Comic for 2026-09-14
I'll admit, I was pretty hyped for Wolverine. It looked like it was going to be a fun, stabby Berserker-ragin' time. Plus it was being made by Insomniac- should have been a shoe-in.
I prefer to think that I'm going to see the movies I want to see/play the games I want to play, and form my own opinions; to not let reviews decide things for me, etc... but on the flip side of that, when you're asking me to pay $70 for a game, and there are so many games coming out, well... I guess I'm going to at least be open to hearing what the reviews have to say.
And everything I've heard about Wolverine this past week has killed my interest in the game. At least at the $70 launch price point. I still do want to play it someday, but now only after a pretty noticeable discount (and if I'm lucky, a handful of patches to tweak some of the biggest criticisms).
It's odd to think that a 78-80 Metacritic score would create such a shockwave through the industry; a lot of games would be perfectly content with that average. But for a AAA, blockbuster title from one of Sony's most successful studios, following up two incredible Spider-man games... suddenly a high-70s score starts to look more like... not a disaster, really, but just a big, big disappointment.
Comments (6)
I've stopped paying attention to *critic* reviews entirely. After seeing so many games with mid-to-high critic reviews, mid or terrible player reviews, and my own gameplay experience being "why the hell did I spend money on this?!", I don't trust critics to actually know what the hell they're talking about anymore. Player reviews are wildly more reliable, imo. Brilliant example of that was Homeworld 3, actually. 75 for critic reviews on Metacritic... and then a 3.0 player review and "mixed" to "mostly negative" (depending on timeframe) for Steam.
Tims Reviews are usually quite on point for me. But mainly because of similar likes for specific movie/gaming genres.
I mean, the mixed reviews are from publications I haven’t heard of b4. And others that I generally would ignore (IGN, ComicBook, GameSpot). Besides I tend to ignore metacritic as my experience will differ from others.
Sure, you can probably hear any worldview you want if you say "these voices don't count," right? But even the positive reviews mention some of the same things: Very little room to grow in combat/playstyle. The same moves you're using at the start of the game are the same ones you're still using after 15 hours. Repetitive. Super linear, hand-holdy game design. Nothing wrong with a linear game, but yellow paint everywhere, plus fart gas, plus dialogue prompts etc just toddler-walks the player between enemy fight arenas. Some of these points crop up over and over across discussion, and paint a picture of what gameplay is like regardless of whether the reviewer enjoyed the experience. And then I can think about things I like in a game, and decide if these problems are going to bother me or not, and make a decision about when to purchase the game.
That’s the issue with these notations. People are overrating everything they like, so is the press. So, a low 80 does means "meh". The scale seems strange when you look at it vanilla. But if you figure that the scales starts at 50 (being the worst game ever) to 100 (or even starting at 60 when it comes from a big studio, because the journalists don’t want to antagonize them), then you look at this 78 and think : "oh, yeah, it’s not very appealing to people"
The scale is, at best, going to be a general reference. But there's no way to really aggregate review scores when the scoring criteria/system varies so wildly between every outlet. One play rates a game an 8 out of 10, and another rates it 43 out of 47 apples, and we're supposed to reconcile those opinions? I think the best you can do with reviews is try to get a sense of the game underneath the reviewer's personal experience, and try to map that to your own sensibilities. But games are similar to movies in this regard: If a studio makes a sequel to a billion dollar movie, but it only rakes in half that, it's a flop, despite the fact that 500 million still sounds like a crazy good amount of money. Insomniac made 2 high-80s/low-90s Spider-Man games, so a Wolverine game expected to hit those same highs is now "a flop" in that context.