Reviews for Marvel’s Wolverine went up today, and they are surprisingly mixed for a big PlayStation first-party game. I reviewed it here at Kotaku and thought it was Fine. It feels good to play but is repetitive to a fault, making it overly reliant on a story that’s spinning more plates than it can hold. But you know one thing that is consistently great in Insomniac Games’ Wolverine? The level of detail the game puts into tearing into Logan’s suit after fights, and then his healing factor kicks in and his toned body looks as if it has never seen combat.
Folks who have seen trailers know that Wolverine is much more gory and violent than Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, and that means that there’s a lot of blood splatter covering the screen at any given moment. Logan’s near-immortal status also means that Insomniac can treat him like a pincushion, which the developers love to do any chance they get. Why dodge an incoming, potentially lethal strike when you could just tank it and look super cool and sexy while doing it?
That’s Logan’s M.O., and I guess when you’ve spent centuries viewing your body as more of a prison than something that needs to be preserved, it makes sense that you would have zero qualms wielding it like a shield between someone you care about and an incoming piece of broken rebar.
This logic applies to on-the-ground combat scenarios where Logan slashes enemies and they respond with a few blows of their own. Logan’s body heals, but the suit or flannel he’s wearing doesn’t. Not immediately, at least. Insomniac has gone on record about that decision, explaining that its purpose is to have Logan’s armor regenerate over time (the game even says it’s supposed to) so players aren’t fighting in rags the entire game.
“You can’t play through most of the game wearing just shredded rags on his body,” Insomniac head of technology Mike Fitzgerald told IGN. “So we find the right balance between clothing that reflects the gameplay you’re doing and this brutal combat and the realities of that, and then finding the right moments to have it restore itself so you get that right cinematic feel of Wolverine.”
Senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed followed up in the same interview saying that if Logan was just walking around in the torn shreds of his costume, he would look like a weakling.
“Early on, you would be playing through missions and your clothes are shredded for way too long,” Reiner-Reed added. “You don’t feel as powerful as you’re playing through. So yeah, we definitely found that right balance was the right thing to say.”
That’s all well and good. For those who come to Wolverine in search of a power fantasy as one of Marvel’s baddest of bad boys, they probably don’t want to be running around in the tattered remains of some yellow spandex. But what about those of us who are playing a different ball game? Well, I’m happy to report that if you want to see a strong, grizzled man with his clothes torn asunder while he snarls, grits his teeth, and poses, again, and again, Wolverine has that shit in spades.
To table the horny for a second, one thing I genuinely found technically impressive and appreciated was Insomniac’s commitment to making Logan a hairy guy. I first took notice during one of the game’s State of Play showcases earlier this year, where we got a good glimpse of just how hairy his shoulders are, like someone at Insomniac painstakingly but lovingly placed each hair on his big, broad frame. However, as I played through Wolverine, I found that attention to detail extended far beyond just his arms. Logan has a full suit of body hair underneath his comic book hero suit.
There are a few segments of each costume Logan wears that get repeatedly destroyed in combat. The center of his back is constantly exposed, and his sculpted chest is usually showing through a DIY titty window, and both are completely covered in body hair. Games have invested a lot in the finer, granular details this console generation, but even in the ones that allow you to customize your characters to a near neurotic degree, body hair is often left out of the equation. Not for Logan, though. My man’s a jungle of hair and Wolverine loves to expose it.
I certainly didn’t try to get Logan’s suit torn up in a scrap, but I was rarely mad when it happened. Sometimes it would reach extreme levels, like when half of his cowl would be missing around his face and he would still insist on wearing the piece that remained. Those silly moments broke my immersion often enough that I eventually stopped wearing the mask, opting for a Hugh Jackman-style bare-faced hero look instead. That way, the tattered flannel and torn pants legs all kind of complimented each other like he was already wearing a minimalist suit before he started the fight.
I became real acquainted with Logan’s toned back throughout my time playing Wolverine, but across his wardrobe, it felt like each suit was reacting differently to the damage. His buttoned up formal wear stays connected as the other pieces were ripped apart, the flannel shirt under his bloody denim jacket clings to his body for dear life as patches of it are scattered around the battlefield, and sometimes his iconic yellow suit would expose large parts of his while remaining intact across more vital areas. It’s a cool system, even as silly as it is for all this gore and carnage to immediately disappear upon entering a new cutscene.
Clothes-based damage systems are nothing new in video games, and while they’ve often been deployed in an effort to titillate, I really appreciated Insomniac’s attention to detail in Wolverine. Both when it came to the clothes that were being torn off and the deliberately sculpted body underneath. Props to you, Insomniac. You made losing a fight less frustrating.
