In recent years, we have seen movies, games, and TV shows across the board washing out their color palettes to embrace drab, concrete visuals. It's especially exhausting to watch the life drained from the panels of comic books, a medium that prides itself on experimental and vibrant artwork, in more recent adaptations. I've never once looked at the chromatic and surrealist graphics of Adam Kubert or the deep black contrasting inks of John Byrne and thought, 'What if this was really grey?', and I certainly didn't expect it from Marvel's Wolverine.
Insomniac Games made a name for itself with a purple dragon flying through candy-colored realms, and an intergalactic cat lugging it from planet to planet in a barely-held-together mail van. This is the studio behind the hyper-saturated and punk-rock playground of Sunset Overdrive, an unabashedly loud post-apocalypse where you chug energy drinks and fire vinyls at hordes of OD. And let's not forget the criminally underrated Song of the Deep, which uses a hand-drawn painterly art style to welcome you into its enchanting underwater fairy tale. This is a studio built on the bold and unconventional: what happened?
Insomniac Is Stuck In The Marvel Machine, But The Fixation On Realism Is Even Worse
Wolverine is yet another victim of the realism ceiling. Environments and lighting are stripped of character and intent to pave the way for an uninspired graphical showcase: remove Logan and you would be hard-pressed to identify what you're looking at, a problem Spyro and Ratchet & Clank never had. Even the UI isn't exempt from this, with its minimalist stripped-bare approach. Devoid of context, it could be slotted into almost any other modern game seamlessly.
This was the opener to State of Play, meant to wow and dazzle, but its lackluster visuals just reminded me that Insomniac is stuck making increasingly by-the-numbers Marvel games for the next decade.
Not to mention that comics are so distinct that you can pinpoint an artist just from character designs and line work, whereas Wolverine would feel right at home in Marvel's Avengers.
As much as I enjoyed Marvel's Spider-Man, it suffers from these same problems. New York is lifeless and static: a generic gray sandbox. In sharp contrast, Ultimate Spider-Man's blocky pastel buildings and comic-accurate line art underscored a unique direction that gave the game an edge, while even the limited pixels of the NES-developed Batman were able to bring to life the shadow-drenched city streets of Gotham with more style.
Miles Morales promised a more heartfelt direction that embraced Insomniac's strengths by coating the city in a wintery blanket, juxtaposed by the hubbub of a bustling Harlem, trading the more sterile Manhattan for a community-driven neighborhood with character packed into every corner. But the sequel, while an improvement over the first game, lost sight of that direction, and unfortunately, it appears that Wolverine is continuing that downward trend.
Of course, this was just a seven-minute snippet of a much longer game, and Wolverine may surprise us, but it hardly inspires confidence that this is what Insomniac and PlayStation chose to show.
The brief sizzle tacked onto the end was a lot more reassuring, yet even the garish city of Madripoor looked desaturated. Not to mention all the generic thugs in generic combat armor that look indistinguishable from the generic thugs in generic combat armor from Spider-Man — even Sabretooth, the iconic animalistic adversary who dons a fur mane to intimidate his opponents, is stuck in paintball gear. It's impressive how the game already makes mutants look better than their leatherbound '00s counterparts.
Insomniac can do better, as it has proven time and time again, but boxed into a hyperrealistic corner, we're left with MCU-style costumes and flat visuals that not only do a disservice to the rich tapestry of the source material, but the studio's past work.
- Released
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September 15, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment
