Before Insomniac Games announced its third Spider-Man game during this year’s PlayStation Showcase, the publisher slipped in an unexpected surprise about yet another upcoming Marvel project.
Wolverine of the X-Men will be the unexpected centrepiece of Wolverine, Insomniac’s latest game — directed by Brian Horton (operating as creative director) and Cameron Christian (game director), who previously worked on Insomniac’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales — in a story will likely draw upon important elements from the characters’ decades-long canon. In the short teaser shown during the presentation, Wolverine sits in a wrecked bar, calming having a drink and seemingly waiting for another person to challenge him to a fight they’re almost sure to lose. As the lone survivor of the unseen fight struggles to their feet and whips out a blade they plan to attack the Wolverine with, Wolverine’s claws come out, and you get a pretty good idea of what’s about to go down even though the trailer cuts to black.
Scant as the teaser is in the way of narrative details, it immediately gives you a sense of what Wolverine’s finalises aesthetics will look like, and a taste of what the game’s action might feel like. Given how Insomniac’s Spider-Man games have mined their titular heroes’ rogues galleries and lore fairly deeply, it’s likely that Wolverine will feature a number of X-Men characters with particularly close ties to Wolverine and delve into plots inspired by the comics focused on him. What’s going to be particularly fascinating to learn more about is what sort of world Insomniac creates for Wolverine to exist in, and whether the studio will develop an innovative way for him to move about it the way it did for Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
There’s currently no projected release date for the new Wolverine game, but we’re sure to hear more details about it in the coming months.