The game, not the train wreck of a movie. Although the official title is something like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, let’s just call it Wolverine. At its core, Wolverine is a straight up brawler. You kill dudes…a lot of dudes. It has some leveling up your combat moves and some other RPG elements but it’s nothing to write home about. It is one of the goriest games I’ve played in quite a while. Slicing off limbs, decapitating, impaling and ripping enemies in half, Wolverine isn’t for the squeamish. But that’s exactly what Raven (the developers) got right; it’s Wolverine, not a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s gritty, it’s gory and it’s not that bad.

Raven has made the best Wolverine game ever. That’s not saying a whole lot because the games that came before it were complete piles of shit. The experience that Raven has absolutely nailed is that when you’re playing the game you actually feel like Wolverine. The health regeneration is quite impressive. If you get shot in the face you don’t go down like Cyclops, you take it like Wolverine and put your claws through his face. After fighting I would zoom in on Wolverines character model and watch the bullet holes, slash marks and open chest wounds close up and regenerate in real time.

It’s a decent sized game, probably 8-10 hours or so. My biggest complaint with it is that it’s quite obvious that when Raven set out to make a Wolverine game, they didn’t have the movie in mind. Some environments and dialogue just seem out of place and uncomfortably injected into the game. Raven probably had a good idea of where they were going and a movie executive stepped in and told the developers to make Wolverine: The Movie: The Game instead of Wolverine: The Game. That’s quite sad when you think about it, but that’s just the state of the video game industry these days. Everyone is out to make money and not necessarily a true experience. I wonder what Wolverine: The Game would have been without all the movie bullshit added into it. I just hope Raven or another developer gets to make that game one day. I would be so lucky to work on a Wolverine game.