Ballistics Report

Pros

Damage Modeling: The amount of damage you will be able to see on Wolverine is amazing, whether it’s the long gashes from swords or the explosive blasts of grenades. And to top it off, you get to watch it impressively heal right before your eyes. Aided by the excellent UE3 engine, you can be rest assured that it looks as good as you think it would. It gets to the point where you want to let yourself take damage, just to see how bad it can get.

Satisfying Combat: While it can be a little on the repetitive side since it all boils down to button mashing, the interesting environmental kills helps keep things fresh. Lunging into a pack of enemies, then quickly dispatching them one by one is very satisfying, especially if you are a Wolverine fan. The combat here is a perfect representation of what how we’d think Wolverine would fight.

Cons

Repetitive Boss Fights: Each boss has a pattern and once you nail it down, they become almost laughably easy to defeat. Mighty foes like Leviathan and W.E.N.D.I.G.O., who can easily give Wolverine a run for his money, become a monotonous game of lunge, slash, jump away, and then repeat. The helicopter sequences are a joke and pretty much have you doing the exact same thing every time you encounter them. It isn’t fun at this point and makes you tend to get it over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to throwing the generic foot soldiers into concrete mixers.

No Replay Value: Once you’ve beaten the game, your only options are to go back through on hard difficulty. Since you’ve already solved the puzzles and figured out the enemy’s patterns, there’s no real incentive to do this however. The Uncaged Version of the console game apparently includes a Danger Room-type setting with infinitely spawning enemies; however to play this mode you have to pre-order the game. Activision has not stated whether they intend to release this gameplay mode to the PC.

Lack of Innovation: The game pretty much tows the line of modern action/hack’n’slash games, with your character fighting wave after of enemies and then fighting mini-bosses that require quick-time execution events. While this isn’t a bad thing, Raven has never been known to make a game without at least trying something different. The RPG-Lite aspects are interesting, but hardly worth getting excited over.

The puzzles are ridiculously easy to solve and many of them make no sense given the context of the character. Wolverine doesn’t need a key; Wolverine IS a key.