurate to breaking open these blue tanks for XP. Get XP. What fucking year is it? But again, that feels like those old school arcade games, but instead of being in 2D, it's in 3D. So I, on that, in that respect, I can enjoy it and find that there's, there's fun with that.

But the rest of the game presents this as if it's a big PlayStation Studios, third person action game and the narrative and story and performance and set pieces. And I think that those things, the budget that you see oozing out of this, it doesn't add up. And it reminds me of a archaic style experience that there's fun in. but when it's wrapped in such a pretty wrapping, I think it brings up more questions than satisfaction.

I would, real quick, Jordan, I want everybody to, in the YouTube chat, who is here, leave a like, subscribe, leave a like, subscribe. And also apologize for everybody who was like, of course they're going to love it, of course. I would like to see an official apology from everybody. Before you wait a long time for that, yeah. Go ahead, Jordan.

Just to Tim's point about how, like, air is there's a segment when you're in Madrepoor where you have to fight at a fish market and just before this you can walk around the fish market into kind of the different areas the second that encounter finishes and a little clip plays you're you're only moved like five feet outside the fish market but if you turn back and go back into that market just to look around just to see if you've missed anything the game screams at you that you cannot go that way and turns you back around like the entire thing feels like it was built for players who have never played a video game before.

Like it is so unbelievably hand-holded. The amount of times where you know where you have to go, but it forces Wolverine into like this you cannot run mode. So you're just walking slowly. And even if you get to somewhere that requires a running jump, it will just make you stand there until the voice acting stopped, which is in such contrast to Spider-Man, where they literally recorded voice lines for swinging as fast as you can because they know that people want this story stuff kind of in the background while you're doing all the superhero

shit. It's just, there is a, if we were listing all the weird things this game does, that is so kind of surprising and it's mediocrity, this would be like a four-hour review, because there's so many little things that you can just go, yeah, why do they do that? Why do you get way more XP than you actually need to hit the level cap? Why is the level cap 36 of all numbers? Like, there's just such bizarre shit up and down. Yeah.

That seems like an oversight. That's just a typo. No one's paid it to actually like, oh, shit. That's got to be a typo. I love that. Real quick, I want to think because there's a great broad performances and I do think that there's a lot to talk about here

because that's a big part of this game. A lot talking about in general. Absolutely. But I will say a major, absolute highlight of this game to me was Troy Baker's performance. I did see that on the internet. I loved it. I thought it was one of the more nuanced performances

is I have experienced from Troy, and granted, like, I don't play a lot of the open world RPGs and stuff that he has done in the past. There's a lot of characters of his. I do not know. I was like, holy crap, he's working for this. Shocker, he's really good at his job. No, but I really, really, really was like, oh, this is, this is one of them reasons why Troy is one of the best of all time.

I saw Timor Hussein say he hard carries so much. I mean, I really, really think so. And I also really liked Liam's performance. I think the performance of Logan was very, very. very high quality. I don't like the writing much in this game kind of across the board. And so to piggyback off, I think Troy

is killing and performing, but I wish they gave him more to work better stuff to work with. That's my thing. And it comes back to Liam as well as Wolverine, right? I think he looks the part. I think he fucking is acting and doing his whole like stick with me because it's going to sound counter-attuitive, I guess, but

he is great at what he's doing. I don't think he's the Wolverine we need. And I don't mean him personally, I mean, the character they give him. When Wolverine previews dropped and I was like, I was welled, I don't know, I saw so much, and there's, I know there's a lot of people just looking to hate and hate and hate, but there wasn't an undercurrent of real fans who aren't just haters being like, there's something about him, he doesn't look like,

Wolverine, it doesn't, it isn't my Wolverine, I was like, that's interesting, I don't get that vibe. And then playing throughout the game, one of the games, I think, Achilles heels in the narrative is show don't tell. They tell us so many times about him being tortured or that this relationship will they won't they with him and jean tell tell tell that but i don't feel the characters ever show it until very specific examples that maybe are spoilers we won't get into but by then it's too late and so my point that i'm driving at here with this version leiam's version of wolverine is that i think he's too kind his eyes are too kind he's too compassionate he's too nice and i don't mean necessarily in the actions although

that is there. But I, this is me just being somebody who consumes movies probably and moves on. It gave me such a different and new respect for Hugh Jackman. From the moment we meet him in X-Men one, right? He is a tortured soul. The, you know, the shotgun to the back of the hair, him in the car. Does it hurt every time? Like there's a brooding, I hate myself, Wolverine that I think is key to the, I don't know who I am and I've got a past and I hate it. And here they could have given us a Wolverine that isn't that guy, but it is that guy. I have a past and I'm bad and I have berserker rage and all. It happens to me sometime and I get in his, but then he's back to being like, I'd love to hang out with you, Logan. You're awesome. But then he's like, oh, but I'm tortured.

I'm like, you keep telling me you're tortured, but you really don't seem tortured. And that's not the actor. I don't think. That's the material and the direction and everything else. Had you ever mentioned the, the eyes comment before? I haven't. I've seen other people. Okay. Oh, no, maybe I've seen. I had seen the inner. talk about before it isn't my Wolverine or something about it. Okay, because I did see DG Mayer in the Twitch chat say he has soft eyes. And then I heard you tell Barrett several days ago, like, he just, he's, he's, he exudes like, he's too lovable.

I'm too, like, nice and kind and I'm not this asshole that you want to avoid at all costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The saber tooth's there. Oh, my God, fucking saber, that's what he is. That's all he is. I did hear, yeah, I fucking, dude, like, and again, for, for, Background for people, of course, I'm a DC comics fan. I never was into Marvel comics outside of Spider-Man that much.

I know the X-Men through the X-Men movies, through then a bagillion video games I've played here, there, blah, blah, blah. I've always thought Sabretooth sucks. I've never seen a good rendition I think of Sabretooth, right? This game is like top of the monument of why I think Sabretooth fucking sucks. Just screaming everything all the time. You're a complete fucking asshole to everyone. you're on Team X.

They have a whole thing where like there's Walter on the team, right? Just a dude and like, you will not believe how many times you hear the, Hey, Walter, I trash your fridge. You're like, why are you here? Like, what do you do? What do you bring to the team that we have to put up with you being such an asshole? I mean, just with that line,

he's supposed to be, Jordan, would you assume he's maybe comedic relief or? It's weird because just on Greg's point in there, it feels like the, and I did like kind of the narrative overall, all, but it feels like they're trying to do so many different eras of Wolverine at the same time in different parts of his career altogether. Because to Greg's point, they set it up as like, okay, he's in Team X, the X men don't exist.

He's a bit like wet behind the ears. The turn hasn't happened yet, but they're also pulling stuff from like old man Logan and he's this experienced fighter. So I think that's kind of the thing that falls away. Like he could have just been a dickhead the entire time, but then you wouldn't be able to do the gene thing as much. but they obviously wanted jean to be a big character that honestly seems like she was probably playable at one point um but yeah the the saber tooth stuff is so like you i'm glad you don't see

him for a long time in the middle of the game i think that the the mystic and um tiger is that i think that stuff is under explored and could have been given a lot more time and i also think that the the young mutants that they set up at the very start of the game they they stop dealing with them way too quickly. That was like an, I thought, okay, we're going to come back to this bar all the time. We're going to be checking in. We're going to be maybe doing a mission with exploring what these guys' powers are. If you don't know who these characters are, that essentially just like random people and you're like, hmm, that's a very famous voice actress that's playing one of these. Why are they just a random NPC in the middle of this game? Can we talk about that?

We've seen, we've seen her in trailers and everything else. Right. Okay. Well, it's, yes, I believe so. We all know. I'm fine I'll Google I was in my previews in our preview so we were able to talk about the preview I didn't do the preview no right I keep forgetting you got sick or something you ate a bad pizza yeah I had too many monsters let me just do it Google ate a bad pizza I like I liked the kind Wolverine I feel like that like it was it was an interesting take on the character I think it was inconsistent though like I I don't think the great's criticisms are are off base overall.

I feel like when we look at the insomniac world for Marvel with what they built with Spider-Man now over three games, I really think that one of the high points of that game is what it does differently from our expectations of Spider-Man and the world and characters around him and Peter Parker and all those dynamics. And I don't always love the changes they make, but I always respect them.

I always am like, okay, cool, I like that you're going out of your way to make this your own Spider-Man and make this your own part of this world and his giving him a history that I'm interested in going back and trying to piece the puzzle pieces back together to get from the origin point of the radioactive spider bite to where we are playing as Spider-Man.

It's like, okay, cool, he's been doing it this long. The backpacks are telling me this story. I can kind of understand what's happening. I think with Wolverine, a big problem is because he is ageless and has lived forever and doesn't remember things. We're filling in gaps over way too long of a period that it doesn't feel like I'm filling things in as much as I'm just kind of like,

getting a bunch of random things. It's just like everything and nothing could have happened. And it doesn't really matter because the Wolverine we're dealing with right now is this kind of kind of kind guy that's like surrounded by a bunch of like mean assholes or like corrupt people and all this. And it just kind of doesn't they give you enough to understand why he's where he's at. But I feel like they constantly are pushing themselves. Like, but there's a darkness in there. And whenever the darkness starts showing, I'm just like, but that's not the character that we're seeing here for for so much of it. It's definitely not what the gameplay is to back that up.

But I think that what I'm talking about loving so much about Insomnia Spider-Man being its own worlds, it's the characters you know, but they're kind of different in a satisfying way. I do respect how different this is. I respect the takes they have, the timeline and the, where what we know of X-Men, what we know of the different groups and worlds and stuff here, I like that this is different.

I don't like the direction that they went pretty much anyway. Like, I don't like Gene's character. It's a very different gene. I don't like it. I don't like the history that they added. I don't like it. I don't like where the enemies are. I don't like where mutants are.

It's like, there's just a lot of things that I'm like, oh, man, like, y'all definitely have your own take here. It's a take that I don't like, but I respect it. Is it a take that you feel that way because you have so much learned knowledge and or would somebody coming into this who has no background for X-Men maybe find enjoyment in what these arcs are? I mean, I say that as somebody that has way more knowledge of Spider-Man, and I love what they did, right? So it's like, here it's like I have a lot of knowledge. I think the knowledge definitely enhances this experience.

I think there's a lot of things that are very cool Easter eggs, just like we got in Spider-Man. But some of them aren't even Easter-Rex. Some of them are like understanding who a character is in their history from the comics and shows and stuff goes such a long way in enhancing this story and giving you kind of, I think that there is a triangle in this game of the different facts. actions and groups that are presented in their ideologies about the exact same thing when it comes to the core mutant issue or condition. And I feel like that stuff is greatly enhanced by knowledge of those people from the past and how they have acted previously. Because I think that the story that they're telling here, they don't go deep enough into things. I think Trask is a really good example of that. Trask is the guy that made the Sentinels.

You can play this game for 10 minutes and you'll know that, right? And if you watch the movies, you know that. But what up, Dinklach? Why does Traskate Mutants? Why is he this upset about it? And there's like throwaway lines in the background of just like, well, what if one of them blows up a school or something? I'm like, there's so much interesting things there to talk about.

They don't talk about it. They never get into that. The assumptions they make and the bad guys, bad doing bad things happens way too often here. Where I'm like, we're talking about some really deep subject matter that they clearly know his deep subject matter. And they treat very importantly at certain points, but I do think they just shy away from it when it cuts to the point that I needed them

to step it up for it to be really special because so much of this, it's fun to get through and you kind of want to know what happens next, but I feel like more often than not that what happens next goes, made me go like, huh, really. Damn.

That's kind of key to my point there where I'm talking about the other mutants that you're with at the start of the game. I really thought that those would be the kind of vessels through which you learn more about kind of the mutant plight in this state of the world. Maybe one of them goes into the rest of Madreport because that area is far more open than they actually let you play and you have to do like a quick side mission with them or something like that. But they skirt past that so quickly to just like go straight down this kind of Gene Logan line

that by the time you get back to the conclusion of the game where you would really want all that kind of mutant subtext, it feels kind of rushed like the, I don't know if they started making this game and then they were like, okay, we actually just want to get us to a point where we can do X-Men, let's change up how we're going to make this Wolverine game, because it feels like it's serving like three different masters at all times. And I think that for me, the things that I liked about the narrative were the individual kind of conversations and performances, but the overall story of the game when I got to the like, when you get like an hour into it, you're like, I know exactly how this is going to end and I know exactly how this is going to play into the

rest of the presumed universe and the things that were kind of on the way up to that, like the specific set pieces. There's a set piece mission with Gene that's, I couldn't say slows the pace down, but the pace is always a fucking crawl in this game. Like, that is an extremely slow mission that I was like, okay, this is this is cool. It's reference. I'm enjoying this. I'm enjoying these two together. But yeah, it's just missing. It's missing the kind of oomph that the Spider-Man games have for me.

And also, like, they fit in the same universe because they have the insomniac look. But I don't feel like these characters are in the Spider-Man universe. I don't know how to quantify that specifically. But I feel like if you put this Wolverine next to Spider-Man to the point about him being too nice, it would just be like, yeah, these are just too nice superhero. There's no real sense that, oh, this is, this is, when the previews happened and they're like, oh, he starts on Team X.

He's with Sabretooth and Mystica. I was like, okay, we're doing like a, we're doing a redemption arc. He's going to be a tweener here, but he's not. He's like, he's just like, he's just like a nice guy the entire time. Then when eventually terrible things happen, you're like, oh, this is just a bit. That's a little bit off putting out. I've had, I've invested in you as this baby face and you've suddenly just smashed the chair over this person. Yeah.

you're just a solid stand-up guy, yeah. Yeah, it's a little about weird. I think, you know, Andy, to piggyback off something you were saying, right, where you knew nothing and you walked into this, right?

Would it work better? Would you be fine with characterizations and things like that? I just don't think that person really exists on who's going to go get this game. Because I think, honestly, if I'm guessing, and I know we had a conversation

weeks ago, where I was kind of like, they're just doing knock-off X-Men here, And I assume because we don't want it to be, well, we play, I've seen the movies, right? I know a little bit about Professor X. So rather than have Professor X getting a team together and doing the X men, we'll have Essex doing this and the X team or whatever. And Tim's like, well, that's accurate to Essex's point, you know, who he is in the comics and yet he dietia.

And I'm like, I get that, but I still feel like when you do this and you do it so closely to what the X men are, even like, you know, the motivations of people here, there's the anti-mutants and there's the pro-mutants and then there's the evil kind of promulence, right? It's like, cool. So that guy's just Magneto then. Like, what do we do? Like, why are we doing the same roles, even though that is, but not doing it? Like, just fucking commit

or do something completely different, rather than give what feels like knock off X-Men, knock the team U.S. Men, right? Yeah, exactly. And then what we'll give you Gene, and as you've seen throughout the promo campaign, and you're seeing here, like, they're going to hang the whole fucking story, or at least their

hearts on, will they, won't they, what's going on between them? And personally, I think he has no, they have no chemistry together. And it's not the actor's fault. They're good performances. They're doing with what they can. But like back to show don't tell. I would say there's one scene.

It's from the slow mission Jordan was talking about where it's way late in the game. Where I was like, okay, that is the first time I've seen you guys together doing something. I'm like, yeah, that's kind of hot. I believe you're like doing a thing. Outside of it, I don't, I never felt that. I never believed that. So to try to make me care about what's going on. Why?

I was like, I just don't. I'll say it, man. I'll tell you what. There's also a weird amount of like, there's also a weird amount of like small vilitis where they're like, we'll put Wolverine in the costume and we'll put some of the characters in the costume. But see this Gene Gray fella that we're with the entire time. We'll give it a green dress and a mask once, but we won't just go the entire way. Like it is weirdly CW in that way. And it works.

It's obvious. Like I, throughout this game, you have all these Wolverine suits. I was like, cool. I'm going to put him in street clothes because he looks like a fucking clown running around in a Wolverine. Eventually I got the text. black when I put him on that. I never put the mask on. I was like, no mask.

Great was saying, he hates the call on. And I was just like, I don't know. And then like the more than I'm like, like, what are you talking about? Especially I think that like having him run around in the face,

that looks goofy. Like there's a lot of the different outfits where the amount of hair he has. I'm just like, is a distract. The world. It's, I mean like, again,

it's narrative. It's a bit visual. It's just I don't think it fits having him in the call and in these goofy suits when like this is the missions he's doing. He doesn't, he doesn't feel like he's Wolverine. Like I and I hate that shit from every superhero fucking show that ends at season 10 We're finally gonna put him in the suit Dracula

But it feels like exactly it feels like that's what we're building to when you play this game I was just like and not to mention the suit doesn't make any fucking sense I mean I will I will there's like here it is it's a nano fiber so it'll heal and then I'm still cut up all the time Like what the fuck's the suit doing he'll be he'll better do it out I do I do it out I do agree with you that like him in the suit doesn't fit the story and team that they're telling here okay like I'm just saying I like how it looks and I like gameplay I'm just like, see him, it just stands out to me. Like not being able to see his eyes when I can see everybody else's eyes is something weird.

And I know, what about Spider-Man? Like, it is an apples to apples, and we can't do it that way. Because, again, there's something about Spider-Man's world feeling real. Something about Peter Parker's protecting his identity and he is going off and doing this. And when I'm done doing the boss fight or the fight of a million guys on a rooftop, I then swing off and catch the kids balloon, which doesn't happen. But you know what I mean? You go and you exist in the city without it.

Whereas, like, you're in these missions. And sometimes, yeah, you're kicked out of the fucking plane. and then it's like, all right, cool, now you're on the ground? Do you want to put your suit on? I'm like, wow, what the fuck? Do you think this would have been better served if it was completely disconnected from Spider-Man's universe? No.

I don't think that matters. Yeah, that doesn't matter at all. Honestly, I think one of my complaints and it's, you know, I will talk about it is I feel like it would have been better served if they chose in this, stick with me, an art style other than realism. Like the fact that it's meant to look like a movie slash Spider-Man's universe like real people, I think works against it,

where it's like, yeah, Gene looks, the entire time in this trench coat. Like that's just, and like sometimes when people are standing there, you, it's back to what the old criticism people had against Marvel's Avengers the game where it looks like people are in Halloween costumes.

And it's just like, this isn't, this isn't what you're doing. I don't understand. Whereas like something obviously, cosmic invasion, you're playing a side scroll rate, but you're not thinking about why they're in their suits

or what they're doing. Like, Mystique never looks normal. And then when she goes to the bar and puts on her outfit, I'm like, I don't know, I guess that's even weirder, but okay,

cool, whatever. I had a, There's like a- We're venturing into nitpicky personally things but like the game doesn't work for all of us for reasons and here's fucking Walter. Let's hear

from Walter everybody. And there's a part where you're like in Japan at night and you're walking down the like the kind of Camarocho style street and a leather trench coat and a leather jacket and I was like maybe this should have just been the whole game

like maybe it should have just been like Logan on his adventures in Tokyo. He's just dressed like this and then maybe at the end you pull on the like what do you want yellow spandex like to start off with that kind of stuff it just seems silly especially when literally in that scene you were

shown there where Jean Grey is wearing the green dress she's in disguise and like oh this is a ridiculous thing for her to be wearing but the rest of the time she's wearing like a Brian Singer era like cool version of her costume like it's all just very odd especially as Greg points out

mystique is just wearing the mystique costume at the bar where that's previously she was in the team X thing it's like it's like guys like if you didn't you didn't need to call it you could have just done Gwen X-Men everyone would have been fine with us like it's yeah shout out Troy Baker

he really saves this one and that counterpoint Andy I get to wear the ultimate X-Men Wolverine costume okay oh it was fucking awesome hell yeah yeah finally got that I was not happy with the suits then I got there and I'm like how did it's talking to cook a little bit they unlock it at a

healthy pace just like Spider-Man I do think, I know, let's jump to ads. Yeah, that's, I want to talk about combat. Yeah. I was, I had a segue earlier for hot. I was going to, you know what is hot, though, like hearing from our sponsors, but then I was going to also mention stuff that I was playing and just because I wanted to get in like, you know,

don't worry about it. It was just a really It would have been an awesome segue, but yeah, let's hear a word from our sponsors, everybody. This episode is brought to you by five hour energy. Indulge your sweet tooth with a fruity rainbow, extra strength five hour energy shot. It's basically a candy store and a bottle.

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Kind of funny 50 off at factor meals.com. See the website for more details. Before we get to some super chats, Tim's, you had something you wanted to say. Yeah, leading into the little ad segue that we were talking about, comparisons to Spider-Man. And I feel like we have to talk about that because this game does not exist in a vacuum. And even if it did, out of the world of Spider-Man, the fact remains that, like, this is a game that I doubt many people are going to play that didn't play at least one of the previous Spider-Man games. So there is kind of a one-to-one comparison there. I do think that

it is apples to apples in this situation because the gameplay is so very similar, if not just direct copy and paste from the general gameplay of Spider-Man. Jordan, Greg, would you agree? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So that's the baseline there. I think the biggest problem is core baseline Spider-Man gameplay is fun.

Like there is a lot of fun to be had. I like the, we're in a combat scenario, and I'm just mashing square and triangle and jumping from person to person to person. Maybe I'm mixing a gadget here. It's fun. The gadget stuff. Being creative.

The ability's coming. Jumping up, like the stealth takedowns, just that the base, base of that, I do think that is a lot of fun. And it's like, all right, cool, no matter how many times I do it, I'm still enjoying this. Spider-Man, though, ratchets all that stuff up. And there's so much more meat on the stick when it comes to the set pieces because of the momentum of running around, jumping, swinging, having the webs, being able to be used both as a defense thing, offense thing, and traversal thing. And with all of that, you're just getting a lot of dynamic battles. and you're able to web people's feet up,

go underneath their legs, get them from the back. Like, whereas with Wolverine, it's just stab, stab, stab, sap, sap, sap, sap, sap. And it's never more than that. It's always just stabbing. And in Spider-Man, you can kind of web-zip to somebody and, like, pull them towards you or you pull towards them.

Wolverine just kind of jumps at them. Almost every example, as you just keep going, it's like, all right, Spider-Man can climb walls, but also then he can swing. Wolverine can climb walls, kind of. It's like every starting pace of the Spider-Man. 18. I'm not supposed to do this here. I just think that like the more comparisons there are to playing Spider-Man versus playing Wolverine.

It's like, wow, both are starting at the same good spot. But Spider-Man just takes it so much further constantly. And I think another example of that is presentation and set pieces. When we are playing the opening rhino fight of in Spider-Man and you're going through the mall, I think it was Miles Morales. It's like so crazy. And like there's so many set. I mean, the opening of Spider-Man 1, we're going after Kingpin, right?

Yeah, whoa, here we go. We're on to the thing. All of that, like the big set pieces, and you know them well. And even dating all the way back to the debut of Spider-Man at E3 when we see him running through, like, he's on the street. Then he jumps into a window and, like, there's, like, papers flying as he's, like, running through an office or whatever. Just how crazy that all looked. And that's been PlayStation games. That's kind of what we expect from them these days.

Wolverine doesn't have a single set piece that I'm blown away by. thinking about the opening of Spider-Man too with Sandman, blown away by that. All of these, because he is Wolverine compared to Spider-Man, you're holding R2 and you're holding forward. And that's it. And you're just kind of going straight.

And I can't believe that. Because in Spider-Man, the moment you pick up that controller and you swing and the music starts to swell as you get higher and fall faster and it's so dynamic and moving, Wolverine's always at the exact same speed the entire time, and I was blown away,

that you get into a lot of these challenges that so Spider-Man had as well. Use all your different gadgets. Use this combat scenario. We're going to send wave after wave of enemies, and you're eventually doing all the same things, but there's a lot of ways to do those. In Wolverine, there's one way to do them.

There's just one way to do them. There's a lot of get from point A to point B, obstacle courses. There's one way to do them. And that is hold R2, hold forward, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. I can't imagine not get, getting the platinum trophy on those challenges first time every time. Yeah.

There's nothing to them. And there's a couple different paths. Not that I'm arguing with you. But I mean, I'm throwing it out there. I don't know that those even matter. I never worried about it. Yeah,

I don't know. To hold forward and just go. And there were multiple times where I was playing and a QTE came up that I wasn't prepared for. So I didn't touch anything. Yeah. Guess what happened? Oh, by the way, just on the,

none of the QTs, you actually have to press anything. It just plays the game automatically. It just plays L2 R2 pop up. You cannot touch the controller and it just goes through. You can hit square and it goes. You hit any button and it'll do the prompts. So you hit no button

and you just go. It's tricking you. It's a placebo. I want to jump in here because combat is something I wanted to touch on a lot and I think this parlay is into it right and also pulls from Jordan's earlier comment of like this game treats you like you've never played a video game before.

I think when we, especially us, the critics and people are talking about this, the enthusiasts, right? That's one of the reasons it's going to get dinged so badly is that I think this was a game that Insomniac was like, man, Spider-Man sells so much, right? Let's make, we're going to sell this as much probably. Let's make it welcoming for every Wolverine fame to walk into.

And I think that is such a miss, and it's why it's getting the review scores it's getting, and it's a part of the core problem with the game. And I think that's so eloquently shown in the combat failings. you, of course, come in and reference Spider-Man, which we need to. I want to throw out two different games that I'm going to reference multiple times here, right? Fresh off the review, the Blood of Dawn Walker,

and then also just Diablo. I'm throwing this out for a couple different reasons, right? But every time in Blood of Dawn Walker, I would go to get into a combat scenario. Inside, there'd be this hit of, yes, I love doing this. And it's doing the same fucking thing over and over again. By definition, gameplay loops are repetitive. game gives you a toolbox to play with

and that's what you're going to do right but in Dawn Walker a room full of bad guys pops up whether they be witches or fucking zombies and it is they come at me there's a little shield it goes it shows I got to block up if they're coming in and block left right down whatever hit it the right time Perry

unleash some stuff I kill everybody there great I've had a lot of fun with that right in Wolverine you walk into this fucking room and it's just fodder there's just a bunch of guys with robot legs for you to run and stab maybe some ninjas if you're there, eventually some sentinels, right? Just go in there and mash on square, kill them.

You're getting XP like you get in Dawn Walker to then go invest into your character, right? But the problem is you don't need to. Me playing Dawn Walker, Hour 1, like Midler already talked about, right, versus Hour 37. My Cohen feels like a completely different character. Playing Wolverine, Hour 1 versus Hour 12. I feel like the same fucking guy,

except that now when I am dodging at the right time, which I've always been doing, I fire back a blast at somebody from it. I send back a little projectile to hurt them. And it's like, that's not fun and that's not rewarding, which is where Diablo comes in, where Diablo, of course, the most repetitive gameplay, right? Just fucking tap or hold a button,

do my basic attacks, eventually set off some kind of cool chain reaction. But when I do that, I then level up and I then go in and I go, oh, now I'm making the character my own. I'm building a kit where I'm doing lightning damage. I'm doing poison attacks. I'm doing like I'm really feeling I'm getting gear that's augmenting that and doing all the stuff. Wolverine, when I came out wellmed from the preview, I was like, it's, it's, it's Wolverine. One of the things I was, you were like, what are you hopeful for?

I was like, well, I'm interested to see how your combat kit pays off. Because I was like, it did change my demo when I got the, okay, when I strong kick you and daze you, I can triangle you to heal. And it's like, awesome. And they showed us a stealth section. Can I do the whole game very you can do stealth in this very specific spot if you want to Once I blew it once I did it the first two times and realized eventually somebody's gonna see me What's the fucking point? I just jumped in immediately said hi to everybody and started stabbing and doing the same things over and over again

And again getting that XP and going back to those moves and filling in those things and you're like oh now you're getting to level three of your spin Cork screw? Who gives a shit? It doesn't feel great. It's not tearing them apart like the combat is mindless I think trying to make sure that that anyone can get into the combat, but it's doing that thing where it's trying to serve everyone, so it's serving no one. I think the really damning point is that you're allowed four abilities. I would rather have none. Like I, at no point was I like, oh, I need to take this one instead of this one.

Like, oh, that's a shame because they're all so fun to use. Like, it's all so dull. Like one of your moves is a dash where you like stab them in the throat and that gives you some health back and like, okay, you can use it. use that to kind of close the gap between you and the enemy. But there's like two other moves that do the exact same thing. They just don't give you the health buff. And it's like, this is so, it's so, so undercooked, especially when we've recently

been playing games. Like, at one end of the scale, you have something like Oni Musha, where the gameplay and the combat is just like pristine, wonderful stuff. And then as Greg mentioned, like Don Walker, something that evolve, something that can be played multiple different ways. Every single play through of Wolverine will look identical. because there is so little from a combat perspective there's so little challenge to mention the nightmare doors they're a joke man they're such a waste of time like yeah tell me about

the nightmare doors adding writ large like you have some uh you have some obstacle courses and then you have survived this this wave of enemies which is the worst because it's not difficult it's just so so tedious you get a 40 000 score and i like after two minutes i like that i'm at 2 000 i have to keep going this one to get the fucking adamant it and it's like the the lightest, lightest, lightest, roguelight situation where every, I don't know how many waves, like they'll give you two options to take

of like, you get this perk, but it gives you this. I'm not even three. Not even three. It's two. And you don't have to take either then, which I do think that's the third option. I'm like, actually, I do kind of enjoy that. I guarantee they will eventually update with hey, we have a roguelike mode now where you can go do this all the time. Keep going.

I will not be partaking. No, I, like, I stopped doing them at the end. Not to mention they completely interrupt the flow of combat. So the idea you've seen from the preview and I talked about it or you've seen it here, you're running around doing whatever the mission is

and then this purple brown root appears and if you follow that off the beaten path because there's just nowhere to go. A door opens up that's like your mind cabin that you walk in, do the challenge, then when you do it inevitably very easily, there's a little wood carving you do

that then plays a VO from Logan telling you a memory he's remembered, right, that are always horrible and terrible. But it's like you'll be, all right, we've got to go hunt this guy and we're doing that thing. All right, Gene.

yeah, but all right, and you run in, and the dialogue abruptly stops, and then you come out and they pick up three lines before. So you hear the same thing again, and you come out,

and it's just like, what I started doing is running into them, activated and running out. I'm like, I don't want to fight 30 guys. I don't want to do another traversal chance. When you do it, it unlocks DNA adaptations.

So this is the only way to go into this and like, there's a whole different run. Again, you get to select just a few of them depending on how many you have, and it buffs you, whatever way,

I forget what they are, because they don't matter. Is, uh, do you, do you all feel like when insomniac and Sony are ideating and kind of going around? What should the next thing be? Wolverine, I think, is obviously a very popular character. And Hugh Jackman made it this worldwide, like, you know, household name. Um, do you think that they do that? And then once they're in the game, they're realizing, man, there's not a whole lot for us to do with this guy. we were just going to completely change what his character does, right?

Because a lot of it is slash slash slash. But there is so much to do with this guy. There's so much to do with the character of Logan, the character of Wolverine. I mean combat wise. But even from gameplay, it's like I think this, from the moment I picked up the controller in this game, I was kind of surprised at going back to what I was saying earlier, how arcade, old school arcade this is, a button mashy, just boom, boom, we always talk about X-Men Origins.

it's like yeah it's that type of game where I'm like I inherently you start the game off L2 R2 Snick jump out of the helicopter all this how was that not the control scheme I think that slowing this down not having it be hack and slashing hack and slashing

but having it be more you're feeling every strike of Wolverine like you were controlling the claws slowing it I don't know if slowing down is even the right right no it is but I think it's more like give this game and I let it breathe might sound trite to some extent, but I stand by it.

A Wolverine game like this, the way it's being presented after we saw that first trailer, I think it needed to lean way more last of us than early uncharted. Like I think it needed to be camera closer, even like the slower god of war, like the god of war slow. The combat can get so intense, but it's deliberate.

There's nothing deliberate combat. It's what it needs. I think, you know, so many people were torn up and talking about like, oh, there's no dismemberment and the no look at the video, there is dismemberment. Like, there isn't a very specific situation. right? I would have much preferred them do this yet, Tim, whereas now I walk into a room and it's

going to be waves of fucking robot men coming to, and women, coming for me to kill. And it is instead, it's three guys, and I have to think, and I have to actually be very, okay, I'm going to parry it this mart and stab you and then go over it, and then go over it. Now I've done this. You don't get that. We're seeing Omega Red here, who we've known for a while

is in this game. I always thought that's look like Troy Baker. I do, too. I was honestly, when I was watching, it was like, are we about to get some weird thing of the clones? But like, Omega Red, every boss. lame. No, I didn't like any of the boss fights. And there's one, like, in the last fourth, maybe like one of the last few boss fights where they're like, it was hilarious where they're like, oh man, like, you really have to stun him to hurt him or whatever, build up his yellow bars.

So do attacks that's done. I figure what they actually call Stagger. And then it was like in the middle of the, I kept fighting in the middle of fight. They popped up the tutorial of like, here are the moves that actually build Stagger because you've never had to think about combat this way. So we've never talked to you about combat this way. It's like, guys. There were two bosses I enjoyed in this, but I don't think that even those are like major standouts that I would. They're not making any smiley's list at the end of the year.

Sure, yeah. We have a super chat here from Nick, Nick Cash, who says, would the views on this game be different if this is Insomniac's first Marvel game, or if this game wasn't by Insomniac? I don't know. It is. I would like to think, no. I mean, no game exists in a vacuum. It's 2026.

We have, like, this feels like a, like, you know, somebody had asked earlier in the chat about my, yeah, I reviewed it IG and X-NXMen Orions Wolverine, right? And I had a great time with that. This feels like I woke up in a coma. I went into a coma after that review and wake up and play this. Like, yeah, this is, makes perfect sense. This is what a modern, that's gorgeous.

Oh my God. It's exact. Like, I think it was midmax, right? And I forget if it was Jacob or, I think it was Jacob Geller, who said, demand more of your popcorn, meaning demand more of your popcorn. meaning demand more of your popcorn movies, right? Like, we can all enjoy a dumb action movie,

a dumb action game or whatever. But like right here, they're doing the would you rather thing we all talked about out of the preview. Everyone's like, that was a really cool thing. You don't get stuff like that again. The next thing you get like this

is the Mission Jordan referenced, which when I was in it, and it is slower, but I was like, damn, a video game where I do different things would have been fun. You know what I mean? Put me in these different scenarios.

Put me in where it is I'm going to just, I have to stealth or I'm doing, whatever, I don't know. Do you all, like, when we're talking whatever the game loop is, are you ever going back to a menu and going like,

select a mission or whatever? You're just going. You're just going to the cabin. You can go to your bed and they give you the X-Men 97. Wolverine lays on the bed and looks at a picture in a picture frame, and you can replay missions there.

Gotcha. I think that, obviously, for trophy chasing. But I mean, it is as linear as you can possibly get. like the entire start of the game to end of the game it is this to this to this straightforward this aggressively linear which i don't i don't think that inherently that is a problem but i i do think that even within the linear designs like i don't know it's at a certain point i'm i have to ask myself like what i would prefer them to do or what i wanted to look like but so many of the areas i'd say

all of the areas that's just a hallway and then you get to the end of it and it splinters to two other hallways this way and this way they'll be a collectible on one and then not nothing on the other. And then you get down another hallway and then there's two more hallways and then there's just nothing on either side. And I'm like, okay, it just feels so basic that I'm like, would I rather just be one straight hallway to not even have to deal with is there something over here or not? No, that's stupid. But then I'm like, why am I thinking about all this while I'm playing this game? Like it's just because in addition, in addition, Andy, to it being a just hallway, I also have a blue line telling me to go down the hallway. Oh yeah. Because he could sniff. So he

always has GPS. He's always smelling the enemy's fart, wherever they were. Don't worry, there's a blue line, but also if there's a, if there's a, if there's a blue line to your objective, there's also a blue line to the whiskey bottle. And then if you walk past a material crate, this fucking Times Square billboard goes off to show you exactly where this well-hidden crate is.

And it's just like, right, was this stuff put in like the last five minutes of developing? Like, it's so just randomly plopped around, which is weird because there is, there's a few nice references that you'll pick up on a desk or something like that and I was like, why aren't they the collectibles? Like you you pick up a book

and it has like an author on it that if you're if you're clued in you're like, oh, that's cool. Why isn't that the collectible thing instead of like, here's the materials to build your shit suits? They don't even have a Brian Singer suit which criminal in my opinion. But like that's surely

the one that in two weeks they go, we've listened to you. Sorry about those reviews. Here's the Brian Singer suit. That's the one thing they fixed. They didn't have the movie Spidey suits either and they brought them in later so I'm not surprised. That's exactly what I think they will do.

Like that is a heart. If today happened and this was at like a 91 in a week they do the hearts and minds, here is your classic 2000s movie suit instead of now being like, oh, I got an email during this of the day one patch and I was genuinely checking it being like

have they made the game fun? No, I think they've added photo mode. To your point and then to combine it with Tim's again, that was the I think such a crazy mishear of like, okay, in Spider-Man, the backpacks, the collectibles, they're all telling me part of Peter's story in a world and giving me grounded and answering questions and yet a yada.

And this one, yeah, to be a material crate or yeah, the whiskey bottle. Okay. If I do the nightmare things, I get to Tim's point from earlier, I get a story from Logan's, however old he is past, that are just not about anything. Like it's not like we're I met this guy Xavier is like no I was going to be a cannibal what I decided not to be And then there's a few that I start referencing this one thing and I was like okay that could be interesting by the time it pays off I was like there's a weird way to do this there's a lot I didn't think about doing it this way this is this is weird fascinating

Yeah and again I do I respect it I just think that it's it's tough like to be in a place right now like to answer the the question going back to it Where just like if it wasn't insomniac and whatever I think that's hard to too because it's like take the insomniac out of it and then take even the superhero side out of it. It's like this game presents itself as the quote unquote prestige story type game. And I think that it that's where it really doesn't live up. And I think that that means that this game would not survive because so much of the gameplay, it is, it's fun. It's not, I don't think, recommendable fun.

It is, I was saying this about only musha that I'm going to recommend that game to all of my friends. I'm going to tell my friends, you don't need to, this is this one you can miss. And that's shocking to me that that's my takeaway from Wolverine. But it's just, I don't think you're going to have a bad time with this game. If you enjoy Wolverine as a character and if you enjoy just like an okay superhero movie, cool. But I wouldn't recommend you go out and play it. Yeah. It's seen.

It sounds like you won't have a bad time. But if you've played the Spider-Man games, you will be very. There will be a lot of comparisons. Yeah, there'll be a lot of things to let you down. We have a super chat here from Miller's got something. Miller's got some. Oh, sorry. The last thing I was going to say is, to be clear, the Insomniac team that made this as the Ratchet team rather than the Spider-Man team for the majority of it.

And that makes even less sense to me because the Ratchet games are linear, but their entire thing is like every 40 minutes we're giving you a new gun, a new fun way to engage with the game. Like, it's a game that can appeal to all audiences. So it's fairly basic, but there's no massive amounts of downtime. You can't say that the start of a Ratchet game, you're doing the exact same things mechanically as you're doing at the end. And throughout Wolverine, like, when I was going back and taking footage for my video review, which is on the VGC YouTube channel, by the way, I was like, is this past the part that I'm allowed to talk about? Because it looks exactly the same.

It's hardly different at all. The locations are the change, but you go kind of back and forth to the same places over and over again. And, oh, man, I can't wait until we can talk about what happens at the end of this game. Jesus, Lord Almighty. Yeah, it's kind of a man. And I think like, you know, the mood on this game has certainly, like, been kind of not great for the last. So, so, yeah. Right.

But even at the start of it, when you all only had the game for about maybe a day or two. Oh, man, Tim's first hour. He was like, I don't think. Well, yeah, oh, that too. But then I remember, you know, the thoughts of as we're doing out the schedule, you know, we could maybe do a spoiler cast, but I don't, I don't know, man. And I was like, really? Like, we're that.

You've only been playing for, you know, maybe a couple hours. but it already feels that way, which was really, really shocking. Super Jedi from Tucker. $2 Super Jedi, thank you for your support. It says, Don Walker gives me claws. Might skip Wolverine now. There you go.

Donald Walker is really fucking good. Real quick, I'm comparing it to other games, which, again, is, it's like, it sucks because on its own, we can talk about it, but I do think that right now, there are other games to compare it to, and whereas whatever this combat system was, it's very peri-focused.

Like, this is definitely a, you are smashing square and you're hitting L1 to parry a lot. And if you don't, the game punishes you. Not much, but it tries to as much as the combat will. Playing this directly back to back with Oni Musha that has one of my favorite parries I've ever experienced made it so much more evident how the combat feels in this one.

Like Jordan, was that, I know you also loved the parrying in Oni Musha. Like, did that take away from this experience for you? It's been a terrible run of games to play alongside each other from that comparison point. And you can only compare them. It's just natural to do, especially from like a critical perspective. And yeah, it's the,

you may remember when I was there doing the Don Walker review, I was like, most of the stuff around the sides and the edges of this combat, I'm not fat enough, but this combat is a reason to play this game, even if I wasn't super hot on it. But the combat here is,

if you were doing like a top 50 games that have this style of combat, it might not break the top 50. like there's just nothing about it like it doesn't even games have been stealing the arkham combat pretty well for like 15 years like i've no idea why they didn't just do that or like if you're going to do an l1 parry game like the jedi games they're they are l1 paddy games that aren't of ony musha quality but they're perfectly fun to play they're not just so they're it's stateless it's absolutely stakeless you if you get hit who cares you're you're just gonna i died like

once in the entire time I played the game. The enemies do so little damage, even when they start throwing in enemies that are invisible, and it's like, oh, you have to trace their step. Doesn't matter, just keep smashing square over and over again. You will clear this entire room, like you've blacked out and just woken up to a pile of dead bodies. Like, it's thoughtless in its gameplay so often.

I'll tell you what game has a real good combat. Moonlighter 2. Man, that's a good game, dude. Moonlighter 2 is so fucking good. All right, go, Tim. There's a middle section of this game that I enjoyed quite a bit. And it's pretty meaty, I would say, for what this game is. And in terms of locations and enemy variety and just story beats.

And I mean, I could say it's Japan. The Japan stuff, it really works for me. Not the best thing ever. Like I said, I feel like. But in this game, I do think it is the highlight. And the boss fights I thought were very interesting there. The enemies, how they interacted were very cool. I mean, we're talking about the hand.

So it's like a lot of just disappearing and teleporting ninja shit. I'm like, oh, this is great. But I think it's where the insomniac of this game did shine. Like I've been very impressed with the way that they use their tech. And you kind of, one of the signs of an insomniac game on the PS5 is that like portal tech that they use where it's like ripped apart where you're like pulling in and all of a sudden you're in a completely different world and how seamless using that PlayStation SSD. There's a bunch of that in this game. And I think that that area has the most of it where it's like you're walking through this building and some of the doors are like portals into just completely different. places and the way that they play with perspective and all that.

Reminded me a lot of Spider-Man 2 with Black Cat and you're literally using like the Dr. Strange portals like jumping through things. It's like that stuff is so cool and we just don't see it in other games. Insomniac really leans into that stuff. And when they do it in this one, which is peppered throughout the game, but a concentrate in the middle, I'm always impressed by it. I'm always like, this is so, so cool. And there is a lot of technical chops going into this.

Super chat here from Volk Dasher. Volk. Thank you for your generosity. Volk Dasher says, I think unfortunately the industry has caught up with the PlayStation type games. You have I-O-making a much better linear world, world-traveling game. Insomniac mission structure, even from Spidey 2, has been called out as dated, refresh needed.

I disagree. I feel like there's still room to... You just got to do them good. It's just like the superhero fatigue. There's not. You just got to do it. If the writing and characters are enjoyable enough, then like, those problems are a lot less noticeable, I would say. You were going to say something, Jordan? No, I was just going to say that I generally agree that there are better examples of, like,

a double seven is a great one to call it in terms of like an action-adventure game that is fairly repetitive in a non kind of pejorative sense throughout, but it hangs itself on so many other things that Wolverine kind of just doesn't again. I keep coming back to the fact that this game changed directors solely in the day, that there is a totally different version of this game that has to be out there. And I think you look no further than how large the levels actually are. Some of the time you're in Tokyo, they're like, okay, climb up these roofs and you can jump onto other roofs. And there's much further away roofs that are just as detailed and look like they're supposed to be in the game.

And then you'll chase this enemy down to this like garbage dump. and it's like that's a whole other level. It's like there's weird semi-open worlds, like multiple of them in this game that they just decide to make a linear action game out of. And I don't know if that was like a scope problem or what, but yeah, there's a, the post-mortem of this game

will be absolutely fascinating and how they approach what they clearly want to do, which is set up an X-Men universe is going to be really the story of the next kind of five, ten years. Mr. Straightfire with a $10 super chat says, Instead of making a button-masty repetitive combat, they should have made a more complex, harder combat system,

although it's less mass-friendly. Something like Sifu, at least it would have made it interesting. Clearly, I think that's what they were going for. And they wanted as many people to be able to get in this impossible. But again, make something for everybody. Makes something for nobody. Volk Dasher with another Superjad says, Insomniac will get heat for this and weirdly may not even survive.

But I'd like to think we give them second chance, considering how bad the leak ruined them. Also, Superchat, to say thanks for the review. Thank you. I mean, hey, I'm I love insomniac. I still do even after this. It's not like,

this doesn't give me any less faith in their next project. Like this one was a miss, I think, but I still had, can't hit them all. You can't. And it is a bummer.

I'm very disappointed in that, but I still have the utmost faith in that team and then. I don't think the sky's falling to the degree of the super chat. I'm with Tim. I'm like, yeah,

like this is, all right, cool. This one I didn't like. It's not the end of the world. I'm still excited for Spider-Man 3. I'm still excited for whatever they're going to do with future X-Men's Wolverine, whatever the fuck.

Whatever the next insomniac game is, I will be there day one slash the preview event excited. When they announce it, I'll be excited. I don't think PlayStation is to the point that it is one strike and you're out. Like, I don't think this, I mean, it clearly, you didn't get all this one. Well, let's see what happens with the next Spider-Man. Like, you know what I mean? There's so much more where it's not, sky's falling.

I could be wrong. You know, do a PlayStation makes a surprising decision. Each and every fucking Wednesday, so who knows. Duro with a $2 super chat says, Greg, say it, Starfield's better than Wolverine. Yeah. Yeah. Starfield does better than Wolverine.

Thank you. Even from Midler, that's crazy. Is that VGC's five-star game, Starfield? Oh, wow. Nice, dude. No wonder you all like each other. Russ Fine says, with a $5 super chat, says, any chances could be salvaged,

like Crimson Desert via updates or is it just a scenario where it is what it is. It is what it is. Yeah. And it's I was thinking too of like if this was even a smaller game than it is like if this was a Miles Morales type thing, I feel like if they had cut because it's not even that long. You know like just playing through the story is not that long. But I feel like they could have got the points across even quicker and I feel like maybe it would be I'd be less disappointed in it. And it would be more just like, oh, okay cool. The button masher gameplay.

work for this limited amount of time. I don't know, but that's not the world we live in. That's not the game we got. That's not the world we live in. I'll tell you what's another really good game of Star Wars Zero Company. Dude, that's a good fucking game, man. Played a lot more last night. Really, really fun.

We have a bunch of different little random super chats. Levi Little says, should I cancel my pre-order? I mean, the choices in your... Yeah, you just heard everything we said. Yeah. Are you such a Wolverine fan? They're like, I don't care, an X-Men fan of superhero game, a game fan? Maybe it's a little hit for you.

Who knows? Yeah, it's, it's so tough because it's just like, do you watch every MCU movie if they're good or bad? Like if the answer is yes, you keep your pre-order. I think you will be able to play this game and enjoy it for what it is, but also be kind of critical of it. But it's like, yeah, there was something there. But $70 is a lot of money. I mean, it comes back to the score thing, right? Where it's just like thing of for me going to five five mediocre.

Like it's not a game I would recommend that you can take that with what you won. Like, well, I wait for sale. or I'm such a big fan. Totally. I'm not, I'm just here to give you my opinion. In my opinion, we're not pocket watching.

If Poe calls me tomorrow, I was like, should I get this back now? Tarin, with a super chat, kind of brings up a point that Midler was talking about a little bit earlier, asking, you know,

have you seen how the original Alpha build Brian Horton built was part of that, was leaked before he left to the creative differences. His vision seemed way more innovative than what we got now. If I were to just throw out a little prediction out there, reckless speculation right here. Love some miraculous back.

It would really just be that, yeah, this game was supposed to be scope to be larger, especially with Jordan Miller's talking about where a lot of these zones seem like they were meant to be larger and things had to get extremely pared down because it's like it's going to cost so much more to hit those highs. And we don't want another Spider-Man 2 budget situation. And things are just getting more and more expensive. But let's get three more or maybe four more games of service, live service games. Good idea.

you saying that reminded me of this. There is a very important thing that we need to do here. And that's a Gamescast game tip. Oh! Kevin, can we have the song? We didn't prep you for it. We didn't think about it.

But I can keep saying can we get a Gamescast. Because it's a games cast Game tip. If you need help, don't feel ashamed. It's a games case. With the game.

With the game. Hey, everybody, welcome to a Gemscast, Gamescast, Gemset. It's an important one. It's, I heard, Tim and Barrett lamenting in the office that this game doesn't have a lock on

why can't you lock on to people in this fucking game to stab them and do this instead of just brawling around and I said actually guys it does and they both said no it doesn't I'm pretty sure I saw it in the accessibility settings and I jumped in and there in fact you can go it's off by default you can go and turn on lock on

you can also make it I'm a little hazy on this one I haven't in front of me you can also make it you can decide who it targets it'll be like after you kill somebody do I go to the closest person on screen or the closest person behind you. How about I control them? Why can I? It's just weird.

Just by default, it doesn't function the way that you just would expect it to. A little R3 click, you know, it's bizarre. I don't know if I got, I have my thing, yeah,

so it's, but you can change it and you can fix it, and then it'll work exactly how you expect to. Set the behavior of L3 lock on on screen, press L3 to lock on to the nearest on-screen enemy. Once defeated, lock on to the next nearest on-screen enemy within range. all is the other option. So it's on-screen or all.

Press L3 to lock on to the nearest enemy either on or off-screen. Once defeated, lock on to the next nearest enemy in range. On-screen enemies have higher priority. Fast. Games cast. Game chill. Chaos Killer with a super chat. Says, thanks for all the reviews.

Gersman stated that this is a five-hour, this is a five-hour idea game stretch into 10 hours. Do you think it'd be rated higher if it was shorter? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, by a little, but Just for like, thanks for ending that quicker? Is it just what I'm doing?

No, because there's stuff here. And I just think that like... I think there's a lot of fat that could have been cut. Yeah, to the conversation we had a long time ago where I checked on the actress and then I never got back to you. Deborah Wilson is in the game as... Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Why, no, everybody's always sensitive. No, there's not a chance I thought you were talking about that character. Oh, yeah, sure. But it's like a weird thing of like, to Midler's point, if you have these mutants,

are they going to be a big deal? Clisto going to be a big deal. I was like, oh, Deborah Wilson, fucking, yeah, not a big deal, right? And then at the end of the, there's more, and it's just like, what the fuck was the point? And then not only that, the bad guy's layer where it's like 15 minutes

still is self-destructed. They're using her voice. I'm like, what the fuck? Why is Deborah, why couldn't we have gotten the fucking goddamn receptionist insomnia act to come and 15 minutes? I'm like, why is Debra Wilson double duty? You look in the credits and it's like,

Clisto and voice. Maybe I'm rolling, but I'm pretty good to catch you. Voice of a alarm or whatever. chat let us know what sort of questions and comments you all have about wolverine are you planning on picking it up and before i do that any other last words from the panel i'm bum man you know i i really even as we were seeing the gameplay and it was like okay this looks like it could kind of just be good not great i i'm still a little disappointed i think it didn't even hit where i thought it was going to for me and i think that should say

a lot to people because y'all know how much I enjoyed this type of thing and these type of stories. I respect some of the story choices that they made, but I don't like them. And when it comes to the future of insomniacs X-Men characters in universe, I have a lot more trepidation than I ever thought I would coming out of this. Do you think we get more of this? Whether it be another Wolverine game or an X-Men universe game. Yes, because I don't. I think we get X-Men. I don't think we get more Wolverine, though.

Greg. I echo everything we've said here, right? Mainly I would say this. It's not a bad game. It's a disappointing game. It's a mediocre game. It doesn't stop me from being an insomniac fan and being excited for their next game,

whatever that may be. Jordan. Yeah, I love insomniac stuff. I don't think I've given anywhere near this kind of review to anything I've ever reviewed from them. I'm such a big Spider-Man fan more than most people are and I was so excited for this. I just think that the way they've chosen to represent Wolverine in a game doesn't work at the scale of game they've made. There is probably like a four

star game in here if you did a lot of like tweaking and changing and it just doesn't land for me in so many ways. Your mileage will vary on the narrative stuff like I see a lot of people, myself included, that liked it a little bit more than we did on the panel today. But the thing that comes back in every single review that you can read today is it's so repetitive. The gameplay stuff really lets it down and in a game where the power fantasy

is this character who should be tailor made for video games. If you make it boring to control Wolverine, you've failed at the first hurdle and that's my biggest issue with it. Damn, kind of dodged a bullet there on fantasy critic, right, man? Oh God, here he comes.

You summoned him. You really wanted it. Listen, it's not too late, you know. Like, I put the, I put the trade back up, you know, like, just in case you want it. Just in case you want it. The third time, third time's the charm. A lot of people say, you know, like, maybe, you know, maybe, think about it. This will, we're a bunch of Sony ponies, right? Like, this will be our game of the year, you know?

So, like, don't you want kind of funny's game of the year? Maybe we get on Metacritic in the, in the time being in, like, and then you play it and you give it like a 10. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's got an 11 already. You got 11 points right there. That's sitting pretty. It dropped to 77. Honestly better than I was expected.

It dropped to 77 on Open Critic. Oh, right now on our page, kind of funny.com slash league, it still says he has 11 points off. Yeah, it did drop, unfortunately. Barry, yeah, bad news for you, Baron, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I mean, last thing I'll say is like, dang, how crazy is it that Wolverine will not be on kind of funny's top 10 this year? You don't know yet. I do. I'm fucking around.

I mean, it's like, I think definitive. I think, I think there's a chance I put it on my top 10. Wow. There's a chance it might be low. I,

I enjoyed it. I didn't really, really love it, but it's like there's still a lot there that I'm like, yeah, I do like punching things. You're going to have a 6.5 out of 10 on your top 10. You got to play more games. You know what I mean? I told you, Sam, we would change you. Send her to boarding school. Send her to boarding school.

No, like this game's not bad. It's not bad. It's not bad. Resounding praise. Kind of funny on the box. It's not bad. Let us know what do you all think in the comments down below. Are you planning on picking this up?

If not. Zero company is awesome guys. And Moonlighter 2 is great. Play the hell out of Moonlighter 2. That's a good fucking time. Appreciate you all watching and hanging out with us. Jordan Midler, where can we find you? You can find me in Japan, motherfucker?

Because I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Wow. But until then, yeah, I'm going on holiday and I'm going to TGS for like one day just to say I've been to TGS. Do Zito work and then leave. Patreon.com slash video games chronicle is where you can support the boys.

We have a load of best friends in the Discord. ready. So if you'd like to come and join us and we do all this podcast nonsense, then you can go over there for ad-free browsing and ad-free version of the podcast and so much more. And I swear this is the last time I'm on kind of funny for a little while at least. So you get rid of me for now. We'll see about that. Thank you, Jordan. Everybody, appreciate you all hanging out with us. Stay tuned for stream. Until then, take care of yourself. Happy! Take care of each other and we'll see you all next time.