Wolverine may be the best at what he does, but Insomniac’s latest game is only kind of decent at what it does. And for a triple-A, first-party PlayStation game featuring one of Marvel’s best-known characters, that’s disappointing. Don’t let the internet fool you; there’s plenty to like here, but quite a bit to dislike, too. I had enough fun to stick around for the platinum trophy, yet the more I’ve reflected on my time with Logan, the more those little frustrations have added up.

Part of the problem is that Wolverine is a bit tricky to design around: he’s a bloke with swords strapped to his arms who is almost unkillable and has super-senses that let him track people. Slap those together and you’ve got a tricky suite of powers to deal with. He can kill anything, heal from anything and find anyone. Insomniac certainly embraces his ability to survive a beating, but struggles more with making him feel like the terrifyingly skilled fighter who ought to be dishing it out. For a lot of the game, it seems like Wolverine’s superpower is the fact that he’s remarkably persistent, rather than being a badass wandering samurai who smokes cigars and is a bit of an arse. And sometimes it struggles with making him feel like Wolverine at all.

That isn’t down to the casting. Picking Liam McIntyre to play Wolverine was a hell of a choice. Regardless of the writing, McIntyre kills it, giving it his all whether he’s called upon to unleash a berserker rage-induced snarl or play the softer scenes. There are little expressions where he looks like he’s barely keeping the animal inside him under control, and moments when the gravelly delivery is exactly what I hear in my head when reading a Wolverine comic. Troy Baker is in excellent form, too, bringing a quiet, articulate authority to Essex. The performances frequently do more for the story than the script does.

This version of Wolverine was discovered roaming the woodlands in a near-feral state by Essex, who helped him regain the ability to function as a human and discovered that he had no memories of his past. Taking Logan under his wing, Essex brought him into Team-X, a group of mutants whose goal is to protect other mutants. That was years ago. Wolverine has since left to figure things out for himself, but the game opens with him rejoining Mystique and Sabretooth to rescue a kidnapped Essex from the clutches of mutant-hating Bolivar Trask.

It’s a promising setup for a story about an odd found family, especially with someone like Sabretooth involved. Unfortunately, the game struggles to make that family convincing before the arrival of Jean Grey shifts the games narrative focus to their relationship. Sabretooth’s odd relationship with Logan mostly comes across as bullying that Wolverine tolerates and occasionally pushes back against. Optional recordings suggest considerably more affection than I ever really bought from their scenes together. Mystique fares a little better because there’s some believable mutual respect, but both relationships get sidelined as the story increasingly becomes the Wolverine and Jean Grey show.

I’m fine with Jean being the romantic interest, although I never entirely bought their chemistry. The problem is how much of the story gets pulled into their relationship at the expense of everything around it. A group of rescued mutants gets precious little development before the game starts asking you to care deeply about them. Some emotional moments land, but others feel like the writers have skipped the getting-to-know-you bit and gone straight to demanding a cheap reaction. The pace picks up towards the end and I enjoyed the increasingly frantic action, but the story also starts cramming in more mythology than it can comfortably handle. Without spoiling anything, there’s enough material here for several stories, and some of it feels more interested in setting up the next one than finishing this one. Like, maybe pick a few things and focus on them instead of trying to jam huge mythologies and rewrites into Wolverine’s story. I mean, he’s only going to forget about it all again when he bumps his head, anyway.

My biggest writing problem, though, is Logan himself. Calling him too soft doesn’t quite explain it, because Wolverine absolutely can be gentle, affectionate and funny. Usually, though, you have to get through that gruff exterior first, the same exterior that’s usually swigging a beer and smoking a cigar. Here he’s much more openly communicative, and the dialogue jumps between recognisably Wolverine and fairly generic video game protagonist. Other characters talk about a frightening, vicious Logan from the past, and I kept finding myself more interested in that bloke than the one I was controlling. It also leaves less room for the warmer scenes to surprise you when he’s been fairly approachable all along.

And Jesus Christ, the man talks. He talks to Jean, he talks to himself, he talks about what you should be doing next. There are jokes about him being a man of few words which become hilarious for entirely the wrong reason when he’s spent the last ten hours refusing to shut up. This Wolverine is a social butterfly. He’s got a better social life than I do. I don’t need him to communicate exclusively through moody grunting and asshole comments, but there’s a guardedness missing. This Wolverine feels like he’s been in therapy for a few decades and had a few pointed conversations with HR.

His violence suffers from a similar lack of contrast. There’s plenty of it, but the people around him rarely seem troubled enough by what he does, and quite a few are happy to join in. There’s room for an interesting relationship between somebody prepared to do absolutely anything and somebody who needs his help but worries about how far he’ll go. Instead, too much of the friction with Jean feels like familiar romantic misunderstandings. The blood and swearing are there; the uncomfortable edge of sharing a room with Wolverine is less convincing. The one time Jean brings up being uncomfortable, they figure it out in about 30 seconds and carry on.

Fighting is where the game should be at its very best. But it isn’t. Combat is mostly handled by hammering Square and occasionally tossing in Triangle for leaping attacks or combo finishers. You have selectable special moves on cooldown, while parrying and dodging are your bread and butter for defence. It’s enjoyable enough for a while, lulling you into a nice and comfy sense of familiarity interspersed with Wolverine sticking his claws through people’s throats. The finishers are wonderfully savage, especially when Sabretooth joins in, and building rage lets Logan go berserk and execute enemies after a few swipes. Extra chances to regenerate after being knocked down also suit a man whose body refuses to accept that it should be dead.

After an hour or two, though, I was already feeling the repetition, and the game never developed enough to shake it. Mixing different attacks into the basic string rarely gave me a compelling reason to change what I was doing. The special moves promise variety, but their roles overlap far too much. An early spinning attack became my answer to almost everything: it damages a crowd, lets you move through it and gets you out of trouble. A drilling move is presented as useful for escaping when surrounded, yet I found the spin already did that while catching more enemies along the way. Likewise, the knee strike’s interruption didn’t feel valuable when my other abilities were already dealing with the problem. There may be differences in the numbers, but in practice I rarely felt encouraged to care.

The issue is that combat isn’t much more complex than Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. That wouldn’t be such a problem if Spider-Man hadn’t offered exceptional traversal as another major attraction. Here, fighting is the focus, as befits the world’s angriest wielder of knuckle cutlery, and there’s little else to sustain it. You can climb selected obstacles and occasionally jump from tree to tree, but the game laughably throws optional traversal challenges at you as though there’s a substantial movement system to master. But all you do is push up on the stick and press X to jump.

I’d have loved something closer to a proper character-action game, with more combos, launchers and follow-ups to learn. Instead, I got very comfortable pressing the same buttons. It feels like the licensed Wolverine Origins had a more varied and substantial combat system.

Bosses expose that simplicity particularly badly. Even on Normal, their enormous health bars turn fights into long stretches of dodging a couple of attacks, taking the obvious opening and doing it again. Breaking a stagger meter should feel like a big opportunity, but the resulting damage barely seems to dent some of these bastards. It’s like wailing on a piece of jelly until it eventually agrees to die. There’s surprisingly little playable spectacle, either. Think of the Sandman battle in Spider-Man 2, where being flung across the city feeds back into swinging your way through the action. Or some of the fights from the first Insomniac Spider-man. Wolverine too often saves its exciting stuff for cutscenes while you handle the prolonged chipping away beforehand.

There’s also that inevitable disconnect between how Wolverine’s claws should work and how they actually work. The fantasy is that adamantium blades can slice through almost anything, yet ordinary enemies take repeated hits without losing limbs, heads or entrails until a finishing move kicks in and you finally get the promised murderous mayhem. Much like lightsabers in most games, you have to accept a compromise for the combat to function. I get it, but that doesn’t stop it feeling odd when a full swing looks like it’s passed straight through somebody’s spine with minimal effect. I’m sorry, sir, but you should now be several sirs spread out the place.

Then you win a fight and watch Wolverine get his ass kicked in the following cutscene. This happens often enough to become irritating, particularly when the scripted threat looks considerably less dangerous than what you’ve just survived. I like seeing Logan endure ridiculous punishment and keep going, but there’s room for him to be frighteningly skilled and almost impossible to stop. Too often, his defining talent here seems to be getting battered and recovering from it. Even the healing isn’t as gruesomely satisfying as I’d hoped: flesh restores quickly and abruptly, sometimes while Logan is hunched over or obscured, rather than letting you properly watch it knit back together.

Look, Logan’s ability to endure insane pain and just keep going is a major factor in his character. That’s fine. But Insomniac couples that with getting his ass kicked in cutscenes, presumably in a bid to make him seem like an underdog. But Wolverine isn’t an underdog. And that’s not even a joke about his height.

Stealth offers a small change of pace, although it’s the familiar business of hiding in conveniently placed grass and stabbing people. I have no problem with Wolverine sneaking around; his background gives him plenty of reason to be good at it. I just wish the game did more with the idea. It’s largely optional, which I appreciate, but with combat rarely difficult enough to make thinning the opposition worthwhile, I seldom felt much incentive to bother. Especially when a sneaky section ends with you getting spotted anyway. Apparently the bright yellow-and-blue costume finally gave him away. And the stealth systems just aren’t fleshed out enough to be worth it.

I’d thought the criticisms of hand-holding might have been overplayed, but even with the guidance reduced, there’s a strong sensation that Insomniac doesn’t trust players to find their own buttocks with a map and both hands. Scent trails make sense for Wolverine, but the obvious blue gas becomes ridiculous when it’s accompanied by objective markers, white paint on climbable surfaces and Logan reminding you what to do. Some areas genuinely are awkward to navigate without the trails, which points to another problem with how they’re laid out. Elsewhere, the game feels like it’s grabbing your head and yelling, “Go this way!” Mate, it’s a corridor. My other option is backwards. Where the fuck did you think I was going to go?

The more annoying example is a room containing a computer that controls some shutters. I couldn’t use the computer until I picked up a nearby lore note, at which point the interaction became available. The note didn’t give me a password or explain how to operate anything. It just had some information the game apparently insisted I read before being allowed to leave, a piece of frankly unimportant lore. There are too many moments like that, alongside slow walking-and-talking sections and chases where you largely hold forward and jump when prompted. I’m happy to slow down for a good scene, but too often I felt like I was waiting for permission to play again.

There’s more clumsiness than I’d expect, too. An early motorcycle sequence has basic handling and awkward moments where control is pulled away from you. At one point I caught the bike on terrain and came to a dead stop, then nudged clear and immediately regained normal speed. Door prompts sometimes wouldn’t register until I walked around and tried again, while interactions could yank Logan into position rather than flow naturally. In fights, the camera gets obstructed by walls or bodies, leaving you wrestling with the view as well as the enemies. Individually these are irritations. Across the whole game, they chip away at the polish I associate with Insomniac.

And then there’s the bloody quick-time events, which are actually more like suggested-slow-time events. The game will often let you press any button you like despite giving you a clear direction about which one to hit. And it will frequently pause if you don’t hit a button until you do. Other times, you don’t have to press anything at all and the action will continue like you did. Until you hit one random quick-time event where you actually do have to press the correct button on time; otherwise, you die. What the hell!? I’m not the biggest quick-time event fan, but if you’re going to include them, do them properly or not at all.

Visually, there’s plenty of technical quality on display, but I found the art direction surprisingly dull. Too many environments feel flat and too clean, with little of the heightened comic-book personality I wanted. Even Logan looks smoother and more boyish than the weathered bloke I picture. The violence doesn’t entirely shake that sterility: blood can look like thick blobs, and ordinary attacks lack the impact their animations suggest. It’s a strange game to describe as lacking grit while someone is being dismembered in front of you, but that’s where I ended up. It often feels like an Xbox 360 hack-and-slash given a modern triple-A budget. I liked X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so that isn’t automatically an insult, but I expected a bigger step forward than this.

Despite all of that, I still like Marvel’s Wolverine. I settled into its easy rhythm, enjoyed the nastier finishers and wanted to see where Logan’s story went. McIntyre is a terrific lead, Baker is excellent, and the later action has an energy I wish more of the game had sustained. Those pleasures were enough to carry me through the campaign and the platinum clean-up, even when the fighting had long since become a chore. This isn’t the disaster some of the noise around it would have you believe.

But it is disappointing. The repetitive combat, overbearing guidance and accumulated clumsiness would be frustrating on their own; the fact that Wolverine himself only intermittently feels like the character I wanted makes them harder to forgive. There’s a decent game here, and some fun to be had if you want to switch off and turn goons into spare parts. For me, though, it’s among Insomniac’s weakest efforts in a long bloody time. Wolverine is supposed to be the best at what he does. Adequate wasn’t really what I had in mind, and now that the platinum is done, I don’t feel much urge to pull the claws out again. I’ve replayed the Spider-Man games multiple times, and the Ratchet & Clank titles, but I doubt I’ll ever come back to this Insomniac adventure.