Insomniac Games dropped a gameplay trailer for Marvel's Wolverine this week, and the internet promptly lost its collective mind. The clip runs two minutes and forty seconds, features approximately nine hundred gallons of digital blood, and confirms what we all suspected: this is not the Spider-Man game with sideburns. This is a man stabbing people in the neck while screaming.
For those living under a rock (congrats on the affordable rent), Insomniac announced this game back in 2021 with a teaser so vague it could've been a shampoo commercial. Then we heard nothing. For years. The studio pumped out two Spider-Man games and a Miles Morales spin-off in the meantime, while Wolverine fans sat in the corner refreshing Reddit like raccoons waiting for the trash can to open.
Now we finally have footage, and the reaction has split neatly into two camps. Camp One: "This looks incredible, day one purchase, take my money." Camp Two: "Why is he killing that guy, Wolverine doesn't kill, I've read exactly four comics and one of them was a coloring book." To which the rest of us say: ma'am, his name is Wolverine. His bones are coated in metal. His primary hobby is violence. What did you expect, a puzzle game?
The gameplay itself looks like someone fed God of War and a meat grinder into an AI and asked it to make art. There's a rage meter. There's a healing factor mechanic where you watch his skin knit back together in real time, which is either cool or a war crime depending on your tolerance for body horror. There's a sequence where he pops his claws through a guy's chest and the camera lingers. This is a hard M rating and Insomniac is not apologizing for it.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: we've been asking for this. For a decade, every superhero game was rated T because publishers were terrified of losing the teenager demographic and their parents' credit cards. We got bloodless punches and villains who got "knocked out" and woke up in jail with a headache. Wolverine was always the exception. You cannot tell a Wolverine story without blood. It's like making a cooking show where nobody eats.
The discourse, naturally, is already insufferable. People are review-bombing a game that isn't out yet. Someone on X (formerly Twitter, sadly) argued that the violence "sends the wrong message to children," as if eight-year-olds are the target demo for a game where a man's skeleton gets ripped out through his nose. Concern trolls are farming engagement. Console warriors are fighting about frame rates. A guy with a Spider-Man avatar has posted forty-seven times about how this "proves Insomniac is abandoning its roots." His roots, presumably, being a video game studio that makes licensed Marvel products.
What's actually interesting is the business angle. Sony needs a holiday tentpole. The PS5 generation has been weirdly light on exclusives that make people actually buy the console. Spider-Man 2 did numbers, but it's a friendly, family-adjacent blockbuster. Wolverine is the opposite: a bloody, angry, R-rated middle finger of a game. If it lands, it proves mature-rated superhero games can be system sellers. If it flops, we get another decade of sanitized cape content where nobody bleeds and everyone learns about teamwork.
No release date yet, which is the most Insomniac thing possible. They'll probably announce it three weeks before launch via a tweet that just says "Friday." We'll be there anyway, wallets open, ready to watch a Canadian man with anger issues and a metal skeleton disembowel a paramilitary goon in 4K.
The trailer ends with Wolverine walking away from an explosion. Of course it does. Subtlety was never his thing, and apparently it's not Insomniac's either.
Final take: This looks exactly like the Wolverine game we've been begging for since 2009's X-Men Origins tie-in, which was mid but had the decency to be gloriously violent. Let the man stab. If you wanted a wholesome superhero game, Spider-Man is right there, and he's not going to make you watch him heal a