Marvel's Wolverine has already made a huge number of sales in the three days since its launch, even though would-be fans keep suggesting it's not worth the Adamantium on its retractable claws. Despite them, Insomniac's new superhero blowout has already surpassed Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding 2 in lifetime sales on PS5.

Head of market analysis Rhys Elliott explains in Alinea Analytics' latest Substack newsletter that the PS5-exclusive Wolverine has quickly amassed a $130 million fortune, while Death Stranding 2 falls just short of that with $129 million in total PS5 sales – though it's been out on the platform for over a year now. Similarly, Wolverine has already sold a heavy heap of 1.9 million copies on PS5, while Death Stranding 2 lags with 1.8 million total sales.

These numbers help put into perspective PlayStation's decision to abandon Kojima's upcoming stealth game Physint, to its new publisher Xbox's delight. The underwhelming Wolverine has an overall 77 Metacritic score, with over 3,500 user reviews giving it the more harsh 6.4 rating, while Death Stranding 2 boasts an 89 Metacritic score and an 8.7 user score, sure. But who needs their PS5 games to have critical value when they could make easy money instead?

After all, "Wolverine is already the top-performing new PlayStation Studios game on PS5 this year," Elliott explains. It's sold more than double Marvel Tokon and sci-fi shooter Saros, "but you’d never guess from the DiScOuRsE," Elliott continues.

Some loud people are finding Wolverine annoying. They don't like the quicktime events you can't fail, or the colorful scent trails – colloquially known as "fart gas" – that some players think are as offensive as yellow paint. But GamesRadar+ guides managing editor Leon Hurley lets the truth come out in our three-star Marvel's Wolverine review: "Marvel's Wolverine is never a bad experience, just an underwhelming one full of odd choices."

That's satisfactory enough for anyone simply looking for a good time with a Wolverine missing his armpit hair, and so Marvel's Wolverine will likely continue to sell.

"The situation is that Wolverine is now the #6 top-grossing PS5 game of the year, despite only being on the market for a few days," Elliott says. It's already catching up to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, which has made $133 million on PS5 since July, and Crimson Desert, which racked up $160 million in PS5 revenue since March – so it's selling at a faster rate than any of those games, too.

The only PS5 game launched within the past three years that Marvel's Wolverine can't keep up with is Insomniac's acclaimed superhero adventure Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which made $250 million in three days.

"So yeah, Wolverine will keep selling, just not at Spider-Man heights," Elliott says. Sometimes, you're your own worst enemy.

Marvel's Wolverine dev Insomniac has "been cooking hard" in response to negative feedback: "We have been 100% listening."

Oh dear. Marvel's Wolverine came out this week, and let's just say not every section requires a killer instinct. In fact, one level doesn't even require you to hold the controller.

The streamer Michael Does Life discovered this while playing Insomniac's latest release. In a clip posted to his Twitter account, he openly drops the controller, keeping his hands free on camera, while Logan rides forward in an on-rails section where he's meant to fend off several enemies.

In theory, if you do nothing, you'll crash or get hit off the vehicle, right? Wrong, because Wolvie's got another mutant power - staying on a motorbike despite bashing into things and having cronies on his tail.

"Wolverine has ANOTHER motorcycle section and you don’t have to press ANYTHING," he captions the post. "The game plays itself! YIKES!"

The video is pretty damning, especially in light of similar instances people have found over the last couple of days. There's evidence of quicktime events that automatically pass if you do nothing, too.

But these aren't indicative of the entire game. Another clip from a different motorbike sequence shows that Wolverine can be killed during those missions, and some quicktime scenes leave damage if you don't do them right.

Results may vary seems to be the prognosis, but this all leans toward Wolverine being an uneven, unpolished game with some glaring problems. It's a huge contrast to Insomniac's Spider-Man games, and a real shame for all involved. But at least if you get a message you should reply to while playing, you know you can sort it out without missing much.

Marvel's Wolverine dev Insomniac has "been cooking hard" in response to negative feedback: "We have been 100% listening"

Marvel's Wolverine lead actor Liam McIntyre has thanked Insomniac Games and the Wolverine fanbase as his performance finally reaches the world.

Sharing a post on Twitter from Insomniac community and marketing director James Stevenson of the team celebrating the launch of Marvel's Wolverine with the actor, McIntyre congratulated the team on the release, adding, "Insomniac, you've given this nerdy kid more than he ever dreamed of. No amount of thanks will ever express my gratitude."

McIntyre later followed this up with a video message thanking fans of the game, saying, "Thank you for all of the incredible words and all the amazing support we've had on this really awesome launch day."

The Wolverine actor adds, "we've spent years and years trying to build something that we're really proud of." He also shouts out the team at Insomniac, saying, "you guys are just the absolute best." McIntyre also spoke about his role in the game, saying, "I can't believe it. This has been the honor of a lifetime."

While Wolverine is the worst-reviewed Insomniac Games title since the studio was acquired by Sony – as far as critic ratings go – so far fan reception seems to be positive, with the PlayStation Store reviews sitting at 4.84/5 stars on launch day.

McIntyre is especially receiving praise for his role, with responses to his posts full of positive comments about his performance in the game, and some calling for him to be given more projects as the character.

Marvel's Wolverine dev Insomniac has "been cooking hard" in response to negative feedback: "We have been 100% listening"

PlayStation exclusive games like Marvel's Wolverine and Marvel's Spider-Man aren't Sony's only connection to superhero media. Sony Pictures also produces the Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man movies (and, of course, the likes of Madame Webb). That's created some creative opportunities, as Tom Holland himself has admitted that some of Brand New Day's terrific stunts and fight scenes were inspired by the trilogy of games. Considering the Spider-Man flicks are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios could do worse than taking some similar notes from Marvel's Wolverine.

While the action in Marvel's Wolverine on PS5 is certainly bombastic – expect lashings of blood and gore as Logan pops his adamantium claws to de-limb cybernetic reavers and pounce on ninja hidden in trees before ripping their chests out – high-octane action isn't unusual for the angry superhero. No, I think the most impressive aspect of Marvel's Wolverine, playing it as a long-time comic and movie fan, is how unbothered it is by the long shadow of Fox's iconic X-Men saga, many instalments of which put Wolverine himself front and center.

Suit up

With 10 core movies spanning 2000–2017 (discounting spin-offs like Deadpool), the landmark X-Men films truly define a generation of superhero cinema. Its original two films, alongside Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies, helped to put the comic book movie on the map and turned them into the audience-pleasers they are today.

Even since Marvel Studios got the mutant rights back from Fox in 2019 with Disney's acquisition of the company, they've so far been unable to resist the allure of playing with pre-existing toys. The past eight years have seen variant timeline heroes such as Professor Charles Xavier in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and Wolverine in Deadpool and Wolverine being reprised by original actors Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman respectively. A core meta red herring twist in Wandavision even revolves around the idea that Evan Peters may be reprising his role as Quicksilver. Following Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Marvel has finally announced a proper X-Men film is on the way in 2028, starring an all-new cast – and it's vital Marvel gets it right in a post Avengers: Doomsday world.

During all this to-ing and fro-ing, Insomniac Games' own Marvel universe on PlayStation has been in its lane, thriving. The Marvel's Spider-Man games kicked off with Peter Parker already active as the web-slinger, reinventing his history with a suite of villains while also coming up with fresh origins for familiar faces to create a world for Peter Parker to inhabit that's both familiar and fresh.

Marvel's Wolverine takes this approach even further. This is also no Wolverine origin story – only a small flash of memory points towards his Weapon X backstory that saw his bones fused with adamantium metal – but this is a universe in which the X-Men don't yet exist as an institution. In fact, the game opens up with Logan effectively coming out of retirement to assist his old crew, Team X, with rescuing their founder Nathaniel Essex from Bolivar Trask's illegal mutant blacksite facility, ending up on the trail of a grander scheme that imperils mutantkind in the process.

Logan is old, but due to suffering amnesia after going feral, he can only remember the last thirty years of his life, even if his skills before then return naturally – like being able to speak several languages fluently. Even while not being an origin story, this still manages to be a tale that juggles Wolverine finding himself and defining his future rather than his past, all while a parallel journey is happening for a dispersed and diminished mutantkind being hunted down by prejudiced forces. A better future is worth fighting for.

Team X is neither quite like the black ops Team X from the comics (formed of Weapon X test subjects) nor the X-Men themselves. They're an off-the-grid group led by Nathaniel Essex, fighting for mutant rights in a world that has forced them to do so with extreme violence. Early chapters where memorials for fallen members loom large make it clear that anything less will see you snuffed out.

There's plenty of blood-spilling from Logan, but Marvel's Wolverine is also home to quieter, bleaker moments of tragedy that are heartbreaking. Especially as – like in Spider-Man – this paints a familiar world that's just different enough from the source material to leave me constantly wondering where it'll go next, and how it can possibly resolve in a way that's not completely devastating.

Jean Grey, too, is a core character (we are living in the year of Jean Grey). Unlike her recent appearances where she's much younger, it's nice to see Jean Grey here as a grown woman fully capable and comfortable with who she is, what she wants, and what she's willing to fight for.

Here, she's grown up alongside Callisto and this game's version of the Morlocks – a found family of unhoused and abused-by-society mutants with nowhere else to turn. It's even neat to see Logan's pining for Jean in other media inverted as Jean herself is clearly won over by the power of PS5 and its ability to render Logan's incredible amount of realistic body hair and big, glistening puppy dog eyes.

Both Liam McIntyre and Krizia Bajos inhabit their roles as Wolverine and Jean Grey fantastically, with direction that makes the most of the gaming medium to give them a wider gamut of emotions through its lengthy runtime than one movie would be capable of. I also have to tip my hat to Troy Baker's turn as Nathaniel Essex, whose British accent is surprisingly good for Team X's morally grey mentor.

Even with these differences, Jean Grey still feels true to aspects from the comics that define her as an enduring character, the same as Wolverine. Plenty of Wolverine easter eggs, teasers, and cameo appearances make it clear where a potential sequel would go while ensuring this version of the world still feels like one lived in by mutants – albeit still different from either of Fox's now-converged X-Men timelines. I actually think it's quite funny that the only movie tie-in suit Wolverine can unlock in the game so far is the yellow one from Deadpool and Wolverine, which is from a character who is decidedly not the one from the rest of the Fox X-Men movies.

I'd been worried elements of Fox's X-Men would be too enduring for this game to escape, and I couldn't have been more wrong. Next up, it'll be time to see the MCU's take on rebooting the X-Men, which promises a back-to-basics team composed of Professor Xavier, Rogue, Storm, Cyclops, and Emma Frost, with Nathaniel Essex also part of the picture. Still, a true back-to-basics approach feels a little obvious. After all, that's what X-Men: First Class already did so well. I want a different take, a fresh take, one that will make me reconsider what I believe the X-Men to be – just as Marvel's Wolverine has done for me in gaming with its own twists on the mutant world.

Logan's latest adventure is definitely not without problems. In our Marvel's Wolverine review, we criticized poor pacing and a choppy structure that feels like it was compiled hastily. But, even days after finishing it a second time through New Game Plus, I'm still thinking about the game's new interpretations of classic characters. I really hope this gets a sequel, purely because I hope this isn't the last time we've seen this take on Wolverine, Jean Grey, and the rest of Team X on PS5. That's exactly the feeling Marvel's X-Men movie needs to give me when I walk out of the theater in 2028. [Pulls out a chess board mimicking the Professor X / Magneto scenes in the movies] – It's your move, MCU.

Snarling for more to play? Check out our best Marvel games ranking. Or, if you'd rather chill, our best Marvel movies list has plenty of suggestions!

Insomniac Games community director James Stevenson says the team is listening to the feedback the game received ahead of its launch.

Marvel's Wolverine has picked the worst possible time to be mid – being the worst-reviewed Insomniac game in a decade. Not only is it releasing in perhaps the most packed September to date, right after the critically acclaimed Onimusha: Way of the Sword and The Blood of Dawnwalker and sure to be smash hits Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave and Control: Resonant, but it comes amid a string of bad decisions from Sony.

PS5 consoles are becoming prohibitively expensive for many, Sony abandoning physical games has been a constant in the discourse for months now, and right before Wolverine reviews dropped, it was revealed that the publisher wanted to cancel Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear spiritual successor Physint – with the game falling in Xbox's lap. Basically, Sony needed a win.

And while it doesn't seem like Wolverine is by any means a bad game, it clearly has some issues that have been picked up by players and reviewers over the last week. But in a post on Twitter, Stevenson acknowledges its shortcomings, saying, "We have been 100% listening over the last few days," adding that "the team has been cooking hard today in response to some of the feedback."

While multiplayer or live-service projects overhauling themselves and turning things around isn't too new a concept – see No Man's Sky – it's also started to become a thing in single-player games in recent times. Most notably, Crimson Desert, released earlier this year, has been constantly updating itself based on player complaints, with a full story overhaul patch being released last month. So in some cases you really are better off waiting a few years for things to get changed.

Check out the GamesRadar+ Marvel's Wolverine review to see what we thought of Insomniac's latest.

There was one thing that we knew for certain going into Insomniac Games' latest title: we'd have a bunch of Marvel's Wolverine Easter Eggs to dig our adamantium claws into. After all, this is Marvel we are talking about, folks, and with that level of history and pop cultural influence, there was no way that we wouldn't get a bunch of references and cheeky little comic book nods.

However, I will say that even as a Marvel veteran, and having played through the entire game (read our Marvel Wolverine review next for a complete deep dive) at this point, some Easter Eggs are tricky to find here. While some are obvious, others rely on optional interactions. There are also more than a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of moments as you fill the shoes of an amnesiac Logan. So with that in mind, we've rounded up all the references, subtle nods, and direct comic call-outs in a handy guide for you.

Below are all 32 Marvel's Wolverine Easter Eggs that we have found so far, complete with a short description explaining each and where you'll be able to find them if you want to check them out for yourself too. Warning: spoilers ahead!

1. The Daily Bugle

While the Daily Bugle is a New York publication, you'll be able to find an Easter Egg of the front page of an issue during the mission "The One That Got Away" that takes place near Vancouver. Found in Leech's hideout, the front page of the paper has been pinned to the wall. Said front page is about a baseball team winning, a team which seems to be called the Maelstroms. Now, granted, I don't know Marvel's baseball teams off by heart, but I do know about the supervillain called Maelstrom, who tries to destroy the universe, so it looks like we have two Easter Eggs in one here, folks.

2. Gambit's card

Gambit is an X-Men staple, and considering how he doesn't make an appearance in the game (he is probably off with Rogue somewhere, right, gang?) I couldn't help but smile after spotting a Gambit playing card during my playthrough. You can spot this during the mission "One Last Mission" on a side table to Walter's right while you look through records for him. If you need a quick refresher, playing cards are Gambit's weapons of choice on most occasions as he charges them with kinetic energy and uses them as basically explosive projectiles. I would have loved to get a chance to throw some destructive aces myself, but at least the charismatic character got a nod.

3. A Dazzler poster

Dazzler may not be part of Logan's team in the new Wolverine game, but she is at least there in the form of an Easter Egg thanks to a poster in-game. If you aren't familiar with this absolute icon, Dazzler is a mutant who can convert sound vibrations into light and energy beams. She also made her first comic book appearance back in the '80s in Uncanny X-Men #130. She does have a kind of on-again, off-again relationship with the X-Men, as she occasionally joins the team. But considering that she is a big-time singer as well as a hero, it does make sense why we get to see a dedicated poster here vs. another mutant. This poster can be found during "One Last Mission", you'll see it after going up the stairs to the bar Jean is in.

4. A Devil Dinosaur in Tokyo

Stepping through the red gates of Kabukicho in the "Get Angry" chapter doesn't just feel like you're playing Yakuza – this is directly based on Tokyo's real red-light district. The huge tower in real-life contains the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku, and is famous for having a massive Godzilla head on the side. Here, the equivalent is reimagined as a T-Rex with distinctive crimson red skin, which seems like a direct reference to Devil Dinosaur from the '70s comic, who is usually partnered with either Moon-Boy or, more recently, Moon Girl – including as a Marvel Rivals character.

5. Alchemax

What better place to reference the evil, cyberpunk megacorporation from Spider-Man 2099 and the wider Marvel 2099 universe than among the neon lights and bright posters of Tokyo? Several locations throughout Kabukicho advertise the company, hinting that they may have offices nearby. Not only is their illegal drug-testing responsible for turning Miguel O'hara – who you may know from Across the Spider-Verse – into a Spider-Man, but also for creating Degen mutants, who populate the futuristic universe.

6. Sable Security

Sable Security (also known as Sable International) makes an appearance in the game, meaning we have another Spider-Man link here. If you aren't familiar with this already, Sable Security is a security force that is founded by Silver Sable, the princess of Symkaria. It's a group that is meant to help out countries dealing with rising crime rates, but they have a habit of pushing boundaries and often civilians around. Several advertisements can be spotted around Shinjuku, but most prominently this appears near the start of "Bad Blood" as Logan and Jean approach Shiro's building, where Wolverine can comment on her attempt to recruit him.

7. Roxxon

Roxxon is one of the staple villains in the Marvel Universe and is also one of the largest conglomerates in that world, so I was very pleased to see it pop up while playing Wolverine. While this company has appeared in other Marvel storylines like Spider-Man, it is famously very anti-mutant, so seeing it in an X-Men game is very fitting and also serves as a reminder that a ton of people don't like Logan and friends. Signs for Roxxon are throughout Tokyo's urban settings, from "Get Angry" through to "We Were Wrong".

8. Hammer Industries

Iron Man fans may be more familiar with the name Hammer Industries, but I was very pleased to see this Easter Egg pop up on a billboard during the mission In The Shadows. It is a weapons manufacturer that surprisingly has a history with the famous group of mutants. Firstly it's logo has been shown in Marvel Animation's X-Men '97 series, and in the comics, the X-Men saved one of Its weapon manufacturing firms from Magneto. It's also a nice bit of world building to see mention of Hammer Industries in tandem with Trask Industries, and Roxxon being mentioned.

9. Jean Grey's green dress

In Marvel's Wolverine, we see Jean Grey wearing an outfit which is very much reminiscent of her X-Men #39 costume. The comic saw the hero wearing a green mini-dress with yellow accessories and a pointy yellow mask. As you can see from the screenshot above of the outfit sorted in the game, there is a very clear reference being made here as Jean Grey dons this classy outfit to blend into a party in "Death Comes To Death" while Logan sneaks in through the rooftops.

10. Angel, Worthington III

Angel Worthington III is a mutant and the founding member of the X-Men, and also comes from a wealthy background – which makes it appropriate to catch a glimmer of his presence in the "Roll the Dice" mission during the opening section where Logan and Jean infiltrate a classy Uptown Madripoor casino undercover. Near the dance floor which you need to approach to progress the story is a reserved spot at the bar for Warren Worthington III.

11. J Jonah Jameson's autobiography book, 'My Life in Words'

Marvel's Wolverine is set in the same universe as Insomniac Games' Spider-Man games, even if they haven't explicitly crossed over thanks to being in different locations. J Jonah Jameson has wide market penetration, however, with multiple copies of his autobiography, My Life is Words, present in Nathaniel Essex's mutant institute where Team X is based, complete with JJJ's mug on the back – first able to be seen during the "Homecoming" mission. Essex, you need better reading material.

12. Henry McCoy (Beast) research

If you have a poke around Trask's lab, you'll see that on display is Henry McCoy (Beast) research. This is a nice little find considering that we don't get to see Beast otherwise. It is also a fun tie-in for some comic book lore, considering that Beast's backstory did once upon a time involve him working as a researcher for the Brand Corporation, where his research was also the target of thieves. I was personally a bit sad not to see Beast in the fold during the game, so finding at least a mention of his name and history was a nice surprise. The reference appears on one of the monitors Logan can interact with during the "Mutant Detected" mission in Madripoor, after Mystique suggests you nose around while she obtains some data.

13. The obelisk of dead names in the institute

Nathaniel Essex's institute features a striking black obelisk in its lounge area – a reference to members of Team X and fellow mutants who have fallen, and it's sadly not a short list. This can be observed in "Homecoming" and other missions set there. All of these names are references to mutants from the comics, spanning some classics to much more modern additions. Oddly, the obelisk's reverse side repeats a portion of the list.

• John Wraith: Kestrel
• Kodiak Noatak: Harpoon
• Sidney Green: Onyxx
• Myles Alfred: Vivisector
• Michael Baer: Blockbuster
• William H Thornton: Potentially Harry Thornton, AKA Harry Heck, he's in the Punisher 2004 movie, but not a mutant, so we might be missing something here
• Robbie (Prism): Prism, believe it or not
• Carl Aalston: Rain Boy
• Christoph Nord: Maverick
• Trevor Hawkins: Eye-boy
• Lazaro Kotikash: Kidogo
• Benjamin Deeds: Morph
• Sarah Vale: Network
• Roxanne Washington: Bling

14. All the other mutants' gear in the Arsenal from former Team X members

Several of the former members of Team X memorialized on the black obelisk still have space in the arsenal for their gear. Clearly, the team isn't recruiting new members quickly enough to have to hurry up with clearing those up. At various points, Logan can comment on the members here. They include Maverick's mask and pistols; a water tank containing Rain Boy's gear; Eye-Boy's many-goggled nightvision specs; a heap of Vivesector's books; and Onyxx's training weights. Wolverine must walk through this room in "Homecoming", but some of his comments about them come during later sections.

15. Young Dragons in Love book

At the institute (during "Homecoming" and some others), you can find a Young Dragons in Love book, which comic book fans may understand is a reference to the same-titled storyline in Uncanny X-Men 181. That story is set after the events of the original Secret Wars, when the X-Men have returned to Earth; however, they are followed by a kaiju-sized dragon. This is also another Easter Egg about the X-Men's past adventures in Tokyo that we see in the game, so it's nice to see that the game has taken the time to build up a sense of subtle history in the locations you visit here.

16. Along Came a Spider book

Also during "Homecoming" and other missions at Essex's institute, you can spy he has a few copies of a book named Along Came A Spider, though it's harder to get a good look at the full model. Black, with distinctive red linework across it, this is likely a reference to Venom: Along Came a Spider (1996). Though it's not the only Spidey media to use the name, this feels like a reference to the Venom symbiote from Spider-Man 2. A Venom spin-off game has been long rumored. Could this mean anything?

17. Skull and engine motif on Sabertooth's Barbed & Wired poster

OK, so this is an Easter Egg that may be nothing, but it did make me double take so it is worth putting it on this list. In Marvel's Wolverine, you'll be able to see Sabertooth's Barbed & Wired poster as you sneak through his room as part of the main story in "Homecoming", which does feature a skull and engine motif. Now in the Marvel universe, a skull and engine can only mean one thing: Ghost Rider. It is a bit of a reach, considering that Ghost Rider and Sabertooth don't often cross paths, but there is a connection between the two through Wolverine, as Logan and Ghost Rider have teamed up to face Sabertooth in past comic book storylines. I may be reading too much into this, but it would be cool if my hunch is correct, especially as one of Logan's more impressive unlockable skins, earned through surviving challenging combat gauntlets, is a Ghost Rider suit.

18. Osmium

During the mission "The One That Got Away" Wolverine discovers Trask is shipping Osmium to Madripoor. This is a fun Colossus Easter Egg, as the Russian mutant's body is made up of an "organic steel" that is very similar to Osmium. Although we don't know his full body composition, it's pretty likely that Osmium is a big part of it so seeing it pop up in the game is a nice little nod to the missing X-Men member. The next mission, "Raise Some Hell", takes place in a refinery, and the reavers have set up indestructible osmium locks that force you to find more creative ways around the refinery. This is also the mission where you find the head of a prototype Sentinel, which is presumably what all the osmium is for.

19. William Stryker's autobiography

William Stryker is a big name in the X-Men universe as a massive anti-mutant force. In fact, most iterations of the character have him viewing his opposition to mutants as some kind of crusade, as he believes that mutants are the forces of satan trying to kill humanity…very healthy. This warped mindset comes as an Easter Egg in the game, as you can find Stryker's autobiography (titled 'My War') in the Trask power station in the mission 'Knock Knock'. Another fun fact about William Stryker getting a shout-out is that in the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine's version of Weapon X (which he leads), he convinces Wolverine into receiving adamantium implants and then shoots him in the head, making him suffer from long-term amnesia. A fun similarity to the game's amnesiac hero, isn't it?

20. Trask's cerebro-like tracking device

Marvel Wolverine is missing a lot of familiar X-Men and other mutants. However, even though we don't see them on screen directly, at least we do get some kind of mention of them in this particular Easter Egg. In the game, we see a Trask Cerebro-like tracking device that lists several known mutants indirectly, which Mystique accesses during the "Mutant Detected" mission. For example, there is information about an individual with absorption powers which is pretty much pointing at Rogue since Caldecott Country is also mentioned (aka where she is from). Another example is an entry mentioning very Kitty Pryde-like intangibility, while another mentions optical blasts, which points to the Summers family. I'm sure there is more here that I may have missed, so I highly recommend comic book fans pay attention to this Easter Egg to see if you can pick out any more covert mutant mentions.

21. Princess Bar

The Marvel Presents storyline from the '80s in which Logan goes undercover in Madripoor as Patch, his eye-patch and white tuxedo-wearing alter ego, also features the Princess Bar, where Tyger Tiger works. This is almost too direct to be a true easter egg, but it's worth noting how much Marvel's Wolverine seems to pull from the iconic Marvel Presents 'Save the Tiger' run even in terms of pure aesthetics and tone. It first features in "One Last Mission" as Team X debriefs, and appears in later sections in Madripoor as well.

22. A Angar and the Screamers poster in Madripoor

There is a poster in Madripoor featuring "Angar and the Screamers," which is a very fun little nod to the character Angar the Screamer (aka David Angar). Angar used to be a social activist; however, after he volunteered to undergo some experimental research, he developed a very unique set of vocal cords that allows his screams to have hallucinogenic effects. He is a villain in the Marvel Universe, and often pops up as a baddie for hire in the comic books. You can see this as you explore around the Princess Bar in "One Last Mission" at the nearby theater, and in later missions in the same area.

23. The Crick-Hits

This poster is an easter Egg of an actual band in the Marvel comics (not just a fun parody of a villain). They are a rock band from Earth-1611 and are a Beatles parody in-universe. Considering how Earth-1611 is a divergent of Earth-616 set in the 1960s, the Beatles reference is very fitting. Another fun fact is that this timeline is also where The Age of Sentry storyline takes place. Posters for the band are across Madripoor Lowtown, but feature most prominently alongside other references at the theater near Princess Bar, which you can see earliest during "One Last Mission".

24. Starry

For a while I thought the Starry jewelry ads in Tokyo were just chic designer wear, but the mix of Starry with jewels feels like it could be a nod to the Starry Wisdom Cult from Journey Into Mystery #4 (the same strip that introduced Thor), itself based on the Church of Starry Wisdom from HP Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark short story. In the comic, the church believes that gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron could awaken their Old One deity. Given the strangeness of the Helix Engine, it's not off-base. Perhaps there really is more to this seemingly innocuous jewelry brand than it seems.

25. A Backwards Santa ad in Tokyo

Backwards Santa, advertised in Tokyo, and potentially a movie of some sort, could just be a wacky reference to an evil version of the Father Christmas character to fill billboard space. However, it's worth remembering that in the comics Santa is confirmed to be a mutant who uses his powers to deliver presents to children, which is in Marvel Holiday Special 1991. If this were a poster for Backwards Cyclops I'd include this as an Easter Egg, so it's only fair to embrace Santa in the same way.

26. Tokyo kissing toilet

The bizarre kissing toilet in the basement of the bar Wolverine and Jean burst into, which hides a collectible whiskey bottle, isn't just a random invention. No, this is pulling from a real Japanese toilet where a similar mask will make strange kissing noises at you as you do your business. It's just one of many interestingly extra Japanese toilets that continue to prove how advanced their bathroom technology is. Seriously, once you've used a good one in a hotel, you won't be able to forget it – and no toilets back home will satisfy.

27. The Mission select screen

The mission select screen in Marvel's Wolverine has an Easter Egg to the (at this point) iconic meme of a sad Wolverine sitting on his bed and looking at a picture frame. The moment is originally from an episode of the animated X-Men TV series called "Captive Hearts", which had Logan acting all forlorn while looking at a picture of Jean Grey and Scott Summers. While the original source is pretty heartbreaking, the reference is hilarious and a great little addition to see in the game.

28. Archibald Corrigan

The logo for Archibald Corrigan's freight company can be spotted on the side of a building during Way Down Low, which is a fun little reference to the Vietnam War pilot. Archie has a history with the X-Men, having worked for Tyger Tiger and with Patch (Wolverine's alias). A lot of their interactions revolve around Madripoor, so again it is nice that the game gives us a sense of history with that place. Another fun Archibald fact is that Charles Xavier also purchased a plane from him at one point, so the X-Men lore goes deep here.

29. "Where is Baran?" Graffiti

There's plenty of graffiti in Lowtown with the odd bit referencing something appropriately Wolverine-y - during Way Down Low, you can find several instances of 'Bub' sprayed artfully on a wall, referencing Logan's catchphrase. But during I'm Still Here, you can spot a more obscure reference to Prince Baran, a previous ruler of Madripoor who is descended from a long line of pirates. As a key player in Madripoor, he therefore has links with Tyger Tiger and Wolverine in the comics, overseeing plenty of crime, and even dividing the city state's criminal enterprises between Tyger Tiger and General Nguyen Ngoc Coy.

30. Whiskey bottles

All the Marvel's Wolverine whiskey bottles reference something to do with Marvel and Wolverine – most of them nodding to specific Wolverine alternate names or story arcs, such as The Old Man or Patch, and even deeper cuts like Revolto (as in, The Clown, when Wolverine was in Frankenstein's Monster's Murder Circus). Incredible 181 is particularly notable, however, as a reference to Incredible Hulk 181, where Wolverine first made his appearance as a villain of the week hired to take down Bruce Banner as a mercenary. Later, he was retro-fitted to be a mutant, recruited to join the X-Men on an emergency mission in the legendary Giant Size X-Men 1, which introduced many of the core team we know and love today including Storm, Nightcrawler, and others.

31. Wolverine's Costumes

Like the bottles, Marvel's Wolverine suits contain so many nods to Marvel and X-Men lore that we've given them their own deep dive. Stand-outs worth mentioning include a crossover skin with Marvel Tokon, a cel-shaded Animated skin that nods to the legendary '90s TV show, Future Fugitive, which puts a Marvel 2099 spin on Logan's look, and the Ghost Rider-inspired Hellverine. Others spotlight fan-favorite arcs or looks, such as New Leather nodding to Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, and the Midnight look from the original Midnight Suns comics (no, not the tactics RPG Marvel's Midnight Suns – though, please, Insomniac Games, we're begging for the gold all-over look to return).

32. Daredevil's connection to Shiro

The Hand have become a recurring Wolverine threat, but they have their origins in Daredevil 174, and are frequently antagonists for Daredevil, AKA defense attorney Matthew Murdoch. Their New York presence featured in both Netflix's Daredevil TV series, and in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. In Marvel's Wolverine, Shiro is a collector of The Hand artefacts, and helps Logan and Jean track them down, including some crucial clues provided to him by "some lawyer in Hell's Kitchen" just before they take the fight to their base at the end of the Japan section of the game. There's a The Hand reference in Spider-Man 2, as well, which for a while was thought to be a nod towards Daredevil featuring in Spider-Man's future as well. The connected universe continues to grow for Insomniac Games.

For more superhero goodness, we have a list of the best Marvel games that you should play today. Or for more stories, head on over to our list of the best Wolverine comics of all time.

Unlocking all Wolverine suits and claws isn't easy as you've got to complete the game, get every collectible, and ace several challenges. But once you do have them unlocked, you'll have access to almost 30 costumes (or more if you got the Digital Deluxe Edition) in which to dress Logan up in Marvel's Wolverine, covering the entire history of the character - there are plenty of obscure references and there are even more to find in our Wolverine Easter eggs guide too. From deep-cut comic costumes to Hollywood suits, here's a rundown of every suit in Marvel's Wolverine and how to unlock them.

Bear in mind that a few of Wolverine's suits are relevant to the game's story so, while I've kept things vague, be mindful of possible spoilers below.

How to unlock all Wolverine suits

Marvel's Wolverine features 27 suits and 22 claws, with an additional five of each if you own the Digital Deluxe Edition of the game. You'll unlock most suits and claws just by playing through the game's missions (if you want to know how long that'll take, I've explained how long it takes to beat Marvel's Wolverine here) but some require you to complete specific challenges instead – unlike the Spider-Man 2 suits, they are not tied to levelling up.

Furthermore, to actually wear some of them, you also need to spend materials you've gathered from Material Crates in missions to craft them – this is explained in the early mission 'Homecoming'. While all the suits and claws are just cosmetic options with no gameplay effects, crafting suits is quite important as the more you fill out your suit collection, the more you'll increase Wolverine's maximum health, up to double its base amount. For that reason, keep an eye out for Material Crates as you play, but don't worry if you miss any as the game includes more than enough to craft every suit and you can always replay missions - keep an eye our for Wolverine whiskey bottles as well as material crates as you replay.

Besides the Marvel Tokon and Animated suits, you can mix and match any combination of suit and claws to your liking. Just be aware that certain missions will force Wolverine to dress a certain way which can't always be altered during the mission.

Team X Tactical

• Unlocked by default.
• Wolverine's military-grade uniform that he wears at the start of the game, which is based on a Team X comic book look - a black suit with yellow webbing. His typical Adamantium Claws are unlocked from the start too.

Tank Top

• Unlocked by default.
• The white tank top and jeans is a classic look for Wolverine, appearing in various comics and movies - very prominently in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Battle Reborn

• Becomes available to craft for 75 materials during "Homecoming", the mission after you've beaten the Wolverine Omega Red boss fight.
• Wolverine's iconic cowled costume re-imagined for Marvel's Wolverine with yellow and black coloring.

Gold Standard

• Becomes available to craft for 75 materials during the "Homecoming" mission.
• Includes Bone Claws.
• This is Insomniac's rendition of Wolverine's Astonishing X-Men outfit, which features a mix of the classic yellow and blue and even has an X-Men belt buckle.

Fang

• Becomes available to craft for 150 materials at the start of the "The One That Got Away" mission.
• Includes Savage Bone Claws.
• A classic costume from Uncanny X-Men #107. The costume's namesake, Fang, is the name of an alien warrior Wolverine defeated and the costume's original owner. Wolverine dons it because his own costume gets damaged.

Old Man Logan

• Becomes available to craft for 150 materials at the start of the "The One That Got Away" mission.
• Includes Savage Bone Claws.
• Old Man Logan has appeared in several forms over the years, and this is Insomniac's version of their Wolverine all grizzled and aged, featuring the usual long brown coat.

Ultimate Red

• Becomes available to craft for 150 materials at the start of the "The One That Got Away" mission.
• Includes Hooked Claws.
• This is a relatively new costume for Wolverine from the Ultimate Universe in which he serves as the Winter Soldier under Colossus, Magik, and Omega Red.

Ablation

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "The One That Got Away" mission.
• Includes Notched Claws.
• While it doesn't look especially durable in the game, this slightly orange-tinted costume is based on Wolverine's armored Ablation suit from the 'Wolverine' comic series. It was gifted to Wolverine by Spider-Man after a Microverse alien virus caused him to lose his healing factor and ability to use his claws. The suit therefore had built-in claws.

Weapon X

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "Something Stronger" mission.
• Includes Curved Claws.
• Insomniac's interpretation of the classic Weapon X look, which sees Logan covered in experimental tech that make him an adamantium-infused, brainwashed killer.

Future Past

• Unlocks at the start of the "Something Stronger" mission.
• Inspired by Wolverine's X-Men: Days of Future Past comic costume, this outfit dresses Logan in a more casual outfit comprising jeans, a grey henley top, and a large brown coat with a fleece inside.

Dressed Down

• Unlocks at the start of the "One Last Mission" mission.
• A casual red flannel shirt and jeans fit for a Canadian lumberjack, and an outfit that's very similar to one Hugh Jackman's Wolverine wears in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Leather Jacket

• Unlocks at the start of the "Jetlag" mission.
• I don't think this suit references a specific costume but a leather jacket, flannel shirt, and jeans is just something Logan would wear on his days off. Again, Hugh Jackman wears a similar combo in the 2000 movie X-Men.

X-Force

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "Get Angry" mission.
• Includes Angular Claws.
• Wolverine's black ops X-Force suit designed for stealth, from the X-Force comic series.

Blue & Gold

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "Get Angry" mission.
• Includes Thin Claws.
• An X-Men training uniform suit made by Moira MacTaggert in Uncanny X-Men #273.

Ultimate Yellow

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "Get Angry" mission.
• Includes Crescent Claws.
• A simple black combat suit with yellow accents that Wolverine first wears in Uncanny X-Men #423. Ultimate X-Men Wolverine also wore this outfit around the same time for a (briefly) consistent Wolverine costume.

Accursed

• Becomes available to craft for 250 materials at the start of the "Get Angry" mission.
• Includes Natural Bone Claws.
• Wolverine's Madripoor costume from Marvel Comics Presents #8. It's a black sleeveless outfit and this version features all the accessories, including a red belt and black face paint.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls

• Becomes available to craft for 300 materials upon entering the arcade in the "In the Shadows" missions.
• Wolverine's cel-shaded costume from the 2026 fighting game Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. Also includes Fightin' Souls Claws but they can only be used with this suit.

Classic Brown

• Pre-order bonus that unlocks at start of the "The One That Got Away" mission.
• Includes Reflective Claws.
• The brown suit is a classic look for Wolverine that debuted in Uncanny X-Men #139.

Black Tank

• Becomes available to craft for 250 materials at the start of the "Way Down Low" mission.
• Includes Ragged Adamantium Claws.
• This seems to be an Insomniac original that riffs on the Tank Top costume. Wolverine's top is black, he's got a hat, and his sideburns are even more extreme!

Yellow Variant

• Becomes available to craft for 250 materials at the start of the "Way Down Low" mission.
• Includes Variant Claws.
• Wolverine's costume in the 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine. Thankfully, Deadpool isn't here too.

Animated

• Becomes available to craft for 200 materials at the start of the "Way Down Low" mission.
• Wolverine's simple appearance from the original animated series and reboot, X-Men '97. Also includes Animated Claws but they can only be used with this suit.

Patch

• Unlocks at the start of the "Roll The Dice" mission.
• An alias used by Wolverine when hiding in Madripoor that first appears in Marvel Comics Presents #10, dressing him in the iconic white tux and eyepatch combo. You might also recognize it from a Marvel Rivals costume and a brief appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine.

Feral

• Becomes available to craft for 300 materials at the start of the "I'm Still Here" mission.
• Wolverine has gone feral and looked the part in various ways over the years, but this suit matches his wild look in the very first cutscene of the game where he is rescued by Essex.

Midnight

• Collect all Whiskey Bottles.
• Includes Scarlet Claws.
• This suit is ripped straight from Midnight Suns #4, giving Wolverine a black, magically forged, armored suit with red accents, including scarlet claws. Unfortunately, his black-and-gold suit from the Marvel's Midnight Suns game isn't available.

Future Fugitive

• Achieve Gold level in all three Gauntlet Nightmare Trials.
• Includes Techno-Organic Claws.
• This is a costume Omega Wolverine gets in the 'X Deaths of Wolverine' comic series where he is infected with Phalanx's techno-organic virus, which turns organic material into animate machinery. That's why his suit is covered in glowing circuit board-looking tiger stripes. He still lives because of his healing factor, which slows the virus' consumption.

Hellverine

• Achieve Adamantium level in all three Gauntlet Nightmare Trials.
• Includes Charred Bone Claws.
• The Hellverine is a recent comic character that is a crossover with Ghost Rider. Specifically, he's the result of a demon called Bagra-ghul possessing Wolverine, giving him a rather infernal look. Bagra-ghul also went on to possess Wolverine's son Akihiro in a Hellverine mini comic series.

Death

• Complete all missions
• Wolverine's Death costume is modelled after his appearance as Apocalypse's Horseman of Death in Astonishing X-Men #1, featuring the same red head covering and blue metallic armor.

Age of Apocalypse

• Digital Deluxe Edition bonus that unlocks at start of "The One That Got Away"
• Includes Thick Claws
• This is Wolverine's look in the Age of Apocalypse timeline where he goes by Weapon-X, wearing a black and red suit, and is missing his left hand (the claws remain).

Incredible

• Digital Deluxe Edition bonus that unlocks at start of "The One That Got Away"
• Includes Smooth-Edged Claws
• This is the costume Wolverine wears in his first ever appearance, which was in The Incredible Hulk #180 when the Hulk and Wendigo were having a scrap.

New Leather

• Digital Deluxe Edition bonus that unlocks at start of "The One That Got Away".
• Includes Tapered Claws.
• At a few points in Wolverine's history, he has donned a full black leather outfit with some yellow X-Men embellishments. This New Leather suit seems to reference his New X-Men #114 outfit, but it's also reminiscent of the leather costumes in the early 2000s X-Men movies and his costume on the cover of Wolverine #171.

Savage

• Digital Deluxe Edition bonus that unlocks at start of "The One That Got Away".
• Includes Hollow Blade Claws.
• The Savage suit is an original design for Marvel's Wolverine by comic artist Adam Kubert, who has worked extensively on Wolverine, the X-Men, and many other Marvel heroes throughout his career.

Night Hunt

• Digital Deluxe Edition bonus that unlocks at start of "The One That Got Away".
• Includes Serrated Spine Claws.
• Night Hunt is another original design for the game, this one created by comic artist Iban Coello. He's worked on plenty of Marvel characters beyond Wolverine, including Venom, Carnage, and the Fantastic Four.

Flat-Edged Claws

• Achieve Silver in the Last Stand at Cold Pines Gauntlet Nightmare Trial.
• From what I can gather, these claws are an original design by Insomniac.

Gold Claws

• Achieve Silver in the Crucible of Tears Gauntlet Nightmare Trial.
• These gold claws are made from the divine metal Adamantine, a refined version of Adamantium. The claws appear in a few different comic runs, notably Astonishing X-Men. In this series, James Howlett is given Adamantine by Hercules, which is later bonded to his skeleton.

Diamond Claws

• Achieve Silver in the Savage Showdown Gauntlet Nightmare Trial.
• I think these claws are also an Insomniac original and are just an extravagant-looking reward. But there's a point in the Infinity Wars comic series where Wolverine and Emma Frost's souls are merged. Together they form Diamond Patch who has diamond claws.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Since you're already thinking about how much Marvel's Wolverine disappointed critics, you might as well start reminiscing about the awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie in 2009. From there, you'll be led to the more pleasant memory about the unprecedentedly solid PS3 game with the same name, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which we now know is partly so great because of how relaxed its production was.

Its production was relaxed because – to satisfy our thought spiral and return to that terrible X-Men Origins movie that makes Hugh Jackman kill military operatives while fully nude – X-Men Origins: Wolverine was delayed a year. One of the tie-in game's developers, Allison Salmon, explains on Bluesky, "We had LOADs of time…"

"We actually never worked crunch on it cause the movie got delayed," Salmon says about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game. Its matching movie was originally pushed back in 2007 because, apparently, Baz Luhrmann's 2008 drama Australia (which also stars Hugh Jackman) was hogging all the Fox sound stages. Then, Wolverine's Mexico release got shoved back again in 2009 because too many people were getting swine flu. Finally, the movie shone across theater screens on May 1, 2009. GamesRadar+'s original 3 out of 5 X-Men Origins: Wolverine review said it "sadly substitutes the bold ethnic cleansing subplot of the first three for a hackneyed Hulkstyle story of the military wanting better weapons." So. 3 out of 5.

The X-Men Origins: Wolverine game, however, has only earned goodwill in the years since it established that tie-in games – effectively, expensive advertisements – can also be thoroughly entertaining standalone experiences.

Even better, its developers didn't have to sleep in an office cot while proving it. Production crunch was virulent around 2009 – developers for major games like Red Dead Redemption and Dragon Age 2 have illustrated that with countless horror stories of sleep deprivation and red eyes at the computer. But X-Men Origins: Wolverine devs were protected from all of that and blissful. In fact, "I was on maternity leave for the beginning," Salmon remembers about the game's production, "came back and we still had time to goof around with making the unreal engine a deferred renderer (that we didn't use!)."

As you might have suspected, it seems creativity is best suited to free and encouraging environments. But the video game industry never learns that lesson.

Marvel's Wolverine was inspired by one of the few video game movie tie-ins that doesn't suck: "We had the same challenges as those devs."

While Sony cites "consumer preferences" for digital games as the core reason for its decision to abandon physical PlayStation releases, the numbers presented in a new report tell a different story. Games like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 are still making a ton of money on disc, according to Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics, and Sony's decision to end discs is much more about controlling the overall market for PlayStation games.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 earned $1.2 billion in gross revenue, according to the estimates in Elliot's latest newsletter, 35% of which was made up of physical unit sales. Ghost of Yotei made $400 million, with 37.6% physical. Astro Bot hit $275 million with 46.8% physical. Death Stranding 2 made $129 million, with 41.8% physical.

Why are these numbers so much higher than we've seen from other sources, including Sony itself? For one thing, many of the previous numbers have been counting unit sales, not revenue. For another, Alinea's numbers are about revenue generated, not units sold. And, of course, here we're talking purely about "prestige single-player" games, whose audiences are more likely to buy physical.

"Physical revenue is huge in the prestige single-player games Sony is getting more cautious about," Elliot argues, noting that "a disc dollar is worth less to Sony than a digital one, as there’s the retailer cut, manufacturing and distribution." Certainly, Sony would prefer if it were able to keep 100% of the revenue from these games, and it's betting that whatever players it loses by ditching physical releases will be offset by increased net profits.

So, Elliott argues, "the disc decision was largely about margins, control, and killing the secondhand market," rather than a recognition of consumer trends. We all likely could have guessed as much, and these factors are exactly why I've argued that PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, but there's some vindication in seeing the thought backed up by market analysis numbers. That doesn't make the prospect of an all-digital PS6 any less annoying, though.

Sony has topped a generational run of self-owns: abandoning Hideo Kojima's next Metal Gear right as Marvel's Wolverine falls flat.

If we end up seeing Deadpool in Marvel's Spider-Man 3, it would seem we have Peter Parker actor Yuri Lowenthal to thank, at least partly.

Talking to The Movie Dweeb on Instagram, Lowenthal was asked to comment on a potential Wolverine and Spider-Man collab in Insomniac's next open-world Spider-Man game. Insomniac is currently hard at work prepping for the release of Marvel's Wolverine, out September 15, but considering the success of Spider-Man, the standalone Miles Morales game, and Spider-Man 2, another Peter Parker game seems likely to happen at some point even though nothing's been confirmed yet. And of course, a Wolverine x Spider-Man match-up seems all the more likely with Insomniac now having worked on both IPs.

Lowenthal thinks a Wolverine collab would be "terribly exciting," but he says "there is one character that I would opt for even more strongly than Wolverine, and it would be Deadpool."

In response to this, The Movie Dweeb points out a tweet apparently published at some point from Insomniac creative director Brian Horton. I tried to track down the tweet, but Horton's Twitter account has been deactivated and there's no Bluesky equivalent, so take this with a grain of salt. According to The Movie Dweeb, the tweet read "worlds collide" and included hashtags for Wolverine and Spider-Man. Lowenthal says the tweet is news to him, but confirmed he's pushed Horton repeatedly on Deadpool being in the next Spider-Man game.

"I've pushed [Horton] every time I see him with the Deadpool thing, so if I've just spoiled it for Spider-Man 3, then I would just like to believe that they got the idea from me anyway," Lowenthal says.

As much as I'm sure Wade Wilson would be flattered to have a part in Insomniac's Spider-Man series, I'm not sure it would be a tonal fit, what with Deadpool's whole thing being expletive-laden meta humor and Marvel's Spider-Man being a generally straightforward, family friendly affair. At the very least, you'd probably have to bump up that ESRB rating from Teen to Mature.

After playing 2 hours of Marvel's Wolverine, Insomniac has crushed my fears of a post-Spider-Man slump: "This is uniquely Logan"

Just as with Insomniac's previous Spider-Man games, Marvel's Wolverine promises plenty of callbacks to its titular character's long history in comics, movies, and TV. But I got quite a laugh out of one detail in the game's latest trailer – a direct reference to an infamous meme originating in the beloved '90s X-Men cartoon.

The new game features trailer shows us a brief flash of what appears to be a level select screen, where you can replay previous missions. In the foreground, a text menu breaks down the stages by location and mission name, and on the other side we see a brief description of that level, alongside a tracker showing how many of its collectables you've missed.

In the background, we see Wolverine laying back in bed, longingly staring at a small picture frame he's holding in his hands. This, of course, is a tribute to the Wolverine Crush meme, which originates in X-Men: The Animated Series. You've probably seen '90s Wolverine staring at all kinds of things over the years, but in the original episode he's jealously looking at a photo of Jean Grey and Cyclops.

According to a breakdown on the PlayStation Blog, this mission replay screen appears in Logan's Nightmare Cabin, which tracks with my hands-on time in Marvel's Wolverine. While wandering through levels, you'll stumble upon unreal doors that lead into a nightmare version of Logan's home, where you can take on various challenges. I didn't see this level select screen in my preview time, but it looks like the cabin will also be how you select missions to replay.

There are plenty of other low-key references to specific moments in Wolverine history, including numerous suits to unlock ranging from the classic brown-and-yellow to the nearly indecent Weapon X look. But I never would've expected such a goofy reference to creep into such a prominent part of Marvel's Wolverine, even though I love it all the same.

Marvel's Wolverine was inspired by one of the few video game movie tie-ins that doesn't suck: "We had the same challenges as those devs."

There's no stopping everyone's favorite adamantium-clawed mutant now. Five years since its initial announcement, and just one month ahead of launch, Marvel's Wolverine has gone gold, marking the last big milestone before release.

Developer Insomniac decided to mark the occasion appropriately, with a little gif of our man Logan, all suited up, taking his claws out. It's such an eternally cool image. "Today, we're popping claws in celebration," reads the caption. "Marvel's Wolverine has gone gold!"

A glorious day for any team or studio, never mind when you're putting out one of the biggest games of the year. Wolverine is Sony's big PlayStation 5 exclusive for autumn and winter, and timing was particularly crucial in that respect, thanks to a certain crime sandbox from Rockstar.

With GTA 6 due to arrive in November, everyone else wants to get their games out in September and October to have the most chance of grabbing people's attention. Wolverine comes out on September 15, a healthy two months ahead of when the new Grand Theft Auto will be consuming all the airtime possible.

It may seem close to the wire for the game to go gold only a month out, but that's fairly typical. Much of the work over the last several months will have bug fixing and other minor changes based on preview feedback and whatnot.

This marks the end of what's been a long development cycle for Insomniac. Wolverine was announced five years ago, and a huge leak in 2023 made the process even more laborious. That's without mentioning the release of Spider-Man 2 in 2023, pulling the company's resources in multiple directions.

It's a good day for the people of Insomniac, and it allows the rest of us to get fully excited for Logan's next big video game. Time's up, bub.

Insomniac Games "announced Wolverine very early because we knew it would be very difficult to keep a lid on it," lead says.

The death of physical media means the death of games leaking early. That was my grand conspiracy theory as to Rockstar's motive when it announced that GTA 6 would be digital-only and code-in-box, never mind the more obvious price-cutting explanation. I thought I had it all figured out, but if it's true, there's egg on both our faces.

The latest supposed GTA 6 leaks are big ones. These aren't accidental or innocuous posts from fans whose copies arrived early from GameStop. It's not yet clear how, but a hacker group managed to get hold of alleged GTA 6 footage and share it online before stating its ransom-like terms. The perpetrator is not demanding money in exchange for its silence, but the reinstatement of physical editions for GTA 6.

I got so lost in my own sauce that I forgot there's more than one way for games to leak – and one of them is much more unpredictable than the other.

Scammers never die

My original theory tied back to the death of physical video game stores. I can't count the times I've seen entire games leaking online in the days and weeks prior to launch. From Lies of P to Silent Hill f, physical discs pose a threat to game releases. They are artefacts you hold in your hands, creating a tangible thing that can be bought, stolen, or delivered too early.

Despite agreeing with my colleagues about the importance of physical games, I understand Sony's move to seemingly copy Rockstar from a distribution perspective. Without physical discs, digital copies going live at the same time surely means a reduced risk of early leaks happening, right? Only in the case of GTA 6, all the decision has done so far is antagonize a hacker organization called Cyberleek, who posted gameplay footage ranging from the entire map to shots of Lucia and Jason taking cars and scooters for a spin, which have since been issued DCMA takedowns.

We've seen blockbuster studios get targeted by such operations before. Insomniac's huge ransomware attack back in 2023 springs to mind immediately, when a hacker group called Rhysida threatened to leak Marvel's Wolverine before it had even been given a first official look. Those hackers were the usual type; pay us X, and we'll stop doing X. It was a greed and money thing through and through.

Cyberleek seems to think it is doing a huge public service to gamers by fighting for physical games, supposedly out of the good of its proletariat heart. It even released a manifesto that, as well as a baked-in cryptocurrency sales pitch, demands an end to digital pre-orders, paid DLC, and an offline playable version. It's a skewed and highly unusual attempt at vigilante justice – assuming its motive is genuine – and not even the most vocal game preservationists at Stop Killing Games can get behind.

Uphill battles

Digital-only is not the safety net or quick anti-leak fix that I thought it would be. In this case, it may have been an instigator that shows the magnitude of its unpopularity.

I'm not saying the Cyberleek attack will make Rockstar backtrack. Thieves are here to stay, and there's little a plastic CD can do to stop it. But if the footage was attained through server hacking, it would serve as a reminder of how fallible and unsecure the digital realm itself is – which, I guess, was Cyberleek's completely illegal point.

Whether it's a crypto scam of dramatic proportions or a genuine threat to GTA 6 ahead of its Netflix preview (an alleged Rockstar insider on Resetera says the footage is a year old, so who knows how much of it is legitimate), the GTA 6 hack sends an entirely different message compared to what happened at Insomniac. If money is not the object here, it's clear that physical games are now considered equally as valuable to some. Including, apparently, cyberattackers.

With Grand Theft Auto 6 on the way, it's down to the community to bring back the best (and stupidest) thing about GTA Online

As Marvel's Wolverine faces criticism online, Insomniac Games' director of community and marketing has called out the "relentless onslaught" of negativity amplified by social media algorithms, saying it's not "representative" of overall opinion.

Last week, we saw a wave of Marvel's Wolverine preview content published online by different outlets, bringing a bunch of new information about Insomniac's next game and more footage to pore over. Critics have generally had plenty of positive things to say so far – GamesRadar+'s very own Dustin Bailey said that playing two hours of the game "crushed my fears of a post-Spider-Man slump" in his piece.

However, there's also been a massive amount of criticism from prospective players online following the reveal of new footage, and as you'd imagine, this hasn't gone unnoticed at the studio. Insomniac Games' director of community and marketing James Stevenson responds on Twitter: "I think the wild way this algorithm amplifies and forces negativity upon you has me reconsidering my philosophy on telling devs to look or post here.

"It's a relentless onslaught that I cannot believe is good for anyone's mental health nor representative."

While Stevenson doesn't point to any particular criticism here, you don't have to look far to find many, many examples. There's been a lot of negativity focused at one of the boss battles shown – specifically, against a prototype Sentinel – which'll see you dodging its massive robot arms and attacking them after it's missed and been left vulnerable, in a formula viewers note we've seen many times before over the years in other games.

Others have been slamming its linearity – one scene that's drawn ire sees Logan chasing down an enemy in a straight line amid explosions and gunfire, and while it looks very cinematic, folks have been left questioning how interesting it'll actually be to play through.

Things aren't exactly helped by the fact that a lot of folks are also using official PlayStation posts about Marvel's Wolverine as a platform to express their anger over Sony's decision to end production of discs for new PlayStation games starting in 2028. The backlash is understandable – people have plenty of concerns about everything from game preservation and ownership to the future of the secondhand game market – but obviously Insomniac has nothing to do with that personally. In fact, the devs have already noted that Wolverine's physical version will come with an actual disc in its box, but regardless, the situation means that Twitter posts and YouTube videos are full of negativity around PlayStation's future, drowning out actual hype for the game.

There's just under a month to wait for Marvel's Wolverine to actually release, at which point we're bound to get a clearer view of what folks actually think of it. After all, at this stage, its critics aren't able to look at the full picture, meaning that the hate isn't indicative of the complete package, and as Stevenson suggests, a social media storm like this isn't always even "representative" of what a game's actual player base thinks.

As Stevenson points out in a retort to one negative comment, Insomniac has an excellent track record of games with incredibly high Metacritic scores behind it. While, on the one hand, that'll certainly mean a lot of pressure for the Wolverine devs to deliver, this is also a team that's managed it many times before – hopefully that's a good sign of what's to come next month.

Insomniac had to ditch Spider-Man's open world for Marvel's Wolverine because Logan is "not somebody who has a friendly neighborhood."

Between our love for angry Logan himself and how solid Insomniac Games' Spider-Man series has been, Marvel's Wolverine has been high on our new games wishlist for a while even before we saw any gameplay. I know, I know, that's a bit naughty of us – but sometimes our comic book loving brains are just waiting to be scratched just right. Thankfully, Wolverine's claws are reaching all the right places now we've visited the development studio and played the game for ourselves.

In our Marvel's Wolverine hands-on, we've been overjoyed that Logan's adventure doesn't just feel like a Spider-Man reskin, but something that really celebrates the character. Spending two hours with the game through its first act, across two sections, we've had plenty of time to sink our claws into Wolverine's rage-fuelled combat, play with stealth, get a little too invested in its story, and even hang out with Team X.

But what are the best bits? Why get excited? Luckily for you I'll lead you right to the 'X' marking my superhero fandom spot across eight highlights I've pulled together below! Excited? Let us know which features you're looking forward to trying for yourself in the comments.

8. "This is uniquely Logan"

Make no mistake, we love Marvel's Spider-Man, but with three web-slinging games under its belt, we had some reservations about how distinct Insomniac Games' take on Wolverine would be. Thankfully, the studio seems to have been conscious about that themselves. Director Jess Reiner-Reed tells us that "any decision we're making, we're trying to go: 'Is this right for Wolverine? Is this telling a Logan-centric story?" Having played the game ourselves, we agree – this really does feel like a game that could only exist for Wolverine.

7. Feeling the Rage

Claws out, Marvel's Wolverine was always going to need combat that feels excellent – and Insomniac Games have hit on something special with Logan's Rage. A meter that builds up while fighting, it can be unleashed to enable instant kills, and lasts longer the more violence you dish out. It gives scraps an excellent sense of momentum that really highlights the berserker fighter that Wolverine is. It even loops back into his health system, where his Rage will allow him to get back up again, supercharging his regenerative capabilities so he won't stay down. Again – this is a fighting system that would only make sense for Wolverine.

6. PS5 Power

Few PlayStation first-party studios have had the output of Insomanic Games in recent years – Marvel's Wolverine is the team's fifth release on PS5. Both Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 are exclusive to the console, while the cross-gen Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales was one of the console's best PS5 games in its launch window. Quantity hasn't hampered quality either – they've all been excellent. "One thing we're really proud about at the studio is shipping games," says head of technology Mike Fitzgerald. Likewise, Marvel's Wolverine feels like a real technical achievement so far. Stunning to play, this studio really knows how to get the most out of the system this many years deep into the generation.

5. Violence for a reason

Wolverine is an angry man, but he's no caricature in this PS5 game. Respecting the character we know and love from the comics, he has plenty of legitimate reasons fuelling his rage. Marvel's Wolverine tells a dark story from its early hours (we'll avoid spoilers!), and there's some nasty moments of injustice that have Logan rightfully fired up, ready to rail at powerful authority that relishes doing the wrong thing. He might be the best there is at what he does, but, in a way, what he does is nice – just, not if you're on the receiving end of his bloody wrath.

4. Team X gon' give it to us

There's no X-Men in the world of Marvel's Wolverine (at least, not yet), but there is a Team X, Insomniac's own twist on the unit formed as part of the Weapon X programme in the comics. Here, it appears to be assembled by the sinister Nathaniel Essex, and the game's opening revolves around freeing mutants from Trask Industries' clutches while fighting alongside Sabretooth, Mystique, and Jean Grey. Later moments feature downtime where Logan can learn more about his allies-for-the-moment, including a 'never have I ever' drinking game with Mystique at a bar.

3. Moments of wander

Continuing on from those moments of downtime, while Marvel's Wolverine definitely isn't an open world game like Peter Parker's New York adventures, it's not completely linear, either. Getting some time to explore Madripoor before a mission kicks off, we get to have Wolverine sniff around a fairly wide space for optional but engaging conversations, nab collectibles, and take on challenges. All-out, non-stop action could get exhausting across a long journey, so we're glad for some moments to get some time with Logan off the clock. Here's hoping the final balance feels right.

2. Rising to the challenge

Speaking of optional content, we've had time to play some of Wolverine's side challenges and we're impressed so far. Similar in some ways to Spider-Man's challenges in his games, they put Logan through the paces across combat and traversal challenges, dialing up the pressure to ensure we really get familiar with his controls which – while easy to get to grips with – do have a lot of nuance in the right hands. Even the latter has more to it than we expected, and by the time we master them Logan is dashing about with perfect grace, which almost reminds us of Mirror's Edge (really!).

1. Silent, but deadly

Almost like The Last of Us Part 2, Wolverine is full of rage and violence but doesn't need to unleash it all at once in big, straightforward fights. Instead, he can dip in and out of stealth to strike decisively from the shadows. It makes wide sections particularly delicious to play, as we control Logan's angle of approach and can tear groups of guards apart in a sudden ambush in seconds, before moving on to the next. It really helps us feel like Wolverine, who is a scrappy, brutal fighter, not a hack and slash warrior.

Check out our best Marvel games ranking for more comic adventures!

After the announcement of Marvel's Wolverine, I wondered how much had changed from Insomniac's excellent Spider-Man games. The best part of those previous titles was swinging down digital New York streets, exploring the open world at my own pace. My hands-on time with Marvel's Wolverine put those fears to rest. While the foundations built for those Spider-Man games are clearly present here, the action takes a bloody new form that helps Logan's story sing.

"Central to the Wolverine player fantasy is claw combat, in much the same way that web swinging is the central element of Spider-Man player fantasy," creative director Marcus Smith says. "So we developed a lot of systems for our combat that supply the fast, fluid, and lethal combat system that you would expect from Wolverine."

So Insomniac has traded a web-swinging open-world for a mostly linear roller coaster that takes Wolverine on a globe-trotting adventure. It's a game design decision, yes, but one built on the idea of being true to Logan's character – something the developers repeatedly emphasized to me in my interviews with them.

Not-so-friendly neighborhood

"We're telling a Logan story," senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed says when I ask about the decision to ditch the open world. "He's so different from Spider-Man in so many different ways. One of the ways is that Logan is not somebody who stays in the same spot for a while. He's not somebody who has a friendly neighborhood. He's not settling down in one location. He's a loner guy in a lot of ways."

"It took us a while to say 'traversal is not an important part of Wolverine as a character,'" director of technology Mike Fitzgerald says. "As we talk about those key things, it's about his claws, his healing factor, his rage and anger, his past and dealing with that. These are some of the core things. The game doesn't have to be everything and have everything. At the same time, you don't want to be frustrating or slow."

While Wolverine isn't about movement, I never found the game to be slow. In fact, in some open-ended areas, I was astounded by how fast I could move. There's a part early in the game where you have to take out some anti-mutant alarms spread out across a bunch of half-constructed buildings, and Wolverine's ability to get around, claw his way up walls, and leap between rooftops is plenty of fun in its own right.

"Some of it's subtle, though, in fun ways," Fitzgerald tells me. "Like, he can climb trees. I mean, he's a wolverine with claws that you go up. But if you walk out on the branch, the branch bends, because he's a very heavy guy. That's a whole system we had to build [...] But Spider-Man walks out on stuff and doesn't affect those things at all. He's very light and nimble. As soon as we put it so the branch was bending under the weight and the leaves were all moving the right way, it's like, 'Oh yeah, this feels like this character and not that other character,' even because of that subtle bit."

Lone wolverine

Even Logan's personality provided its own challenges to the team. As it turns out, it's a lot easier to depict somebody like Peter Parker as a character than it is to make Logan's brooding solitude compelling. "Wolverine's a very internal character," Fitzgerald explains. "Spider-Man is an external character. He quips. He talks. He says what he thinks. Logan [is] quiet, and needs to express with his face and his eyes, and interact with characters. Oftentimes, saying one thing but feeling another. How do we express that through the game? It took a lot of work and effort."

These sorts of considerations permeated the game's development from top to bottom, as the devs repeatedly emphasized in our interview. "For making Wolverine," Reiner-Reed says, "we were constantly asking the question, like, 'Okay, what would Logan do here?' Doesn't matter what another character would do. 'What would our guy do? How would he react to this situation?' I think development-wise, that was what we were always focused on."

It's paid off, at least in the two hours I've played so far. Building Wolverine on the foundation of Spider-Man makes sense, since there's a core of biff-boom-bang action at the heart of every superhero adventure. But Insomniac has smartly torn down and rethought just about every element in a way that makes sense for this new hero.

As we await the launch of Marvel's Wolverine, here are the other upcoming PS5 game you need to know about.

Story-driven action-adventure games have a special place in my gaming time, because my wife and I have been bonding over them for years. What started as a desire to show her why I was so obsessed with Metal Gear Solid eventually became a couples' tradition, where she'd sit in and we'd enjoy the twists and turns of games like Uncharted and Yakuza together. When Insomniac announced Marvel's Wolverine, I instantly figured it'd be perfect for our gaming time together.

That thought was instantly wiped away when I saw how violent Wolverine is going to be. I can't blame Insomniac for wanting to be true to the character's violent lore, but my partner has an intense blood phobia. Even a quick glimpse of the goopy gore that permeates the game's trailers would likely be enough to push her to the edge of a panic attack.

So when Insomniac announced that it was introducing a new accessibility option for Wolverine which will allow you to toggle off blood and gore, my interest was more than academic. Alongside my hands-on time with Marvel's Wolverine, I had to get the developers' insights into implementing this option and finding new ways to cater to players – and watchers – with diverse needs.

What I do isn't very nice

While I don't have direct access to the violence options in my hands-on, creative director Marcus Smith demonstrates them ahead of my demo. "Yes, we are making a Wolverine game," he says. "Yes, it is extremely bloody. But we also understand that not everybody has the same level of squeamishness where it comes to blood. So we have settings where you can disable blood, disable gore, disable [dismemberment]."

He shows a screenshot of a character on the wrong end of Wolverine's claws. This enemy soldier is spattered with blood, with gore shooting absurdly from the spots where you'd expect. In the next screenshot, everything's the same – all the visual and emotional content is there – but the red stuff is gone. It's not a haphazard edit. It genuinely looks like a version of the game that was targeting a T for Teen rating from the start. There are other content toggles, too, like an option to turn off profanity if you simply want to make the game's dialog a bit more family friendly.

Offering these kinds of options is a big technical challenge since the gore itself is built from "a very complex set of systems," according to head of technology Mike Fitzgerald. "The way it affects characters is one thing. The way it affects environments is another thing. The way it sprays out of the characters is another thing. A lot of cinematics have custom authored blood that's independent [to what] someone very carefully painted onto a character or object. Finding all those places, making them all relate into the accessibility system the right way, took quite a bit of work, effort, and testing."

No surprises

When I first heard about these sorts of accessibility options, my instant fear was that not every edge case would be accounted for. There are, after all, cutscenes where characters get beheaded, or we see Wolverine get shredded to the bone by gunfire. In cases like those, the game simply blurs out scenes with content you don't want to see.

People like my wife have "a real reaction to that stuff," Fitzgerald acknowledges. "We don't want to surprise anyone with it when they think they have it turned off."

A part of me does wonder if these gracious nods to accessibility might undercut something of the game's bite. "The tone of this game is a bit darker, more mature than recent Insomniac games," Smith says, "and the reason for that is because we need to stay true to these characters. They have lived long and complex lives, and the only way to represent them with authenticity is to do so unflinchingly." Is a blood toggle a flinch?

"Wolverine is a brutal character," senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed acknowledges. "That's a part of the DNA of Wolverine. It is rated mature as far as topics, and as you mentioned, as far as violence, but Logan is not somebody who is ever glorifying violence. He's not cutting up people for violence' sake. He's doing it because he got into some situation. He has to defend somebody who can't defend themselves. He has to fight [against] injustice."

That distinction, I think, is why letting people play a substantially less violent version of Wolverine makes sense, even within the themes of the character. This Logan lives in a brutal world, yes, but his own brutality exists as a shield to protect others from having to endure the same hardships. And personally? I'm just glad my time playing Wolverine won't be as lonely as I feared.

We'll keep you up to date with every upcoming PS5 game worth knowing about.

It took Hollywood decades to learn the truth about superheroes: the origin stories are usually the most boring part. Insomniac Games was clued into that fact from the start with the Marvel's Spider-Man games, which deliberately avoided showing us Peter Parker's fateful meeting with a radioactive Spider. It seems they're taking a similar approach with Marvel's Wolverine.

"During our story, Logan already has adamantium infused to his bones," creative director Marcus Smith explains at a preview event for Marvel's Wolverine. "He does not remember how that happened, why it happened, and we are not really covering it because we're not doing an origin story."

During my hands-on time with Marvel's Wolverine, I saw the very start of the game, which does open with a brief flashback. There, we see Logan in the woods, seemingly feral, when he meets Nathaniel Essex – a character whose name will ring a calamitous bell for X-Men fans. The scene is just a few moments, and we quickly fast-forward apparent years to the actual action.

There's a sense of history to the characters, as they regularly reference past events and conflicts, but it's all flavor that makes the world seem bigger. If you have history with Wolverine in the comics or other media, you'll have a pretty clear picture of what these events look like – if not, it'll just be there to make the characters seem richer.

It's the exact same approach we saw Insomniac take in Marvel's Spider-Man, which references Spidey's origins and history in ways that make sense and add to the story, but never explicitly spells out that story. Perhaps the most important part is that it lets players just start being a superhero from the second they load up the game – whether we're talking about Peter Parker or James Logan Howlett, there's no need to make people wait for the fun part.

These are the upcoming PS5 games you need to have on your radar.

There's a moment in the Marvel's Wolverine story trailer released toward the end of July where we see the camera pull back behind Jean Grey as she enters a dance hall. To my eye, it seemed like an obvious tease of a playable sequence featuring Jean, but looks can be deceiving – Insomniac tells me in no uncertain terms that Wolverine himself is the game's only playable character.

When I alluded to that moment with Jean Grey in the trailer in an interview with senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed and head of technology Mike Fitzgerald, they both registered a bit of genuine confusion, before they both told me, "Wolverine is our only playable character."

That'll likely be a relief to many players of Insomniac's previous superhero games. I never hated the Mary Jane stealth sections in the Spider-Man series as much as other people seemed to, but they're unequivocally the least exciting bits of those games. Insomniac going all in on the game's central hero sounds like a good thing to me.

My hands-on time with Marvel's Wolverine was still filled with loads of side characters, and many of them do have a role to play not just in the story, but the gameplay. In my demo, there were big combat sections where Wolverine is accompanied by Sabretooth or Mystique, who'll dynamically join in with your combos for little team-up moves to knock out the bad guys.

Some similar interactions with Jean were shown in the public gameplay reveal, and "there's more of that," Fitzgerald explains. "There's definitely the team vibe in that sense. But we were really focusing on Wolverine as a playable character and making sure we nailed that."

For more, check out all our Marvel's Wolverine Big Preview coverage.

Insomniac built the adamantium skeleton for Marvel's Wolverine with its Spider-Man games. The upcoming PS5 game clearly builds on the combat, the cinematic presentation, and even the progression systems of those previous titles. But after spending two hours playing Marvel's Wolverine, touring Insomniac's Los Angeles headquarters, and speaking to some of the developers bringing the game to life, it's clear that this is more than a simple reskin of Spider-Man. James Logan Howlett's burning heart beats at the center of it all.

"One thing we're really proud about at the studio is shipping games," head of technology Mike Fitzgerald tells me. "This is our fifth title on the PlayStation 5. We're really proud of that. Part of that is knowing how to build on prior games effectively. If we'd taken a Spider-Man game and put a Wolverine character model in, that wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't be right for the character. It wouldn't be fulfilling the player fantasy for the fans. So it's about building carefully on what we have and then rethinking a whole lot of the fundamentals."

So the flippy, acrobatic combat of Spider-Man – which, itself, echoes Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham series – has slowed down, with a closer camera perspective and more tightly-packed enemies. The violence is more extreme. The story is darker. And, most obviously, we're now following a linear, globe-trotting adventure rather than exploring a singular open world.

Rage against the killing machines

"Throughout development," senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed explains, "any decision we're making, we're trying to go: 'Is this right for Wolverine? Is this telling a Logan-centric story? Is this the best way we can do this to make the player feel like they're playing as Wolverine?'"

Nowhere is this intent more obvious than with the Rage system. As you fight, striking enemies and parrying their attacks, you build up a meter representing Wolverine's bestial anger. Once it's maxed out, the color drains from the scene, Wolverine powers up, and you can launch instant-kill takedowns by pulling both triggers at once. The meter quickly drains once you reach this state, but you can keep it going longer by continuing to kill.

This system really incentivizes you to be aggressive, constantly escalating the speed with which you're taking down the bad guys, perfectly in line with your character's own overflowing rage. It's introduced with a great little moment in the game, where Logan's anger at seeing his fellow mutants mistreated boils over, and you're given control with maximum Rage to rip the perpetrators to shreds. If you've seen any of the trailers for Wolverine, you'll know just how bloody this game can get. But, importantly, Logan's violence feels like an outpouring of his desire to protect others.

"He's not bloodthirsty," Fitzgerald says. "He's not a sadist. He's not reveling in the violence that he's doing. We want the game to reflect that as well. The game itself isn't like 'look at how bloody and gross we can be.' It's more like this is a natural consequence of who this character is and what he grapples with over the course of the game."

The Rage system also accounts for Wolverine's superhuman healing. You do have a traditional health meter, but as long as you've got some Rage in the tank, you can get back up and keep fighting. Die without any Rage to keep you going, though, and you'll have to restart from a checkpoint. It may not be 100% true to the specifics of Logan's mutant ability, but it does keep the spirit of those powers intact and faithfully represents the character's relentless nature.

"You wouldn't see another character with that set of abilities or mechanics," Reiner-Reed says. "This is uniquely Logan."

This is no origin story

The start of the game shows a brief flashback to when Logan was living a seemingly feral life in the wilderness, just as he meets a mysterious figure promising a home for mutants. But this isn't Professor X talking about a home for gifted youngsters. This is Nathaniel Essex, a character with a lengthy X-Men comic history as the villain Mister Sinister.

But if Essex is going to become the villain of this story, that's going to be a late game twist. Insomniac dragged out the ultimate heel turn of Otto Octavius as Doctor Octopus in the 2018 Spider-Man game, which could be the blueprint for what's happening here. For now, though, the game flashes forward, with Wolverine rejoining Mystique, Jean Grey, and Sabretooth as part of Team X to rescue Essex from the anti-mutant extremist Bolivar Trask.

What follows is something of a superpowered D-Day invasion, where I charge up a muddy hill toward a massive fort, slicing through Trask's minions as I go. While there's plenty of action and bombast, this is very much the game's tutorial, as I'm introduced to the basics of combat. The true depths of the Rage system haven't unlocked yet, but even here the combat feels meaty and rewarding.

My favorite move is pushing triangle to leap forward and quickly close the distance with an enemy. It's not entirely dissimilar to Spider-Man's Web Strike, but at this closer combat scale, it reminds me of how Batman would automatically leap between opponents in the Arkham games. Here, it's an active ingredient in the combat soup, something to stay engaged with as the rhythm of parry, dodge, slash slash slash carries on.

I find myself surprised by how quickly I can get around the game's bigger areas. Wolverine can't use web shooters to speed through these levels, but he can still move. Logan runs quickly, can climb up walls, and leap leg-shattering distances. There's an open-ended area early on where I have to take out a series of mutant-detecting alarms guarded by patrolling soldiers. It feels like an absolute playground, thanks largely to how quickly I can move through it, and how easy it is switch between brutal, stalking stealth and full-blown combat.

I'm also introduced to each of the game's major cast members, but notably, this isn't their first meeting. Nor do I hear much about Wolverine's backstory, and that's very much by design. "Logan already has adamantium infused to his bones," says creative director Marcus Smith. "He does not remember how that happened, why it happened, and we are not really covering it because we're not doing an origin story." There are already plenty of places where you can learn of Wolverine's origins, and having the specifics shrouded in mystery here helps build gravity and intrigue around his relationships.

Later in the demo, I'm whisked forward to a part near the end of the game's first act. Here, I get the culmination of all the combat tricks I've learned up to this point as I take on a massive Sentinel prototype. It's a multi-stage boss fight where I've got to wear down its various weak points to deal big damage.

It's familiar stuff if you've, uh, ever played a video game before, but it's a great little challenge. In fact, it's the only time I die outside of a later optional challenge room – and it sneaks in a few unique mechanics, like an ability to call in a sniper shot from Mystique with a tap of the R1 button, which stuns the giant machine so I can get a few extra licks in.

Madripoor me another

Eventually, Logan ends up in Madripoor, and here the game allows me a bit of a breather. The story slows down as I wander a small bar and nearby stretch of street while Logan meets up with his allies to discuss everything that's transpired. There are fun little Easter eggs to discover here – a playing card hinting at Gambit wandering around this universe, for example – but the real treat is the character interactions.

I'm impressed by just how convincing the storytelling and character performances are. There's a wonderful little moment between Logan and Mystique where they play a round of "never have I ever," as our hero is grilled on topics like lost loves. I get to choose what parts Logan drinks to, and relish the chance to get inside the character's head and imagine his past and what's brought him to this point.

There's a haunted sense of history to how Logan and the crew refer to their past adventures and the mistakes they've made along the way, and it works in part because the story is so well-delivered. The devs say getting this right was a monumental task. "Cinematics is something where there's not, 'Hey, this is just the cinematics department, and they take care [of it],'" Reiner-Reed explains. "It takes everybody. There's lighting, there's artists, there's performance and optimization, there's animation, mocap."

This Madripoor section is also my first opportunity to properly explore, finding collectables here and there that tie into the game's various upgrade systems. I'm able to unlock a few new abilities – both passive buffs and active attacks that run on a cooldown in combat – and check out some additional suits for Wolverine, but I don't have much space to actually dive into those systems before my time with the demo ends. For now, it feels more like a teaser for the fact that, yes, there will be reasons to explore and go off the beaten path in the full game.

There are also additional challenges to take on in a sort of dreamy cabin space that will apparently appear at various points across the story. Inside, Logan can interact with various totems to take on optional timed challenges, like fighting hordes of soldiers in a snowy battlefield or racing through an abstract, nearly psychedelic collection of parkour obstacles. I certainly wasn't expecting to be reminded of Mirror's Edge during Wolverine, but the abstracted arenas for the traversal challenges put me in a similar frame of mind. These time trials are fun enough, but those that I played were pretty simple and easy. I was able to get not just a gold rating, but platinum after just a couple of tries.

The combat challenge I took on, however, really put me through the ringer. Here, I had to manage an array of goons pelting me with fists and bullets while I whittle down a big, muscular brute with parries, dodges, and strikes – then I had to do it again, with a second wave of foes, all within a strict time limit. I failed this one over and over, but I had a great time doing it, and really learning the fight made my eventual success feel pretty sweet. The solution? Rage. Building up that rage is essential.

Before playing Marvel's Wolverine, I was afraid I would miss so much from Insomniac's previous Spider-Man games. Sure, the combat and missions in those games were fun enough, but the truly excellent part was swinging through the streets of New York City at breakneck speeds and digging for little odd jobs and side missions along the way.

Going hands-on with the game completely erased those fears. Insomniac has repurposed the fundamentals of its previous games here, yes, but it's done so in a way that feels appropriate for Logan. The turn from friendly neighborhood wall-crawler to this brooding new hero makes all the difference.

More from our interviews with the Marvel's Wolverine developers and further impressions from our hands-on time are still to come. For now, here are the upcoming PS5 games you need to have on your radar.

PATCH NOTES v04.08.2026 – Ubisoft and Insomniac Games are enjoying a healthy boost to player counts across Assassin's Creed and Spider-Man games off the back of cinema blockbusters, with numbers so staggering it points to an exciting new normal for the relationship between how games and movies help one another extend experiences.

What's going on this week in gaming?

• 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey's active player count is surging
• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered returns to Steam's Top 10 best-selling games list

Why is this happening now?

• Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has reignited interest in the Ancient Greek time period
• Spider-Man: Brand New Day secures second-biggest opening weekend in box office history

The Hollywood Patch is live

• The last week has been a reminder that sometimes the box office can deliver just as meaningful of a live video game update as its developers

It's unusual to see such vast spikes in sales and player counts of older games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Marvel's Spider-Man, and in this case, blockbuster movies are the driving forces. It highlights a shift in the way that people are interacting with big adaptations, as they search for ways to stay in these worlds once the credits roll.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has become a monocultural moment, dominating cinemas and conversation for weeks. It's also sending players straight back to Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with analysts estimating that the 2018 release has seen a 90% player engagement jump in the 10 days following the film's release.

AC Odyssey features a lot of the same mythology as Nolan's latest despite not actually being about Homer's Odyssey at all, and with RPGs having a bit of a moment in the 2020s, it makes sense that vast open-world games that feature similar themes, settings, or characters as a major film can receive a second wind by association.

A similar trend is emerging out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, though this time via direct brand synergy. The film has reportedly brought in $927 million across its opening weekend, success which has inspired Marvel's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 to launch back into Steam's top 10 best-sellers. For Sony and PlayStation, it's proof that a great movie can be as effective as a big game update.

Meta Shift

Both The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day demonstrate how successful movies can help revitalize older games of a similar or shared IP. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has immediately become a go-to game to play after watching The Odyssey, featuring many mythological elements seen in the film's epic poem source material, while sales of the Marvel's Spider-Man games have benefitted from a timely Steam sale in line with Brand New Day's launch.

The trend of film-game crossover speaks to more than just the enduring success of select franchises. We've seen a general increase in licensed game adaptations (or brand new instalments) of movie IPs as of late, with 007 First Light and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle being two notable new games that center on icons of the big screen. There's even an untitled John Wick game also in the works from Saber Interactive!

Paired with Halloween: The Game and Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, two licensed upcoming horror games launching in 2026 that feature some of the most famous names in the biz, the potential for symbiotic success as film IPs cross over to gaming is stronger than ever.

But will it work the other way? I'll be interested to see how the new Zelda movie affects sales of games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for example, and the same can be said of the numerous other upcoming video game movies out there. Me and my colleagues on the GamesRadar+ team often find ourselves on a bit of an IP kick after a fresh release, be it film or gaming. That's just how fandom works, and gone are the days where movie prestige outpaced that of video games.

Patch Notes summary

Ancient Greek-set Assassin's Creed Odyssey has seen a 90% increase in active players as Christopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey storms theaters. At the same time, the Marvel's Spider-Man games have soared into the Top 10 Best-sellers list on Steam, bolstered by an attractive discount to celebrate Spider-Man: Brand New Day's opening weekend.

It's clear that fans are seeking to extend their experiences of both film and video games by helping themselves to both. It just goes to show how the power of an excellent IP can bring years-old games back out of retirement – even if you might have to dust off an old console or take advantage of a Steam sale to make it happen.

Related stories:

There isn't much better advertising than having a direct connection to what is one of the biggest movies ever. Thanks to Spider-Man: Brand New Day absolutely smashing the box office, two of Insomniac's games starring the wallcrawler are charting very well on Steam.

That's right, not one, but two of the masked menace's biggest video games have climbed the charts. J Jonah Jameson will be furious. According to the Steam Top Sellers list on SteamDB, Spider-Man 2 is fifth on Valve's platform, while the first is at ninth.

The two of them in the top ten is a nice little bit of synergy. Brand New Day just started its theatrical run in the US, Britain, and many other major territories, bringing in an obscene $927 million over the course of the weekend.

Watching Peter Parker's latest Hollywood outing clearly inspired at least a few fans to go home and look into if there are any games that have the similar energy. Lo and behold, there are several, and Insomniac's releases are at the top of the pile.

It's impossible to say for certain, of course - the well-timed discounts may have convinced a couple of buyers as well. But between the film and Spider-Man 2 being 33% off, it's hard to imagine any other causes for such a clean jump up through the ranks.

It won't hurt that there's a costume based on Brand New Day now as well, for maximum synchronicity. Insomniac's first Spider-Man is down by 60% too, letting you pick up both for the price of a completely new release at full price.

If you're someone who's made these purchases, might I suggest Miles Morales - Spider-Man as well? It's considered something of a sidequel, since it effectively bridges the other two Spidey games from Insomniac, but it's as good as either, if shorter and more contained. Don't gloss over it - Miles is a worthy successor and partner to Peter, and you'll learn exactly why by playing.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2's new cel-shaded suit is a lot cooler in theory than it is in action as fans tear it apart for looking like cheap CGI: "It reminds me of Spy Kids"

Marvel's Wolverine could very well be one of the last Insomniac games to ever get a physical release. Sony's decision to put an end to physical releases after January 2028 means it's very likely that I won't be adding more of the studio's PS5 titles to my shelf after my beloved Marvel's Spider-Man 2, one of my favorite modern games over the last 10 years.

That realisation is why I was pretty comfortable paying full price for Marvel's Wolverine just to ensure I was sent a physical copy for my collection on its September 15 release day, but I'm far happier with its new pre-order deal. Smyths Toys has dropped the £69.99 MSRP down to £57.99 (Smyths Toys) right now, which means I've saved £12 off the game and it's not even out yet.

One of the reasons why I adore physical PS5 games so much is not just because I like to have a physical game sitting on my shelf so I can gaze lovingly at the box art, but because I can take advantage of deals like this one.

A quick check of the PlayStation online store shows the game available for its full £69.99 (PlayStation Store) MSRP, with no discounts in sight. Had I only had this option to pre-order the game, I would not have been able to take advantage of that £12 off, which is very likely going towards another physical game, if I'm honest. I'm looking at you, Silent Hill: Townfall.

If you're based in the US, the early pre-order discounts aren't as fun to sink your Wolverine claws into. At retailers like GameStop and Best Buy, the game is listed at its full $69.99 price, unfortunately. However, PS5 titles are so prone to price drops, even mere weeks ahead of release, so I recommend bookmarking out Marvel's Wolverine pre-order page to keep up to date with the best prices, which is curated by yours truly.

• View all Ps5 gaming deals at Amazon

Check out our guides to the best PS5 controllers, the best PS5 headsets, and the best SSDs for PS5 if you've already got plenty to play.

There's a new Spidey film coming out this week, and what better way to celebrate than with an update to Marvel's Spider-Man 2? Two costumes have been added to the game, and there's some added support for upscaling.

Of the two suits that are now in Peter Parker's closest, the first is the Fresh Start get-up, taking heavy inspiration from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest movie featuring the wallcrawler. This is another take on the classic, iconic Spider-Man look, and I'm not complaining because it's still extremely pleasing to the eye.

The second costume actually comes from another game, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls. This one's got a more contemporary sci-fi edge, with white accessories and a larger spider emblem on the chest. It maintains the slightly cel-shaded aesthetic from Fighting Souls as well. I do love when Insomniac incorporates different aesthetics for the suits, the resulting effect is always impressive.

In the replies on Twitter, Insomniac clarifies that these are completely free of charge. You need only start up the game, let it auto-update, and you'll have access to both of these as part of your wardrobe. Since Brand New Day opens tomorrow, July 29, the timing is perfect to see it, then settle into swinging around New York City in the same threads as our cinematic Peter.

Besides these ensembles, support has been added for both Enhanced PSSR on PS5 Pro and Power Saver mode. The former, if you're unaware, is an AI upscaling feature on the system. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you like what changes it makes, but it's good to have options for your crime-fighting escapades.

Now then, I have side-quests to complete. And by side-quests, I mean taking dozens of cool pictures with these two suits I can hopefully sell to The Daily Bugle.

After keeping the secret for over a year, Sadie Sink's Marvel character is spoiled at the Spider-Man: Brand New Day premiere.

Surprise! The official PlayStation YouTube channel has randomly dropped a new trailer for Marvel's Wolverine with some notable story and character reveals, and as you might imagine the community is – wait, what's that? Oh, the comments are absolutely flooded with anger about Sony's decision to end physical discs, to the point where hardly anyone is actually discussing the content of the trailer.

The trailer seems to effectively be an extended cutscene, but it does have some meat for fans to chew on. We see Wolverine chasing a photo of himself and Jean Grey through an array of battlefields, suggesting that their relationship will be a central part of the story. More surprising is that Sabretooth – who we've seen appear in previous footage – seems to be teaming up with Logan. We've also finally got confirmation that Lady Deathstrike will appear in the game.

But if you scroll through the comments on YouTube, you won't see much discussion about those facts. Instead, you'll see messages like "We want physical games," "WE WANT PHYSICAL GAMES!" and "WE WANT PHYSICAL GAMES!!!!" Others are chiming in with comments like "That disc is going to look awesome," "This is gonna be a day one buy on physical disc," and "Can't wait for my PHYSICAL COPY."

Marvel's Wolverine will indeed be released on a physical disc, something that the devs at Insomniac confirmed in the wake of news that GTA 6 would be a digital-only launch. Since then, Sony announced that there will be no more new PlayStation games on disc as of 2028, so it seems Marvel's Wolverine is likely among the last of a dying breed.

Analysts expect that Sony "will not reverse" its decision to kill discs despite the backlash, but boy – that backlash is loud on the official PlayStation YouTube channel. It's not just a response to a big, first-party title like Wolverine, either – every single new trailer uploaded to the channel is inundated with the same sorts of comments supporting physical media.

Non-Sony devs are certainly taking notice. Eat Pant Games, the New Zealand indie studio behind adorable platformer Teeto, posted a harrowing recap of seeing 400 comments under the game's release trailer, only to find that they're all about physical discs. Teeto is a small enough release that it's only happening digitally for now, but the devs are hopeful that could change in the future: "WE CAN HAVE BOTH."

Despite some reports to the contrary, Sony hasn't been shutting off comments in response to the backlash. Trailers for titles like Instant Sports 2 are flagged as family-friendly content on YouTube, which means comments are turned off automatically – presumably to protect kids from the horrors of gamers who are mad about Sony's efforts to hasten the death of physical media.

Sony killing physical PlayStation games is "the latest attack on our diminishing rights," leading digital rights group says: "The end goal is to turn the customer into a renter."

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 seemed to have been put to bed as developer Insomniac switched its focus to the upcoming Marvel's Wolverine, but apparently there's at least one more surprise in store. Alongside the release of today's Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer, Insomniac revealed that Spidey's new look is coming to the game in a free update on PS5 and PC.

"Get a fresh start in Marvel's Spider-Man 2," the studio exclaims in a tweet. "Swing across skylines in Peter Parker's 'Fresh Start' suit inspired by the upcoming film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in theatres July 31! The suit will be available in-game via update July 28 on PS5 and PC at no additional cost!" You can get a very brief look at the new suit at the end of the trailer below.

The game already features an array of suits paying tribute to Spider-Man's varied appearances across different media, including designs inspired by both the Sam Raimi films and the modern MCU movies. But this update is particularly notable simply because it's the first major change to the game in over a year.

In fact, the last update of any kind for Spider-Man 2 appears to have been a May 2025 hotfix for the PC version. That version, of course, launched some time after the PS5 original, and brought with it the sad news that no story DLC was planned for the game, despite some seemingly obvious teases for it in one of the side stories.

With that in mind, it's notable that Spider-Man 2 is getting what's likely its final update in time for the upcoming film. Any excuse to go swinging through digital NYC again is a good one in my mind.

These are the best Marvel games of all time.

Marvel's Wolverine developers say violence is an integral part of the game, except you will be able to turn it off anyway if you fancy.

Speaking with IGN, game director Mike Daly explains: "From the inception of the project, we knew that the number one most important thing was to bring the Wolverine fantasy to life. Not just that, but make it the ultimate Wolverine fantasy." He adds, "it was clear that violence was a key part of that." Because yes, while Insomniac's take on Spider-Man does have a bit of blood here and there, the footage we've seen of Wolverine features waves of gore and chunks of people flying all around the screen constantly.

But despite having a level of gore that I'd maybe say is a bit over the top, Daly says "we want to have a grounded world with believable things that happen. So we didn't want to go over the top. " He adds, "We really wanted to hit the bullseye on what is the best representation of Wolverine, what delivers fan expectations, and what's going to keep the claw combat action satisfying over the whole course of the playthrough."

However, obviously some people aren't too keen on the idea of constant gore, whether they're squeamish themselves or perhaps a parent buying the game for their kid without paying attention to details because it has a Marvel character on the box, but Insomniac has thought ahead. As Daly explains, "We know that it's not for everyone. And because we knew this was going to be a big part of the game from the beginning, we also implemented an accessibility feature to turn off gore."

And, from the sounds of things, a lot of thought was put into the balance. "It's clearly integrated into the game in a lot of different ways, and so it's a nuanced feature that is very selective about what we show, what we censor, turning off blood and things like that, just in order to make it more palatable to people who don't really want to have that part of the experience," he adds.

Marvel's Wolverine trailer reveals Jean Grey, Sabretooth, and more classic X-Men appearances.

Marvel's Wolverine is clawing its way onto the PlayStation 5 on September 15, so there's no long to go until we can finally unleash hell as Logan, but there's no fancy collector's edition in sight.

Pre-orders instead unleashed at US and UK retailers in June, which included a Standard Edition available for $69 (Walmart) / £57.99 (Smyths Toys) and a Digital Deluxe Edition available for $79.99 (PS Store) / £79.99 (PS Store). Picking up both this early will at least grant you a set of in-game pre-order bonuses, including an early access Brown Suit and a set of Reflective Claws to use in-game. But if you want the best bargain, you're better off sticking with a standard physical copy, as Smyths Toys has knocked £12 off its full £69.99 MSRP in the UK.

There's no sign of any early pre-order discounts in the US as of writing, but I wouldn't give up hope. New physical PS5 releases get marked down on the lead-up to release all the time. Just remember that with Sony putting an end to physical games in 2028, this could be one of the last opportunities to add an Insomniac Games' PS5 superhero title to your shelf.

Marvel's Wolverine US Pre-orders

Marvel's Wolverine UK Pre-orders

FAQ

Picking up one of the best PS5 headsets, the best PS5 controllers, and the best SSD for PS5 will help ensure your Sony pixel-pusher is equipped and ready to take on Marvel's Wolverine.

I wasn't sure whether we'd see many upcoming PS5 games at Summer Game Fest 2026, but now that Sony has finally unveiled its plans for June's State of Play showcase, I'm finally feeling more optimistic about what will actually be taking the stage.

If Summer Game Fest 2026's schedule encompasses the main events, State of Play is more of a pregame. This is where I'm expecting to see the console exclusive titles having a bit of a preen, from the confirmed presence of the new Wolverine game (more on that below) to more recent new game announcements that haven't had much more than an initial teaser.

I've also thrown in a handful of cross-platform heavy-hitters for good measure, since the current list of PS5 exclusive offerings is growing a little thin these days. But I think you'll agree that all of these games are pretty likely contenders when it comes to the PS5 games to watch for at SGF this year, so keep scrolling and theorize with me.

1. Marvel's Wolverine

Developer: Insomniac Games
Platform(s): PS5
Release date: September 15, 2026

This is less of a prediction, more of a certainty. With June 2026's Sony State of Play already locked in, Marvel's Wolverine will be kicking off the pre-SGF festivities in adamantine-clawed style. We can expect a deep-dive into the upcoming Marvel game during the showcase, which will hopefully add a little color to the picture given how little we've seen of Logan despite the game already having a release date.

2. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

Developer: Naughty Dog
Platform(s): PS5
Release date: TBC

It's not been too long since our first glimpse of the latest Naughty Dog game, but as one of the few new PS5 exclusives on my radar, I'm hoping to see Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet in June's State of Play showcase. I added this one to our Wildcard Wishlist because at the time of writing, it did feel like a longshot. But now that Sony has confirmed it will be showing off at least something this June, this pipedream inches closer to reality. All we have to go on at the moment is a gorgeous if brief cinematic trailer and some snippets of melee combat in-action, so perhaps it's time we get a closer look at the story and sci-fi world Naughty Dog has been cooking for us?

3. Phantom Blade Zero

Developer: S-Game
Platform(s): PC, PS5
Release date: September 9, 2026

Phantom Blade Zero couldn't come at a better time. Wuxia ARPGs are all the rage right now, and we're finally only months away from developer S-Game's stunning new hack-n-slasher. I feel like we've been previewing this one on GamesRadar+ for years now – my action-RPG megafan colleague has been raving about it – and it's still one of the most exciting new games coming to PS5 three years post-reveal. I'm a little sad I might not get to check it out yet on my Xbox, given its timed platform exclusivity on PS5, but that fact alone has me pretty confident that we'll be seeing more of Phantom Blade Zero during Sony State of Play on June 2, if not during SGF weekend itself!

4. Untitled John Wick game

Developer: Saber Interactive
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC

By far one of the coolest games at the last State of Play, I'm dying to see more of the new John Wick game in development at Saber Interactive. With Keanu Reeves back in action as the eponymous action hero, the trailer shown at Sony's last showcase gave us a taste of the chaos we can expect, from pens in eye-sockets to throwing henchmen around like ragdolls, and I have a feeling John Wick might show up again in time for SGF 2026. This might not be a Sony-published initiative, but third-party games are almost always featured among the best PS5 games in these State of Play broadcasts.

Well, that came out of nowhere. Insomniac Games just tweeted out the release date for Marvel's Wolverine, and it's officially arriving in September.

To be exact, the upcoming PS5 action romp is set to arrive on September 15. "Let's cut to the chase," Insomniac Games says on Twitter before promptly dropping the news like it's no big deal.

It's great news, of course, but bizarre given that the devs had the perfect opportunity to say exactly this during the massive PlayStation State of Play earlier this month. Well, this way certainly has the surprise factor, anyway – I had to double-check the announcement actually came from the official account.

To be fair, we were warned at the time not to expect anything Wolverine-shaped during the big Sony stream. Before the broadcast, Insomniac Games reiterated its plans to reveal more information in "Spring 2026," but I'll admit the decision to hold fire for just 12 days perplexes me.

With this, we also have more of an idea of what the latter half of the year is going to look like when it comes to the game release calendar. Mercifully (for both players and devs alike), Wolverine is nicely spaced out from GTA 6, which is set to arrive on November 19, in theory allowing Insomniac's upcoming game to have more time in the spotlight before Rockstar Games arrives on the scene. It's been a long time coming, after all – the Logan-centric game was first announced in September 2021, so it'll have been over five years by the time it actually arrives.

Today, Insomniac seemingly has no new trailer to share (unless you're counting the seven seconds of release date announcement), so there's still plenty to show off before that date comes – we'll just have to watch this space.

Marvel wanted the new Wolverine game to bring Logan back in "spectacular and visceral fashion," and Insomniac was "the perfect choice" after the Spider-Man games.

Insomniac Games says that the chances of Peter Parker swinging onto Xbox consoles are low, but the hit-making studio also said the same thing about a PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man once upon a time.

After one online fan's now-deleted tweet asked for an Xbox version of the open-world superhero romp, Insomniac simply replied saying a port is "not likely" to happen. Marvel's Spider-Man first came out as a PS4 exclusive in 2018 and has since been remastered for PC and PS5.

The studio's not revealing anything that's too shocking. After all, Marvel's Spider-Man is a game published by PlayStation Studios primarily as a way to get people to buy PlayStation consoles from Sony, the owner of PlayStation. So, no brainer.

Still, hopes for an Xbox port weren't – and probably still aren't – absolutely in the bin. Keep in mind Insomniac Games is also the same studio that firmly said almost nine years ago that the game would "never appear on Xbox or PC" because it's "a permanent PS4 exclusive publisher by Sony Interactive Entertainment," and that comment, err, hasn't really aged well.

There's also the fact that some Sony-owned games have broken containment in recent years, namely with Helldivers 2 and the upcoming Marathon on Xbox Series X|S, which would've been sort of unthinkable a generation ago, though PlayStation seems more willing to share its multiplayer toys with its biggest frenemy than its single-player blockbusters.

For now, Insomniac Games is set to continue its superhero universe with Marvel's Wolverine, coming sometime later this year, which is apparently a "darker and more brutal" game than you might expect from the studio. I guess it is about a rage-fuelled hairy man with claws.

Marvel's Spider-Man officially has its first working multiplayer mod, and it's probably the closest thing we've got to Insomniac's canceled Great Web project.

Insomniac has seemingly squashed hopes of Marvel's Wolverine appearing in this week's State of Play, saying we won't learn anything about the game until spring 2026.

Marvel's Wolverine seems like PlayStation's big game for 2026. I mean, there's Marathon, but from Sony's multiplayer track record, that may not last the year. After a brief teaser in 2021, we finally got a full, blood-soaked reveal last September, with the promise of a 2026 release date. And after missing The Game Awards, all eyes are on this week's PlayStation State of Play to see if the short king would return. But it sounds like he's staying in hiding just a bit longer.

Last night, almost as if it was to prepare players for the showcase, Insomniac posted a gif of Logan stabbing people with his knife hands (who really didn't look like they needed much more stabbing). And when a user responded "WHEN MORE INFO?" Insomniac crushed the hearts and souls of many by responding with a simple "Spring 2026."

Wolverine is from Canada, being the most important Canadian alongside Bret 'The Hitman' Hart. And according to the Canadian government website, spring starts on March 20th at 2:45pm UTC (so 9:45am ET | 6:45am PT). So if Sony announces a showcase on March 20th at 2pm UTC, you know what's going to close the show. Or we could see the announcement of a Wolverine-specific State of Play, like Sony did with Ghost of Yotei last year.

I often think it's a good idea to listen to developers when they say, "Hey, don't expect news in this showcase" (unless they're the Resident Evil developers during a showcase), but I mean… It's not like they would ruin the surprise. Plus, I'm Scottish, and the Celtic calendar has spring starting in February, so maybe it'll appear to any Celts in the audience. Or maybe I'm just hoping too much for something that probably won't happen.

With Wolverine set to elevate superhero gaming in 2026, here's the four features I want the most, and four I'm desperate to avoid

Nobody could have blamed Naughty Dog if it had continued to make Crash Bandicoot games after the '90s came to an end. After all, its four Crash PlayStation titles had sold in their millions and Crash was arguably the console's unofficial mascot. But as the PS2 was launched in 2000, the studio was working on something different for the new console.

Rather than a solo hero it created a pair of protagonists, in the form of precocious teenagers Jak and Daxter. Then instead of depicting these young heroes' world as one defined by good versus evil, like Crash Bandicoot's, Naughty Dog opted to create an environment that was shaped by mysterious, ancient beings called Precursors.

Just as important as the place they called home was that Jak and Daxter should have depth of character and believable reasons for their actions, as the writer/designer of their debut title Dan Arey explains. "I wanted Jak to have a purpose that wasn't just rescuing a princess or collecting coins, and then Daxter was our wonderful sidekick – he made everything a counterpoint or hilarious," Arey notes.

Dynamic duo

"We had started with this idea of a rich, beautiful world with some strange mystery behind it, and that was what the Precursors became.

"If you went to their island you found Dark Eco, which was energy with very special properties. We were telling you not to go to that island because there was Dark Eco there. Of course Jak, being a rebellious teenager, does just that, and then his best friend Daxter falls into this vat of Eco and becomes an Ottsel – a part otter/part weasel!"

Jak And Daxter's world required the talents of Naughty Dog's storytellers just as much as its level designers and artists so that its plot, gameplay and aesthetics had equal appeal. The studio could have considered these distinct disciplines separately, but instead it looked to how it could weave them together to form a greater whole, as Arey points out. "As the writer, as well as the game designer, I wanted to tell a story that had mystery and suspense," Arey reasons.

"A term we used was 'Narrative as reward', which is that the narrative itself was part of the joy of the game. This was a world that had to be explored, and you were going to have to figure out what Eco was and who the Precursors were. Then because we were an art-centric studio there was a constant push to find out what the most beautiful thing was that we could pull off on the PlayStation 2."

A precursor to success

In order to make Jak and Daxter's first outing – The Precursor Legacy – as immersive as possible, an open-world mission-based structure was favoured over a hub world and spoke system like the Crash Bandicoot games had used.

This structure revolved around beautifully rendered non-player characters that Jak and Daxter would meet on their adventure. Their interactions played out in cutscenes that took inspiration from the very best animated movies rather than from anything seen in earlier games.

"We had invested pretty heavily in Crash's universe, and so we decided to do the same thing with Jak and Daxter," Arey comments. "We knew we wanted to go full open world at this point, or at least reasonably open, and we were hitting the PlayStation 2 where there could be more of that. We knew that we could go to the next level. So we basically made the villagers in The Precursor Legacy the 'keys' to the next place to visit. Back in those days nobody was expecting Pixar-level authenticity, but that was what we were gunning for."

Equal attention was being paid to The Precursor Legacy's gameplay as to its character designs. More specifically, three main collectables were devised: Eco of different colours, which gave Jak powers and affected inanimate objects; Precursor Orbs, which acted as the game's currency; and Power Cells, which were often the reward for completing missions. "We wanted to have some very specific resources in the game, and we wanted to separate their uses," Arey observes.

"Players typically went in the right direction if you did the right thing with them, and we used collectables a lot for that. You thought you were making a choice, but we were helping you along with collectables that led you in that direction. We also had natural barriers so that you didn't feel like you were coming to a stop because of an invisible wall. That was why that first level was on the ocean, so that there was a natural break there."

Second helpings

The glowing reviews and millions of sales accrued by Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy clearly validated the approach its designers had taken. Its stunning visuals and seamlessly open world were singled out as setting new standards, and as soon as it had shipped, work on a sequel called Jak 2 commenced. As Arey recollects, Jak was given an upgradeable weapon in the follow-up rather than relying on unarmed combat.

"The Morph Gun was really about what we did to introduce something that you were able to modify and change, but with it still being the same thing that you were comfortable with," Arey remembers. "We gave it different capabilities that used different variations of Eco, so the Eco fed right into that. The four Eco types were very specific, and we wanted to make sure that we leaned into that concept. So the Morph Gun was a central system of using Eco with color coding. It was also the idea that each mod was its own unique play experience."

The sprawling metropolis that was created for Jak 2 was equally unique. Haven City's streets were crowded with people and its skies were full of gravity-defying Zoomer craft. A radar-like system recommended where players could go next, but the city's open world allowed them full autonomy and freedom of movement. As Arey concedes, giving players this much choice gave the game's designers considerable challenges.

"Jak 2's open-world city was really complicated," Arey acknowledges. "It pushed every limit of the PlayStation 2 at the time. We had to design it multiple times because we had so much draw distance and so many polygons that we were having real trouble. We had to give it more of a zigzag layout, so the city streets were maze-like. We also tried to build a story like that. We wanted to have a space where you could go and meet people. It was so that it felt like a real place, within the limitations of the PlayStation 2 of course."

Efforts were also made to make Jak 2's titular protagonist seem like a real person, albeit one that lived in a world of mysterious forces. Experiments with these forces pre-game left Jak able to take on a dark and powerful form by claiming Eco from fallen foes. Naughty Dog then used the toll this took and the passing of time to shape its leading man.

"We always knew that we were going to explore Dark Eco further, so that was one of the reasons we played with that. It was all about exploring good and bad," Arey considers. "We were also one of the first studios to age our hero. We wanted to have Jak evolve, and for him to become this forever changed hero. So he got exposed to Dark Eco, and had to overcome the problems of that. We were also giving you a sense that there was real depth to this character because of his experiences, and that those experiences weren't always good."

Jakked up

Judging by the praise showered on Jak 2, and the vast numbers of copies it sold, it's fair to say that Jak's character development went down well. Work on a third Jak title – Jak 3 – began soon after Jak 2's release, with its desert environment, the Wasteland, playing a key part in its design. The Wasteland also fed into ideas that Arey had for taking Jak's story forward.

"We had this idea that there was this city out in the middle of the Wasteland," Arey ponders. "We knew we were going to do a lot of open-world driving, and we also wanted to have the story continue to evolve with Jak and the search for his identity. The thing about it was we needed a place for him to go, because he knew he didn't fit in. We wanted the Wasteland to look weathered and old. It told so much story just with that look, and it also made it different from other locations in Jak's world."

Building on the introduction of the Morph Gun in Jak 2, Jak 3 featured new gun mods including one that radiated a destructive wave around the spot where Jak was standing.

Arey considers this to be a more powerful version of the spinning kick that the hero had used ever since his debut in The Precursor Legacy, in that the two attacks achieved similar effects, albeit on different scales. "Evan Wells and myself designed most of the weapons in Jak 3," he reflects.

"Part of that was just what we had learned about 3D design; that 'area of effect' was your best friend, especially in a radius sense. You really needed to clear space around you, and you did that by using the Wave Concussor, but it was true even with the basic spin. It was all about controlling the space around you. In the worst case scenario you at least had to empty the space around you, and that was always something we wanted the player to feel empowered to do."

Go the the light

More empowerment came in the form of a third identity for Jak that gave him defensive and other non-violent abilities by drawing power from Light Eco.

Arguably the most exciting of these allowed him to slow down time for his enemies while he continued to move at his normal speed, as Arey explains. "We wanted to give you this idea of time manipulation and flying and a protection shield," he enthuses.

"We had seen how Insomniac had done Spyro, where you could leap and then glide, and I thought flying in Jak 3 would be fun. But Light Jak was really because we had Dark Jak before, so of course we had to have Light Jak. It let us ask what Light Eco was, and what were its special properties? So it was flying, protection and time manipulation. Time manipulation can be so powerful if you do it right, and we got to play around with that stuff."

In keeping with its predecessors, Jak 3 received plaudits from critics and players alike. In keeping with Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot trilogy, the third Jak platformer was followed by a racing game. Jak X retained the Wasteland from Jak 3 and built on the earlier game's driving challenges, it also channelled Mad Max, which was known as The Road Warrior in the US.

"Jak X gave me a wonderful opportunity to keep telling the story," Arey beams. "We had a Road Warrior feel in Jak 3, so I thought why not continue with that? We also had a proof of concept for Jak X already thanks to the driving sections in Jak 3. Any time we had a proof of concept that would give us a leg up for the next game we would use it. Also, we had already done Crash Team Racing, and it was very successful, so we thought we would have fun with Jak and get him out racing in the Wasteland."

One of the many differences between Jak X and Crash Team Racing was their approach to meters. Rather than a speed boost meter that filled based on the time your vehicle spent in the air, Jak X's Dark Eco meter filled as your car took or received damage, with the reward being a boost to your weapons.

"We had used Hang Time in Crash Team Racing, where the more air you got the more speed boost you got," Dan remarks. "So for Jak X it was just about how we could be different again. It was trying to be unique in the sense that it wasn't a speed boost meter. It was like an early version of a rage meter, because the more damage you took the more retribution you could give, so you could dump your frustration onto a competitor. I think that's always a fun way to soften some of the pain in a game."

Branching out

Novel features such as the Dark Eco meter and the sheer challenge offered by Jak X were recognised by reviewers when the game came out, as were its many modes and rich narrative.

A year later, Jak's wise-cracking sidekick Daxter received a solo PSP title produced by Ready At Dawn rather than Naughty Dog. Knowing how popular Daxter was, and having a high opinion of the character and the actor who voiced him, Arey was more than happy to be involved in this latest project's development.

"Daxter was a hugely successful character, he had become such a fan favourite!" Arey exclaims. "We would go to conventions and stuff, and Daxter would be all people would talk about. He was voiced by Max Casella. I did a lot of work trying to find the right person for that job. I would write jokes and then Max would come in, and we would just let him run free. So we knew Daxter was important and decided to do something with him, and why not do it for the PSP? Because it was an amazing 'anywhere' gaming platform."

In order to ramp up the comedy value of Daxter's titular PSP outing, the short-tempered hero was given an occupation where he would constantly feel ridiculed. It was also a role that got players using all manner of fun-to-use equipment and vehicles. "We were thinking since he bugged people that it would be funny if he was a bug exterminator!" Arey jokes.

"But it was really just down to a brainstorm at Ready At Dawn, we were just having fun. Everything about Daxter was the economy of him being bigger than life and the silly little things he was. So we made him crawl through tight spaces, and that was indignant for him. That was what we wanted, for him to be constantly complaining about whatever he had to do! It also gave the player gadgets, and gadgets make for a good game."

This assessment was agreed with by critics, many of whom scored Daxter's PSP adventure near-perfect marks. Three years later, the Jak And Daxter series continued with The Lost Frontier by High Impact Games, which Arey also worked on. One of his lingering memories is of Daxter being given a dark, monstrous alter ego that was inspired by a classic animated short.

"There's a Warner Brothers cartoon with a little chicken that turns into a monster, like Jekyll and Hyde. That was the concept behind Dark Daxter," Dan reveals. "We loved the idea of a puffed-up mega Daxter, where for once he gets what he wants, which is to be badder and tougher. Of course, Dark Daxter had to happen after we had Dark Jak and Light Jak. His attacks were designed to change the player's response. For the Frenzy Attack we had this idea of store and release, which is a really powerful way to make the human mind respond to something."

Flight of fancy

Aside from Daxter Hulking-out, Lost Frontier took the idea of piloting gliders and Zoomers from the earlier games, as well as vehicle challenges from the Crash Bandicoot series, and rolled them all into flight combat challenges.

These pitted Jak and Daxter against Sky Pirates in a part of Jak's world that players had never seen before. Similarly to Dark Daxter, this aspect of the game took influence from classic animations, but it was also informed by an earlier Naughty Dog title.

"Going all the way back to Crash Bandicoot we had flying in that," Arey reminisces. "The idea of Jak and Daxter being in the skies and being further out in their world was also really beautiful, and Sky Pirates were just a cool idea. I just love that kind of world, whether it's Miyazaki's animations or whatever. I just love anachronistic cool flight. So it was a beautiful theme, and we wanted to go with something powerful and new."

Although it was well received when it launched, Lost Frontier marked the end of the series, although remastered PS3 versions of the original trilogy and emulation-based PS4 versions of the first four titles followed. When considering the Jak And Daxter games now, Arey cites a convergence of talent and tech for their enduring popularity, and notes their designers' desire to engage the emotions of those that played them.

"I still miss the Jak And Daxter world to this day, because I think that it was just so rich," he laments. "I loved those days. It was a beautiful time where technology and creativity meshed so well. I really do rate the gameplay in the series, especially the dynamic difficulty adjustments. We wanted people to win and we wanted them to enjoy themselves. Even when they died we wanted it to be funny! We wanted them to feel something special was happening, no matter what, so that they had an emotional reason to be playing every level."

Check out all the best platformers out there to play next

"Skills for kills, Agent. Skills for kills." That minor line from Crackdown 1 has been burned into my brain for nearly two decades, a strange little earworm that isn't even a particularly significant comment in the game itself. Sometimes this NPC bark triggers when you empty three boxes of LMG ammo into a jaywalker. Sometimes it happens when you pick up a burning eighteen-wheeler and huck it down the street, smearing panicked criminals into the tarmac. And sometimes it happens when you run down a drug dealer with a batmobile, slap a sticky bomb on the mangled corpse and kick the explosive carcass at his closest friends, turning him into an improvised payload.

Perhaps it's less the line itself that sticks in my mind, and more the surreal and spectacular events that always prompt it. Either way, I can't deny that Crackdown left an impression on me as one of those damn good times of the mid 2000s. But eighteen years and two sequels later, Crackdown went from one of the hottest Xbox 360 IPs, standing alongside icons like Fable 2 and Halo 3, to a minor Microsoft footnote. What the hell happened?

Lawful evil

I couldn't get that question out of my mind, which of course meant I had to replay all three games to get some context. Well, call it two and a half – I couldn't get through the third and final game before boredom drove me away, which itself is illuminating.

Crackdown 1 is practically a relic these days, coming as it does from the long-gone past of 2007. But I'm pleased to say it's still a good time, in a rudimentary, arcadey, rough-around-the-edges sort of way, though missing some of the quality of life improvements we've come to expect from open worlds, and definitely, er, showing its age when it comes to portrayals of certain ethnicities.

That being said, it's also a game that sits alongside Prototype and God of War 3, as you are clearly a monster through-and-through with absolutely no attempt at nuance, complexity or redemption. The notion that a crime wave can only be stopped by an army of lab-grown supercops Hulk-smashing people with heavy ordnance seems pretty suspect from the start, and during the end credits your handler cheerfully acknowledges that The Agency has always been out for world domination, a goal made easy now you've cleared the streets of any resistance.

A nicely ominous ending! Which made it a bit weird that 2010's Crackdown 2 basically sweeps that whole angle to the side and becomes a zombie apocalypse game, broken into a day/night cycle wherein you fight terrorists during office hours and hordes of mindless mutants by moonlight, with The Agency's shadowy machinations reduced to the occasional passing comment and some optional audio logs.

And when it comes to gameplay, the best parts of Crackdown 2 are largely just what was left over from Crackdown 1, with the zombie hordes doing little to elevate old material and just becoming an endless morass to mindlessly pour ammunition into.

Reviews were shruggingly flat, and in hindsight, I really can't argue. In fact, I remember a sixteen year old me taking it back to the store for a refund a couple of weeks after buying it, more disappointed than cross.

But disappointment would become frustration with 2019's Crackdown 3, which took a glacial 5 years to come out after being announced at E3 2014, worrying fans with repeated delays and rumors of development hell.

When it did come out, the twin gimmicks of destructible environments and Terry Crews did little to foster interest, and when all was said and blown up, Crackdown 3 felt even less innovative than the previous game. For me personally, the increasingly loud, cartoonish tone felt like an abrasive attempt to mimic Borderlands, a task so ill-advised that even Borderlands itself can't work out how to successfully pull off that tone these days.

If you could endure it to the end, a post-credits sequel tease would probably be Crackdown 3's funniest moment. Ultimately, twelve years later, we were still struggling with the same flaws we had forgiven the first game for, now magnified by time and exposure.

Call my Agent

Some franchises flopping makes perfect sense. Remember Ryse: Son of Rome? No, I bet you don't, as "Call of Duty: Asterix Edition" was never going to be an easy sell to the world. But Crackdown? Half GTA, half superhero sandbox, with a beloved first entry that ranks as one of the great Xbox 360 titles, backed by the raw wealth and power of Microsoft? How is this not one of the strongest franchises out there today?

Some might say the series is dead and to leave it be, and they may very well be right. But even now, as Xbox struggles to formulate a solid lineup of major first party IP to win back audiences after misfires and poor press, it feels like the moment to bring back Crackdown with some real effort and innovation behind it. And the reason I say that is simple: Helldivers 2 exists.

Helldivers 2 is a game all about over-the-top action, orchestrated by helmeted goons throwing themselves around. It's a satire where we effectively play as the bad guys, working for an obviously fascist government. It's all about blowing things up to send both enemies and allies flying, revelling in the spectacle while still recognising the dark context behind it. And people love it.

And besides, when it comes to Crackdown's tones and themes, the subjects of government authoritarianism and the brutal excesses of law enforcement are just as topical as they were in 2007 – more so, in fact.

Not to mention that more broadly "the big superhero open world game" is a conspicuous gap in Xbox's lineup. I doubt it would match the success of Sony and Insomniac's Spider-Man games any time soon, but I can't help but notice that Microsoft hasn't had anything like this since… Well, Crackdown 3, and Sunset Overdrive before that.

Ultimately though, it would have to be a new game. Part of Crackdown's problem as an ongoing series was that it never really worked out how to get past the shadow of the first entry, refusing to evolve with the rest of the world.

A new Crackdown game would need to take the foundation of what was fun twenty years ago – bouncing around a cool city with a rocket launcher on your back and a souped-up Bond car in your garage – and rebuild that foundation for the modern day. You can't half-ass something like this, or fall back on outdated systems. As the man said: skills for kills.

Check out the litany of upcoming Xbox Series X games we're waiting on in 2026... sadly, a new Crackdown isn't one of them (yet?)

A modder has managed to run PlayStation classic Spyro The Dragon on N64 hardware. Just don't expect a full version to be released any time soon.

After one modder committed the sin of putting Super Mario 64 onto the PS1, the '90s console wars are back in full force. And in retaliation for this major betrayal, the N64 faction have taken one of PlayStation's icons for their own. Or in more normal terms, days after Super Mario 64 was shown running on PS1, a separate modder has released a video showing 1998's Spyro the Dragon running on the N64.

As spotted by Time Extension, Frogbull – who has previously created bizarro projects like bringing Crash Bandicoot and Metal Gear Solid to Sega Saturn – released a video showing off the original Spyro game running on N64. The video in question only shows off the opening hub area, with Spyro roaming around the green plains, but much like Mario's work-in-progress demo, it's missing animations and other assets.

However, unlike the Mario 64 project – which came with a demo – Frogbull explains in the description of the video, "Spyro 64 is an old project I've had for quite some time, basically my first steps into N64 homebrew."

And while they aren't intending to work on this to completion, Frogbull does give a promising update: "I recently learned that a very promising and advanced decompilation project has been started by Altro50, so this homemade attempt at recreating Spyro on the Nintendo 64 doesn't have much purpose anymore as there's a good chance an actual port will end up coming."

Undertale demo is transformed in "faithful" fan-made Game Boy Color demake, and you can play it right now

The formula for the perfect Wolverine game is as hard to crack as adamantium. Those with Logan as the main character have ranged from "okay, not bad" to "please make it stop". He's been in some great games, but always as a supporting character. Take the ol' canucklehead out of the fantastic Marvel's Midnight Suns, for example, and the impact on story and gameplay would be negligible. We've got every reason to believe, however, that Insomniac will finally give him the game he deserves with Marvel's Wolverine.

"Been fightin' longer than I can remember," he growls resignedly at the beginning of the recent gameplay trailer. There's then plenty of ultraviolence to demonstrate this (he literally rips a guy in half), and it's this level of character-appropriate gore that has caught the attention of, and sparked hope in, many fans. There's plenty more to read into however, not least the words and tone of Logan's voiceover that sits in stark contrast to the energy and rage of what's happening on screen ("Death's always waitin'. Just not for me").

He sounds tired. This, too, is true to the character. Not only is Wolverine practically unkillable, he ages incredibly slowly, and as a result has seen friends and lovers lost to time as he is forced to continue, physically unchanged. This makes me wonder whether the story might take place over years rather than weeks or months. It's something of a globetrotting adventure – Madripoor, Canada, and Japan have been confirmed – and the Wolverine at the beginning of the trailer seems animalistic in a way that the yellow-suit-wearing, motorbike-riding version we see later does not.

Claw blimey

It's already been confirmed that Marvel's Wolverine takes place in the same universe as Insomniac's Spider-Man games, so we now officially have a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU, anyone?). I think they're playing the long game here – I don't expect Spider-Man to turn up halfway through Logan's adventure and join him through to the end – but I am kind of expecting Peter Parker to make a post credit cameo. Without spoiling too much for those unaware, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 ends in a way that, if you squint and use a little imagination, could feasibly lead to Peter leaving New York and bumping into Logan somewhere.

Spider-Man and Wolverine are wildly different characters with very different temperaments, but a future game featuring them both would work because of, rather than despite, this. After all, they've worked together plenty of times in the comics world. The MGU plans extend far beyond these two however, as can be seen if you take another look at the trailer. It's revealed that Omega Red and Mystique will feature, and I'll bet you a spandex costume of your choice that there will be more villains – and perhaps heroes – to come. The confirmation of Tokyo as a location intrigues me. Could we see Lady Deathstrike? Logan's son Daken, even?

Mystique only makes a brief appearance in the trailer, but the way that she is framed and animated in the few seconds of a fight scene we see leads me to believe that she'll be a playable character. The fact that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 features playable characters beyond Peter and Miles only strengthens my belief, and in fact, I'll go so far as to say that we'll even get to step into the blood-soaked shoes of Omega Red, even if only briefly. Insomniac let us have a little go living out our Venom fantasies, after all.

Hulk/Logan

Part of what Marvel's Wolverine will set out to do, I think, is solidify the idea of an MGU and continue to normalize the idea of multiple playable characters. I expect this to pay off big time in the future, with an Insomniac X-Men, Avengers, or other big league team-up game. The very presence of a sentinel at the end of the trailer serves as a reminder that the MGU is populated by an untold number of mutants, and opens the door to an enormous number of related characters.

The other thing the game will want to do, of course, is tell a great Wolverine story while making him feel authentic. This poses a huge, vital question that neither the reveal trailer nor the gameplay trailer answers: how? His skeleton is coated with an unbreakable metal, he rapidly heals any wound, and his claws can tear through almost anything. The worst mistake a superhero game can make is to sacrifice the power fantasy in the name of gameplay mechanics utterly unsuited to it (looking at you, Marvel's Avengers and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League).

Balancing the powerful nature of a character with the need for some level of challenge is an incredibly difficult task, but I feel confident saying Insomniac is a safe pair of hands here. Their Spider-Man games demonstrated that they know and understand the characters they've been trusted with, and can find a way to make them a joy to play as without hollowing out their abilities.

Wolverine will need another level of creativity given that he can't die, but I trust this team to do it. An additional technique, of course, is to feature gameplay sections where you take control of a character that doesn't enjoy the advantages of the main protagonist. Insomniac landed on a winning formula with Marvel's Spider-Man 2; I see no reason for them to drop it entirely for their next game, and I doubt they do, either.

Check out our best PS5 games ranking for what to play next!

As people who hate fun keep telling me, tying a tablecloth round my neck like a cape and jumping short distances while shouting "Look at me I'm flying" before hitting the ground doesn't make me a superhero. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 does, though – or at least, it brings me as close as I'm ever going to get. It was, and still is, the best superhero simulator the industry has to offer.

It's not such a great game because it looks pretty… but damn, it does look pretty. Amazing even, you might say. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise considering the fact that it has Sony's money and support behind it, but boy oh boy has that money and support paid off. Few PS5 games come close to matching Spider-Man 2 for looks, especially if you have a TV capable of running it in its full 4K or 120hz glory. Want something to show off the capabilities of your console that is somehow going up rather than down in value? This should be your first stop.

Caught in a web

If 120hz isn't an option for you, you can still go for 60fps, and you should absolutely take it. Sometimes, I don't mind sacrificing frames for fidelity, especially if it's something horror-flavored like Silent Hill f or Alan Wake 2. But it's hard to overstate how integral fluidity is to the experience here, and you need the frame rate to support it.

Insomniac had already seemed to nail the feel of swinging through the air as the web-swinger in the first Marvel's Spider-Man, but by the time the first full sequel launched, it was better than ever. Thwip a webline to arc through the air, launch yourself forwards, thwip another, pull a few air tricks, pull yourself to a launch point to hurl yourself upwards once again, whip out the new web wings to glide and perhaps take advantage of Wind Tunnels to zoom forwards; before diving to build up speed for your next webline.

Soaring through the air above the streets of New York like an arachnid-styled pendulum is an incredible feeling. There's fast travel to unlock, but I honestly don't understand why you might want to use it.

Combat, too, is all about having a smooooth ride. It owes much to the Batman: Arkham series in terms of building up one long combo and dancing from one foe to the next, but both Spider-Men are far more athletic heroes, which is reflected appropriately in how they dispense violent justice.

There's nothing quite like launching a bad guy into the air, leaping up to join them so you can hurl them back down to the ground, pulling yourself to a distant enemy in an instant to start punching them in the face instead, then using a gadget or ability to push back the group that is now trying to crowd you – before using a finisher to instantly take down the nearest goon stupid enough to step up. Fights are a rush.

Air Miles

Perhaps, like me, you bought the game at launch and rinsed it of trophies in less than a week (something I almost never do, by the way). Well since then, New Game Plus has been added, giving you a brand new reason to come back. As well as one final trophy for finishing NG+ on any difficulty, 'Ultimate' character levelling and new unlockable suits have been added. Honestly, though? I just loved playing through the story again, and was once more so taken with the movement and the combat, I found myself drifting back to side content even though I'd already unlocked all the rewards. This 2023 game is one of my 2025 GOTY contenders.

Going back through the story, I was reminded of two things. Firstly, how good the acting is. Nadji Jeter for example again gives a phenomenal performance as Miles Morales, and Yuri Lowenthal remains my favorite Peter Parker version of Spider-Man in any medium (there, I said it). The ever-reliable Laura Bailey makes a great MJ, and don't you dare forget that the sadly departed horror legend Tony Todd makes an appearance as Venom. He plays the character perfectly, and makes a huge impact despite the relatively small role. But don't take my word for it. Just ask his BAFTA nomination.

The other thing that resurfaced in the murky waters of my memory was the depth of the story. Look, it's not worthy or enormously complex, but it echoes uncomfortable aspects of the human condition that you might not expect from a superhero romp. It is in part a story about self-awareness, legacy, and getting a handle on your emotions. Sure, it's also in part a story about one man who turns into a giant lizard and another who only wears scraps of leather and fur so he can show everybody how apocalyptically ripped he is, but that means there's something for everyone.

If Marvel's Spider-Man 2 somehow passed you by, you'll find that it's every bit as impressive today as it was two years ago. If you've already put dozens of hours in – heck, even if you went through New Game Plus as soon as it was added – I'd still urge you to reinstall it and play again. There's a literally endless parade of crimes in this digital New York, and I guarantee you'll look and feel incredibly cool on your way to foil them.

Check out our best PS5 games ranking for what to play next!

After making three Spider-Man games, Insomniac is now working with Marvel and Sony on an adventure starring the mighty Wolverine. Although the adamantium-clawed hero is a different speed to the wallcrawler, there was no studio better suited to the job, according to management.

Speaking to Game Informer about Logan's new video game, Haluk Mentes, the general manager of Marvel Games, reveals how the Ratchet & Clank studio became everyone's number one choice. "As is usually the case, once we complete a project together, they, too, become 'Marvel,'" he tells the outlet.

"Marvel's Wolverine with our dear friends at Insomniac Games is perhaps the epitome of this philosophy," he continues. "We have been working together for more than a decade and developed such a shorthand across multiple Marvel's Spider-Man games that when the time finally came to bring Logan back in spectacular and visceral fashion, it was obvious to everyone on our team that Insomniac was the perfect choice."

Rightly so, as Insomniac's three Spidey video games thus far have been miraculous achievements. The tactile web swinging combined with the well-crafted plotlines that dig right into Miles Morales and Peter Parker's rogues' gallery, and the stunning recreation of New York City, place them all among the finest releases of the last ten years.

The gameplay trailer revealed during September's State of Play shows Wolverine is utilizing a lot of the same strengths. Combos and bouncing between targets are fundamental to the combat, and we appear to be getting multiple perspectives via Mystique, while other X-Men heroes and villains show up throughout.

"It was our shared culture and values that brought us together, and we're so proud to continue collaborating for many years to come," Mentes finishes. Marvel's Wolverine arrives in 2026, then with any luck, we'll have Spider-Man 3 soon after.

Marvel's Wolverine box art "doesn't look like our past games," according to Spider-Man studio Insomniac, which worked with a comic artist who has a brutal history with the character for the cover

We finally got a proper look at Marvel's Wolverine during the PlayStation State of Play for September 2025, and that included a first glimpse at the box art for the upcoming PS5 game. Developer Insomniac seems especially proud of that cover, as the studio took a little extra time during yesterday's presentation to talk about how it represents both the character and the tonal shift away from its previous games.

"We're pretty excited about the artwork that we're using on the cover," as Marvel Games executive producer Eric Monacelli explains in a behind the scenes video. "It's dynamic, it's rough edged. You notice it doesn't look like our past games. It has a sense of urgency and forward movement and rage and fury, and that's Wolverine."

"Our cover bridges bold simplicity with the expressive energy of comics to further accentuate Wolverine’s rugged, complex personality," as Insomniac senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza adds on the PlayStation Blog. This post also reveals that the box art was "designed in collaboration" with comic artist Jock.

As with many comic artists, Jock has a prolific list of credits, ranging from 2000 AD runs on series like Judge Dredd to Marvel and DC runs on characters as notable as Batman. He has an especially notable credit when it comes to Wolverine, though, as he did cover art for all 15 issues of the 2012 series Wolverine Max. That run is notable for featuring a whole lot of extreme violence – not far off from the hyperviolent tone we've seen in the trailer for Marvel's Wolverine.

Here are all the villains in the Marvel's Wolverine trailer, and 3 we hope to see.

Insomniac Games has revealed who will be playing Wolverine in its upcoming game, with Spartacus and Gears of War actor Liam Mcintyre taking on the role.

Marvel's Wolverine had its reveal party at last night's PlayStation State of Play showcase, with us getting our first look at gameplay for Insomniac's next Marvel game. And while it gave us a disappointing "Fall 2026" release date (meaning the game will have gone about five years from reveal to release), it does look like a solid action game in the vein of Marvel's Spider-Man.

We also got to meet the game's Wolverine, with Liam McIntyre (who played JD Fenix in Gears of War alongside a ton of film and TV roles) taking up the mantle, who called it "one of the greatest honors of my life, one of the biggest responsibilities I've ever had, and one of the coolest things I've ever got to do."

During the showcase creative director Marcus Smith said "that level of acting and being able to just deliver that performance with believability across both spectrums was something [...] we all agreed: He's the one. We don't need to see anyone else." And despite Wolverine being famously Canadian, it turns out Australians are the best at playing the character, apparently.

McIntyre confirmed that he's actually played some of Marvel's Wolverine, saying "there was this one section of the game I got to try. It was just visceral, immediate, and so incredibly satisfying, and I was like, 'this is gonna be amazing.'" And while we're unlikely to hear the lead voice actor for a game say "it's kinda mid yeah" the passion and description given by McIntyre does give me somewhat high hopes that the combat will be good.

Marvel's Wolverine dev says it's "darker and more brutal than you might expect from Insomniac," and after seeing the "claws up through the face" scene the director worried was "too far," I'm sure getting that vibe.

Eagle-eyed Marvel fans might be able to spot "hints to other characters" in the new Marvel's Wolverine trailer.

Last night, Marvel's Wolverine made a stunning reappearance during the State of Play broadcast, with a brutal, gore-filled trailer reintroducing the project to the world after early development footage was leaked in 2023. Now, if you're likely to be poring over this trailer for the next 12 months until the game's Fall 2026 release date, you might be able to pick some hints to a wider Marvel cast than appears at first sight.

As well as Logan (and a Sentinel), the trailer shows off classic X-Men figure Mystique doing some of her quintessential shapeshifting. There's also a look at Omega Red, who while not exactly a huge-name villain, has crossed paths with the Wolverine and co on a number of occasions. But those two are far from the only characters we're likely to get a closer look at.

During yesterday's trailer, creative director Marcus Smith said that "it's always nice teasing the depth and the amount of characters that we'll be seeing in the game," teasing that "there are some hints to other characters that fans of Wolverine will recognize for sure."

I'll admit that I've not been over the trailer with a fine-enough comb to work those out just yet, but I've got my fingers crossed for Sabretooth. Arguably Wolverine's greatest foe, it seems fitting that in a game where Logan's apparently appearing without the rest of the X-Men by his side, we'll be focusing more on his enemies than the wider group's foes. And while Insomniac promises (and seems to be delivering on) the idea that Marvel's Wolverine will be "darker and more brutal) than its other games, Marvel's Spider-Man games do give us something of a template to work on – expect some big-name enemies, as well as some deeper cuts.

I might not have done my homework, but our comics expert George has been hard at work documenting all the villains in the Marvel's Wolverine trailer.

The new Marvel's Wolverine gameplay trailer starts off with a bloodied up Logan lifting a human-looking cyborg up and impaling it with his retractable claws, and later in the trailer he uses those claws like a fork on another cyborg's face, going up and through the jaw and out of the top of its head. There's lots and lots of blood, naturally.

That's why, when I saw Insomniac senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza describe the game in a new PlayStation Blog as sometimes being "darker and more brutal than you might expect from Insomniac," my first thought was: you aren't kidding, brother!

Going off the gameplay trailer, you can definitely still tell this is from the same people that made Marvel's Spider-Man. In Espinoza's words, it features the same "fast, fluid, and ferocious combat; exhilarating, action-packed set pieces; robust accessibility features; and a gripping story that taps into the core tenets of one of the most compelling comic book characters of all-time."

Still, I was genuinely shocked watching that trailer, especially the claws in face part. And apparently, even one of the developers working on the game was hesitant to put that extremely graphic image in the game.

"There's a part in the trailer where Logan jumps down, and then he does the claws up through the face," says project director Jess Reiner-Reed in a new behind-the-scenes video. "That one I thought, maybe was gonna be taking it too far, but I am so glad that we have it. It looks fantastic."

It's true, Wolverine is an extremely violent anti-hero, known for putting his giant claws to use liberally and indiscriminately. That puts Insomniac in the position of having to create some truly disturbing visuals or be forever branded cowards by comic fans, and at this point it looks like they delivered on this front.

"The question that comes up a lot to us at Insomniac Games is, 'are you going to make a Wolverine game that is as violent, as visceral, as the character in the comics?" says creative director Marcus Smith, before showing a montage of similarly gruesome kill shots. The answer, he says through these images, is a resounding 'yes.'

Marvel's Wolverine is due to launch on PS5 in 2026.

All the villains in the Marvel's Wolverine trailer, and 3 we hope to see

Marvel's Wolverine, the next superhero action game from Marvel's Spider-Man developer Insomniac, is coming to PS5 in fall 2026.

The Marvel's Wolverine release date was announced in a new trailer released at tonight's PlayStation State of Play September 2025 live show. The trailer reintroduces the long-silent action game following an enormous leak that saw pre-release materials spill onto the internet in 2023.

Insomniac worked with Marvel Games on the project, and the new trailer is a smorgasbord of Marvel characters. In addition to the Marvel roster, the game seems to run up and down the world, with Wolverine taking to Madripoor, Canada, and Japan.

"Become a living weapon," the latest trailer blurb entreats. "As he searches for answers about his past, Wolverine will do whatever it takes – unleashing brutal claw combat, violent rage, and relentless determination – to cut through the mystery of the man he used to be."

A new blog post from Insomniac senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza adds: "We aim to deliver the ultimate Wolverine fantasy built on Insomniac staples like fast, fluid, and ferocious combat; exhilarating, action-packed set pieces; robust accessibility features; and a gripping story that taps into the core tenets of one of the most compelling comic book characters of all-time."

The trailer is considerably more gruesome than Insomniac's usual releases; one developer praised the detailed "blood tech" made for the game, while another said the whole game delivers "a level of detail that we've never been able to do before."

In the reveal, Insomniac stressed that Marvel's Wolverine plays differently to its previous games, and not just because Wolverine doesn't shoot webs out of his wrists. Likewise, one developer touched on the newly revealed cover art, which deliberately "doesn't look like our past games."

More details will be released in spring 2026, the developer teased, seemingly hinting at the game's own dedicated showcase. Marvel's Wolverine is now positioned as one of the big PS5 exclusives of 2026, filling roughly the same time slot as Ghost of Yotei this year, so Sony is sure to pull out all the stops.

Here are all the other upcoming Marvel games, from the new Iron Man game to Marvel's Wolverine.

Right now, you can still buy the Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Collector's Edition set for the PS5.

You know the one that comes with a digital copy for one of the best PS5 games, and that massive 19-inch Venom statue, where he's battling it out with Peter Parker and Miles Morales while the creepy symbiote tendrils menacingly lift him into the air? Well, it's available for $229.99 at PS Direct despite the fact that the game launched way back in October 2023, and I'm trying to use all my strength and willpower not to buy it.

It's not the price that's putting me off, but the struggle of fitting 19 inches worth of spectacular Spidey goodness into my life. There's only so much shelf space I can spare for more Marvel merch, and that's a whole lot of Venom that I'll need to accommodate, tendrils in all.

Collector's Editions don't usually stick around for long. Weeks, and in some cases even days, after a big game's release, you'll only going to find them in the window displays at GameStop amongst other over-priced PS5 accessories. or copies across every second-hand auction site you can imagine in the US. So I'm shocked this is still available to buy.

Shocked but happy, as it's a PlayStation Direct exclusive, I remember the difficulty of finding this edition in stock shortly after launch. Finding the Venom statue anywhere but eBay at the time got so stressful that it's why I stuck with a physical copy of just the game instead.

It didn't disappoint, and I have the Platinum trophy to prove it. But as a big Spider-Man nerd, I can't pretend I wasn't thinking about the 19-inch Venom statue, steelbook case, and all the in-game suits and goodies I could have had access to, had I had the collector's edition been available online for a little while longer.

I'm not sure if PlayStation Studios and Insomniac Games just made an extra batch of Venom statues to appease Spidey fans like me who missed them the first time around, or a fresh box of collector's editions was found by a PS Direct staff member at the back of a warehouse somewhere, but I'm glad they're now more readily available.

Collector's editions of games being this exclusive commodity has never sat right with me. They tend to be pretty pricey, and their short lifespan on the digital shelves makes them even more prone to being exclusive for those with the cash to spare. I've even pre-ordered a collector's edition (the Clock Tower Rewind Collector's Edition by Limited Run Games) purely as I knew I'd not be able to buy it for its retail price in the future - and I still feel gross about it.

Having them still in stock years after launch, like with this Spider-Man 2 edition, gives Spidey fans with smaller budgets a chance to save and grab the statue for themselves, with the added bonus of not having to fork money over to greedy resellers, and I'm all for it.

An MSRP of $229.99 / £219.99 is still going to be out of a lot of Spider-Man fan's budgets, of course. Especially as I'm sure most fans have a copy of the Insomniac Spidey sequel on PS5 (or even Steam) by now, and don't fancy forking out over $200 for another. However, it is the accessibility that I'm a fan of, and I only wish collector's editions for other big PS5 games were still easy to find in 2025.

Now Sony, can you please restock the Marvel's Spider-Man 2 DualSense controller too? If the 30th anniversary DualSense controller can get a restock, why not Spider-Man?

• View all PS5 game deals at Amazon
• Miles Morales Ultimate Edition: $69.99 $49.28 at Amazon

Picking up one of the best PS5 controllers, the best PS5 headsets, and one of the best SSDs for PS5 can help make your web-slinging adventures even better on your Sony console.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was one of the earliest PS5 exclusives, dropping around 6 months after the console first launched, but Insomniac Games has revealed that despite all of that time passing, the final Easter egg that was hinted at less than a year after the game released was never found by players. So instead of waiting even longer, Insomniac has decided to show it off to celebrate the game's fourth anniversary.

All we knew up until now was that the Easter egg was found in Zurkie's Gastropub, a location you frequent during Rift Apart's campaign, and considering that area is already filled with Easter eggs in the form of nods to past games, it made things a bit harder. During the Insomniac Live show on Twitch (with the clip since posted to Insomniac's Twitter account), the game's senior designer, Grant Parker walked through the Easter egg.

So before you go into Zurkie's, there are two signs telling you that there are no weapons allowed and somehow players were meant to figure out that you need to shoot the left one five times, the right one four times, and then shoot the left one 13 more times, which results in nothing. There's no indication that anything has happened. But if you head into the pub and walk up the mechanical bull, you'll be shown a prompt saying "Hold L2 to Ride Mechanical Bull."

Holding L2 will then put you into a minigame where you have to try your best to stay on the bull. Except it's clearly unfinished, as Rivet is seen standing beside the bull while another version of herself is t-posing on the bull, which has no animations at all and simply clips through the floor as it moves around. However Parker says it was "just something fun that I thought I'd leave in the game" knowing that no one would find it… until now, obviously.

Split Fiction players defeat secret challenge so tough that some of the devs themselves can "barely" complete it, and get rewarded with the promise of an early peek at the director's next game.

A Marvel's Spider-Man 2 player has warned others about the dangers of wearing the Symbiote suit in the game's first mission.

As highlighted by the Twitter users below, there's a very real consequence if you play Marvel's Spider-Man 2 New Game Plus and take on Sandman while wearing a specific suit. If you've already played Insomniac's most recent title, you're probably all too familiar with how much sand gets sent flying around when going up against the Marvel villain. What many may not have discovered yet, though, is that the Symbiote suit is quite the sand magnet. 

I like to imagine that the Symbiote suit has the same texture as those squishy alien egg toys, which means the sand that's flicked off Sandman during the boss battle sticks to it very easily. The end result resembles something very different from sand or Symbiote and has got Marvel's Spider-Man 2 fans cheering on a new hero: Poop-Man. 

"Don't play #SpiderMan2 new game plus first mission in the Symbiote suit because the sand goes onto the suit and makes peter turn into sh*t man," one Twitter user has warned fellow players. The picture included in the tweet pretty much speaks for itself. "This is why [Insomniac] held off NG+ for so long, they didn't want us to find out about poop man," another fan responded to the tweet. 

Things get even funnier in the tweet's reply: "If they patch out Peter Pooper I'm not playing the DLC," the same Twitter user threatens. Others have had similar reactions, sharing things like: "This is the main reason you play ng+" and "Spooderman." Although not the most flattering comparison, we're sure Insomniac doesn't mind if it means more people are trying out New Game Plus, even if it is just to meet Poop-Man. 

In other (less poop-related) Spider-Man news: Despite the sequel's ending, Peter Parker's voice actor doesn't think we've seen the last of his character.

Find out what else Peter Parker and Miles Morales can wear with our Marvel's Spider-Man 2 suits guide. 

Steam’s Winter Sale is absolutely packed with savings on games big and small. But the more obscure or overlooked gems are often stuck beneath the pesky algorithm. To save your wrist from the pain of endlessly scrolling, we’ve compiled ten games you’ve probably never played before, all on sale for under $10. 

Let’s start with Before The Green Moon ($6), a low-stakes, low-poly farming sim that’s “set in a small community at the base of a space elevator” that goes to the titular moon. Think Stardew Valley but with PSX aesthetics and an alien world. Before The Green Moon comes courtesy of Turnfollow, the developers behind Wide Ocean Big Jacket, so you can also expect some incredibly human moments thrown in, too. 

Next up is Cursorblade ($4), a game that first caught my attention with a great Next Fest demo. Essentially, the game takes Vampire Survivor’s roguelike formula but casts you as the titular pointy cursor. Enemies stay stationary and it’s then on you to attack when appropriate, threading between projectiles, blobs, and flames to strike.

Before Insomniac Games swung into action with Spider-Man, the studio cut its teeth on Sunset Overdrive ($5), the vibrant shooter that turns an urban open world into a platforming paradise. Sticking with blockbusters, survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2 ($6) is at its lowest price ever and an absolute steal.

Early access not a problem? Driftwood ($7), the longboarding game with a starring sloth, just added snowboarding for the festive season, so, what better time to slide in? Then we have Mortal Sin, a brutal but brilliant roguelike that has you descend into unholy dungeons with some thrilling melee combat. (Yes, I’m breaking my own rules since it’s currently on sale for $13. It’s just that good!)

Let’s switch gears to something dramatically more chill: I Commissioned Some Cats ($3.5), which is an adorable hidden object puzzler featuring some stunning art. Another hidden object gem comes from Sizeable ($3), a puzzler that has you shrinking and expanding objects in a diorama. Cloud Gardens ($4.80) is also endlessly relaxing for its gorgeous voxels and post-apocalyptic decorating.

My final recommendation is the time-looping old-school horror Homebody ($9.99), which is somehow brutally scary and insightful about early-adulthood anxieties all at once. Not very festive, but hey, maybe that’s what you’re in the mood for. 

Steam Winter Sale also has discounts on the best Soulslikes.

Insomniac Games has publicly responded to this week’s massive data breach, which saw hacking group Rhysida drop 1.6 terabytes of data onto the internet. The studio has called the hack “extremely distressing,” but reaffirms that Marvel’s Wolverine “continues as planned” despite spoilers circulating the internet. 

“Thank you for the outpouring of compassion and unwavering support,” the studio writes in a social media statement, “We're both saddened and angered about the recent criminal cyberattack on our studio and the emotional toll it's taken on our dev team. We have focused inwardly for the last several days to support each other.”

Insomniac then shares that the studio is “aware that the stolen data includes personal information belonging to our employees, former employees, and independent contractors,” alongside “development details” on its next superhero romp. The company didn’t detail any potential support being offered to affected employees, though it’s still determining “what data was impacted” at the moment.

“This experience has been extremely distressing for us,” the statement continues. “We want everyone to enjoy the games we develop as intended and as our players deserve. However, like Logan… Insomniac is resilient. Marvel’s Wolverine continues as planned, The game is in early production and will no doubt greatly evolve throughout development, as do all our plans.” But we’ll need to wait until “the time is right” to see an official clip from the game. 

Elsewhere, the studio’s community and marketing director James Stevenson reiterated that the information gathering online is “stolen data - not leaked info” and “pirated builds - not leaked demos.” For the uninitiated, the hacking group reportedly demanded $2 million from Sony before releasing the content and claimed that it held back 2% of the information from public view.

Head to our upcoming PS5 games guide to see what else is in the pipeline. 

Last year's GTA 6 leak cost Rockstar $5 million plus "thousands of hours of staff time," the developer told a UK court. 

On December 21, the BBC reported that Arion Kurtaj, a key member of the international hacking group Lapsus$, had been sentenced to indefinite life in a hospital prison due to his alleged involvement in the GTA 6 leak, and "intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible." 

During the proceedings, Rockstar told the court that the hack had cost the company $5 million to recover, plus "thousands of hours' worth of staff time." The leak, which took place in September 2022, released over 90 screenshots and videos of an early build of GTA 6 - which at this point had barely been announced as in development. 

In July 2023, several months after his initial arrest, Kurtaj was deemed psychiatrically unfit for trial. Then, just a month later, it was discovered that Kurtaj had hacked Rockstar from a hotel room using an Amazon Firestick, TV, and mobile phone - resulting in him being re-arrested.

Although the leak was "extremely" disappointing for Rockstar, it seems the developer more than made it up to fans when it released the official GTA 6 trailer earlier this month. Unfortunately, this wasn't without its issues, as the trailer leaked a day earlier than its official reveal. 

Rockstar isn't the only studio to have recently suffered this kind of cyber attack. Last week, it was reported that Insomniac Games (developer of Marvel's Spider-Man 2) had been hacked by a different group who had obtained information on the studio's upcoming game, Marvel's Wolverine, as well as employee data. Following the attack, there have been plenty of Marvel's Wolverine leaks floating around online.

The GTA 6 trailer confirmed what we already knew: that GTA 6 leak was never anything to worry about, and leaks are very often pointless.

2023 always had scope to be a strange one for Sony. For one, PlayStation entered the year with relatively few first-party exclusives on the books – in comparison to previous years, at least; certainly since the introduction of PS5 in 2020 – with its biggest rival Microsoft gearing up to launch Starfield, easily one of the most-anticipated games of recent times, as an Xbox console exclusive. 

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was the obvious challenger here from a commercial and critical perspective, and while it's difficult to compare the two directly (we'll dig into that further down the page), Insomniac Games' second crack at the red-suited superhero quickly became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game over a 24-hour period, selling more than 2.5 million copies in a single day. 

Final Fantasy 16 was received well at launch in June, wowing players with its combat, voice acting, and spectacle (I'll leave fans of the series to debate the strength of its story, mind you); while the much-anticipated Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was pushed back several months into next year. The PS5 had this year's runaway hit Baldur's Gate 3 all to itself in the console space for several weeks; whereas timed-PS5-exclusive Forspoken didn't quite live up to expectations. PSVR 2 excelled, not least by way of Horizon Call of the Mountain; yet the company's marquee PlayStation Showcase and State of Play events too often flattered to deceive. And so went the last 12 months for PlayStation – seemingly matching many of its forward strides with one or two in the opposite direction. 

With the Microsoft-Activision deal bubbling under the surface, a fair amount of Sony's front-facing visibility in 2023 was spent speaking out about why the proposed multi-million dollar acquisition wasn't good for the video games industry as a whole. And while I don't disagree with the sentiment from an anti-monopoly point of view (I will, however, put the glaring inconsistencies in Sony's argument to one side for the sake of debate), I personally felt both sides allowed the tabloid charade of it all to become an increasingly bigger distraction over the course. 

All of which is to say: 2023 always had scope to be a strange one for Sony. And, for me, it totally was.

The state of play

Ahead of May's PlayStation-focused event, I ran a headline that read: Sony simply turning up at the PlayStation Showcase will keep Xbox on the ropes. With the virtue of hindsight, I'll be the first to admit that I missed the mark at top-level – Sony ultimately delivered a lukewarm presentation – but I nevertheless stand by the points made within. Xbox console-exclusive Redfall, aka Microsoft's biggest blunder of the year, was barely behind us when this particular PlayStation Showcase rolled around, and we were less than a month on from a Microsoft earnings report that stated Xbox hardware revenue had plummeted 30% in the previous year. At the same time, Sony had announced that the PS5 was selling faster than PS4 in the US despite years of console shortages, and that the PS5 had passed 500 million home consoles sold as a result. 

Roll all of this into the fact that at the time – way back in the heady days of late May earlier this year – the Microsoft-Activision bid was enjoying one of its signature lulls, whereby any deal whatsoever seemed all but unlikely. Fast forward several months, and not only has the Microsoft-Activision deal gone through, but Microsoft has also enjoyed the successful launch of Xbox-exclusive, Starfield. As mentioned above, making side-by-side comparisons between Bethesda's space-faring RPG and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is impossible, given the fact many Xbox players are playing the former via Game Pass. What we can say about the superhero PS5 exclusive, however, is that it sold more than five million copies in 11 days and was the highest-selling video game of October 2023. That's pretty good going. 

Alongside all of this, the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 launched on PS5 shortly after its arrival on PC made Larian Studios' hit role-player an unlikely boon for Sony – the PS5 becoming the only console alternative for trips to the Sword Coast between September 6 and December 7, when that journey was finally possible on Xbox Series hardware following a handful of delays. I don't think the importance of this inadvertent period of exclusivity can be underestimated, especially given the fact that games of this nature (Larian games in particular) tend to fare better on PC – not to mention the fact BG3 had accrued a solid and pre-existing following via three years in Steam's Early Access initiative. With the promise of Baldur's Gate 3 DLC on the horizon, PlayStation players will inevitably extend their love affair with GamesRadar+'s Game of the Year for 2023 when the time comes.

On the hardware front, the PlayStation Portal landed in November with its 8" display and built-in DualSense controller designed to sort of replicate the PSP and PSVita handhelds of bygone eras. The jury's still out on how well it manages that – but another peripheral that was well-received from Sony's 2023 purview was the PlayStation Access controller. Designed in collaboration with the accessibility community, the Access aims to help players with disabilities play more comfortably, with a broad range of customization options.  

Despite the aforementioned mediocre PlayStation Showcase in May, the Sony State of Play event in September did a far better job of stirring hype for what lies ahead – even if much of that extends into next year. This showing's coup de gras was destined to be a closer look at Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, part two of the planned trilogy, and it wasted no time in getting going. With flashes of Junon Harbour, the parade on the central thoroughfare of the same seaside town, the cable car ride to the Gold Saucer, Cait Sith, Vincent, Zack, Red 13's hometown of Cosmo Canyon, Bugenhagen, mention of Emerald and Ruby Weapon, and that big bastard swamp serpent that Sephiroth makes light work of – it all looked stunning. Now with its February 29 launch date in sight, 2024 can't come soon enough. 

Elsewhere on PlayStation's coming soon radar sits The Last of Us 2 Remastered (January 19) and Pacific Drive (February 22); with a number of TBC labels hanging over everything from Phantom Blade 0, Sword of the Sea, Hideo Kojima's new project OD, Concord, Marathon, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Marvel's Wolverine. To the latter end, the catastrophic Insomniac leaks that unfolded this week at the hands of hackers dealt a devastating blow to all of those on the receiving end. 

The depth, scale, and scope of the leaked material that's now in the public domain is unlike anything I've ever seen before in video games, and is certainly a sore one for Insomniac who'd otherwise be riding high into the New Year buoyed by its latest successful release. This is indeed a notable set-back for a first-party PlayStation studio, but if Rockstar Games' recent trajectory in the face of high-profile leaks is anything to go by – from its own in-development content hack last year through to this month's stellar GTA 6 trailer – then I'm confident Insomniac has what it takes to bounce back once it's dusted itself down and is raring to go again. 

And with the sentiment of looking forward in mind, despite a fairly stop-start year from PlayStation against what we're otherwise used to, its next steps into 2024 and beyond will be, as ever, well worth watching. 

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