The embargo went up at 8am Pacific on 10 September 2026, five days ahead of the 15 September PS5 launch. Publishers hand out that much runway when they expect to like what comes back.
What came back was a five-point spread.
Across the twenty-four scored verdicts I could verify on the day, the average is 7.5. The range runs from a 5 at Giant Bomb to a pair of 10s at ScreenHub and Hardcore Gamer. Metacritic sits at 78; OpenCritic at 80. Both aggregates are drawn from roughly a hundred reviews, and Metacritic counts none of them as negative — on its scale a 50 lands in “mixed”, which is where the floor of this distribution sits.
Read the middle of that and you get a good game. Read the edges and you get two different games.
Where the split falls
Look at how uniform the low cluster is. IGN, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, Eurogamer, VGC, The Guardian, Gamekult and ComicBook all filed a 60. Eight of the largest English-language outlets, and one French one, arriving at the same number independently. Giant Bomb went a notch under.
The high tail is a longer list of smaller sites, and it is genuinely enthusiastic rather than generous — 100s, 90s, and something close to thirty reviews at 80.
Those two groups are not disagreeing about what the game does. Read the copy and the praise is nearly identical on both sides: combat, gore, visuals, performance capture. The complaints are identical too — the story, and how often the game repeats itself. What differs is the weight. If you grade a Wolverine game on whether the fighting feels like being Wolverine, this is a 9. If you grade it on whether the writing earns its R rating, it is a 6.
Metacritic has this as the lowest-scored game from a PlayStation Studios team in the six years of the PS5. The Spider-Man games Insomniac made before it landed at 87, 85 and 90. That comparison is doing a lot of work in the coverage today, and it sets a bar almost nothing clears.
What everybody agreed on is the expensive part
The unanimous praise is for the things that cost money in a pipeline, and I think that is worth saying out loud, because those are the things a studio can buy.
Take the gore, which is the game’s whole proposition. A body that comes apart along claw lines is not a texture effect. It needs cut states authored per enemy, wound geometry that closes correctly wherever the blade passed, decals that respect the surface underneath, and severed pieces that are real meshes with real weight. Multiply that by every enemy archetype and every angle a player can attack from. Then run the same system backwards on Logan himself, because the healing factor means his damage state has to resolve in view of the camera, continuously, while he is still fighting. Damage that only accumulates is a solved problem. Damage that has to reverse on the hero model, on screen, is a much longer conversation with the character team.
The environments got the same unanimous nod, which is the return on a trip this blog wrote about last week: six people, four regions and 189,589 photographs of Japan. Location scanning is one of the few line items where you can draw a fairly straight line from spend to reception. Nobody in the low cluster docked a point for how the world looks.
Performance held too, which matters because Insomniac shipped something unusual here — ray tracing at 60fps on a base PS5, not the Pro, as the default rather than a mode you opt into. Reviewers on both ends of the spread ran it without complaint. On a launch this size that is not nothing.
None of that budget reaches the script. A scanning trip cannot fix a second act, and a dismemberment system cannot make a mission structure feel less repeated. The split in the scores is a split between the parts of a game money can buy and the part it cannot.
The number
7.5, from twenty-four verdicts between 5 and 10, collected on 10 September 2026 and converted to a ten-point scale.
Treat it more loosely than usual. A mean is a reasonable summary when the verdicts cluster — the Onimusha reviews two weeks ago ran from 7 to 9.2 and their 8.5 told you something real about what a tight spread means. Here, half the sample sits at 6 and the other half at 8 or above, and 7.5 is a value almost nobody gave it. The spread is the more useful figure. If what you want from a Wolverine game is the fighting, weight the top half. If you want it to be Spider-Man 2 with claws, the eight 60s are telling you something.
Scores collected on 10 September 2026 from published review round-ups and the outlets’ own pages, converted to a 1-10 scale and averaged, then rounded to the nearest half point. Metacritic and OpenCritic aggregate figures are theirs. I was not able to open either aggregator directly from here, so the individual outlet scores are as reported across several independent round-ups published after the embargo lifted.