Here's How Combat Works in Insomniac's Upcoming 'Marvel's Wolverine' Game

Summary

• Insomniac Games has revealed new gameplay for Marvel’s Wolverine at State of Play, confirming a September 15 release
• Combat centers on a Rage meter that builds through attacks, parries, and kills, unlocking stronger moves, a Healing Factor, and Rage Tier 3: a monochromatic explosion of savagery inspired by Marvel Comics’ Black, White and Blood series
• Jean Grey is confirmed as a major character who fights alongside Logan, enabling Critical Strikes and co-op finishing moves against Bolivar Trask’s cybernetic Reaver militia.

Insomniac Games has revealed new gameplay for Marvel’s Wolverine at PlayStation‘s State of Play, confirming a September 15 release on PS5. The game is a brutal, violent single-player action title built around an original story starring James “Logan” Howlett, with combat designed around a Rage system that rewards aggressive play and punishes passivity.

The combat system’s core mechanic is the Rage meter, which builds through every successful attack, parry, and kill. As Rage accumulates, it unlocks two distinct options: stronger attacks and the Healing Factor, Logan’s signature regeneration ability that allows him to absorb grievous damage and continue fighting. If Rage is pushed to its maximum state, Logan enters Rage Tier 3, a stylized monochromatic mode inspired by Marvel Comics’ Black, White and Blood anthology series that triggers a full explosion of savagery. The visual shift is a deliberate design choice, signaling a state change rather than simply a power boost, and grounds the mechanic in comic book language that longtime Wolverine readers will recognize immediately.

Within that framework, Logan executes special combat moves called Techniques. Two are confirmed in the gameplay reveal: the Tornado Spin and the Bull Rush. These sit alongside standard fast, fluid claw attacks and the ability to stalk and ambush enemies from above, giving Logan a combat vocabulary that spans stealth and explosive close-quarters fighting. When Logan’s health drops critically, the Last Stand system activates, triggering the Healing Factor as a survival mechanism and keeping the player in the fight rather than sending them to a reload screen.

Jean Grey introduces a second layer to the combat system. The telekinetic mutant fights alongside Logan as a major character, and her powers create Critical Strike opportunities: devastating finishing moves that Wolverine can execute either solo or in conjunction with Jean during frenzied encounters. The co-operative finishing system appears to be triggered by specific combat conditions rather than a dedicated co-op mode, positioning Jean as an AI companion whose abilities expand Logan’s tactical options in real time.

The enemies ground the combat in a specific threat level. The Reavers are a guns-for-hire cybernetic militia armed with advanced technology, lethal weapons, and cybernetic implants, working for Bolivar Trask — a billionaire industrialist operating from a fanatical belief in human superiority. Their technology is designed to match and counter Logan’s physical capabilities, which gives the Rage and Healing Factor systems their stakes. The gameplay’s highway motorcycle sequence extends the combat into a vehicle-based set piece, where Logan tears through a Reaver convoy by slashing tires, destroying trucks, and fighting off powerful Brutes across moving vehicles.

The story context positions the game as an original narrative rather than a comics adaptation. Logan rejoins Team X, a last-stand mutant task force, after a three-year absence, pulled back by the Reavers’ capture of a group of hunted mutants earmarked for delivery to Trask. Jean Grey leads the captured mutants and becomes Logan’s reluctant partner. The world is one where mutants live in the shadows, hunted and unknown to mainstream society, giving the game a tonally contained stakes that doesn’t require knowledge of wider Marvel continuity to follow. Sabretooth is teased in the trailer’s closing moments.

Check out the extended gameplay trailer above. Marvel’s Wolverine releases September 15 on PS5.