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.
