Marvel's Wolverine: 180,000 Likes of Hate, and Journalists With a Controller in Hand Praise the Exact Same Thing

Marvel's Wolverine launches September 15 on PS5, made by Insomniac after Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank, and yet the game is hitting the market under a wave of hate Insomniac has never faced before. When the embargo on preview coverage lifted Thursday, two completely different narratives exploded online at the same time: viral clips mocking the combat racked up more than 180,000 likes, while journalists who actually sat down with a controller praised the game for exactly the thing the internet was mocking.

Three clips, one hundred eighty thousand likes

The loudest clip lines up the boss fight against a giant Sentinel with a sequence from Ben 10: Protector of Earth, a 2007 PS2 game. The Spanish-language version of that post pulled 50,000 likes, the English cut, captioned "God tier slander," another 70,000. A second clip shows fifteen seconds of Logan just running forward while someone holds the DualSense's analogue stick in one position, implying the player isn't really doing anything. A third overlays controller inputs on the footage to show the whole fight coming down to mashing R2. The Sentinel fight itself looks familiar in these clips: a giant mech pounds the ground, you dodge, then you hit it, exactly the pattern the internet wasn't willing to forgive from an AAA-budget release in 2026.

A bar the studio set for itself

Spider-Man 2 sold 2.5 million copies in its first 24 hours back in 2023, and passed 5 million in eleven days. Metacritic gave it 91, the second-best score among PS5 exclusives, just behind God of War Ragnarök. It was Insomniac's first game above 90 in nearly two decades, so Wolverine launches against a bar the studio set for itself, not one built from scratch on an untested name.

What the game is actually selling

The story pits Logan against the Reavers, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary group abducting mutants for billionaire industrialist Bolivar Trask, known in the comics as the creator of the Sentinels. Jean Grey can join the fight as a partner, using telekinetic powers to open up windows for powerful critical hits, so the campaign pairs two heroes off each other in combat rather than sending Logan alone against everyone. The M rating isn't a formality here: reviewers with preview access describe scenes bordering on horror, finishers that are quick and brutal, no doubt about where that rating came from.

Backlash that ran past gameplay into casting

The criticism didn't stop at combat. Some players zeroed in on character appearances, including a redesigned Callisto, arguing it strays too far from the comics. Another thread targeted who actually wrote the script: Brittney Morris, a bestselling author of young-reader books who holds a senior writer title at Insomniac on both Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine, became the target of comments questioning her role on the project. On top of that came criticism of how closely Logan's face model resembles Liam McIntyre, the actor who performed and voiced him. The gameplay discussion turned into a wider front touching casting and writing, the same way disputes over screenwriting credit have flared up around other high-profile launches in the industry. Saber Interactive faced a similar dispute this summer, when a former writer accused the studio of replacing her work with ChatGPT.

The same footage, two completely different verdicts

The most interesting part of this story is the timing. The wave of mockery intensified exactly when the first preview coverage embargo lifted, meaning at the exact moment journalists had a controller in hand and real time with the game. IGN praised the combat system and the tension it built in the story, crediting Insomniac for translating Logan's speed and brutality into mechanics: Rage and Last Stand turn his temper and healing factor into real gameplay systems, not just animations. Reviewers with preview access also stressed the dark, mature tone of the story, matching its M rating, built around Logan's anger and guilt in a world hostile to mutants.

In other words: the viral clips show cuts of the most heavily scripted, cinematic sequences, where the player genuinely does less, while hands-on accounts from people who played for longer than fifteen seconds describe a very different picture of the game as a whole. Both can be true at once: the Sentinel segment really could be a weaker, more cinematic moment, and the rest of the game, according to the people who tested it, could genuinely hold up.

The developer answers, players aren't buying it

James Stevenson, Insomniac's director of community and marketing, called the wave of criticism a "relentless onslaught" and admitted social media algorithms amplify the loudest, most negative voices at the expense of a genuine picture of player opinion. He added that he doesn't think it's good for developers' mental health, nor representative of the game's broader reception. In a separate comment, he called the sheer scale of interest "a good problem to have," betting the controversy translates into sales rather than killing them.