Marvel’s Wolverine is the lowest-scored PlayStation Studios game of the PS5 era. Players scored it 4.85 out of 5

[#item_full_content] Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine launched on September 15 as a PS5 exclusive, priced at $69.99 for the standard edition and $79.99 for the Digital Deluxe. It sits at a Metascore of 77 from 117 critic reviews. That is the lowest critic score any PlayStation Studios game has managed in the six years of the PS5, as Kotaku noted shortly after release. It is also, by a wide margin, the best-reviewed game of the week among the people actually playing it. The gap On the PlayStation Store, Wolverine launched at 4.85 out of 5, with 92 percent of 15,589 voters giving it the maximum score, according to iXBT Games. Within days the rating settled around 4.83 to 4.84 across more than 24,800 ratings. That is higher than any of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, all of which reviewed far better on Metacritic: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: 90 Marvel’s Spider-Man: 87 Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales: 85 Marvel’s Wolverine: 77 OpenCritic has Wolverine at roughly 79, with about 75 percent of critics recommending it. The reviews split hard The spread between individual outlets is the story inside the story: Giant Bomb: 5/10, the lowest among the major outlets IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar, Eurogamer: 6/10 ComingSoon: 8/10 TheGamer: 4/5 DualShockers: 8.5/10 Hardcore Gamer: 5/5 A seven-point gap between Giant Bomb and Hardcore Gamer on the same game is unusual for a first-party exclusive, where reviews normally cluster. The criticism is consistent enough to be worth taking seriously: combat that leans on a small set of repeated inputs and peaks early, a linear structure, and a smaller scope than the Spider-Man games trained people to expect from an Insomniac tentpole. Most reviews put the campaign in the 10 to 15 hour range. The praise is just as consistent. Logan’s characterisation, Liam McIntyre‘s performance and the set pieces carry the game for critics and players alike. What it means for Sony? Leaked studio documents previously pointed to a target of at least six million copies in the first year and ten million lifetime. Neither Sony nor Insomniac has published performance figures. The timing is the uncomfortable part. Wolverine arrives during a rough stretch for PlayStation’s first-party slate that also includes a struggling Marathon and the cancellation of Kojima Productions’ Physint. A 77 is not a failure. It is, however, the first time in this console generation that a PlayStation Studios exclusive has shipped without critical consensus behind it, and the player response suggests review aggregates and audience expectations for these games have quietly drifted apart. Metacritic and PS Store figures were still moving in the days after launch, with some trackers logging 78 as the review count grew.  Read More