The best thing about good-looking, regenerating near-immortals is the amount of punishment you can inflict on them out of impotent jealousy. Luckily, Wolverine was born to soak up all the pain you’ve got, and it’s fair to say that Logan spends a good proportion of the game with his gutcage blown open. It’s a savage game; the only thing more violent that the damage inflicted on Wolverine is the rapid and nonchalant dismemberment of everyone he comes into contact with. Mature’s one word for it: absurd and childish are other, more accurate words. But it’s a brilliant kind of ridiculous nonsense that’ll occasionally pull reluctant cheers out of your grown-up neck.

Wolverine is a straightforward action-brawling platformer with a bunch of pressure-plate puzzles thrown in, and it manages to tackle everything it does very well. In terms of combat, it makes no bones about aping the genre leaders. And when you die in this game, it’ll generally be from having your health corroded by a daft accumulation of crossfire, rather than one unit outwitting you. So the first thing you’ll learn, in the endless waves of enemies that attack you, is to close with the lunge attack. This gets you to the enemy without having to jog through a bullet storm.

Once there, there’s juuust enough variety in Wolverine’s attacks (and the enemy’s counters) to stop you feeling like an button-mashing automaton — and enough character progress and development to stop you ever getting bored. A combination of set pieces, platforming, and puzzles break up the fatiguingly relentless action, and there are enough hidden secrets to stop you feeling like you’re in too narrow a corridor. Wolverine isn’t immune from the pressures of time that go with a movie tie-in, as we’ll mention later, but Raven deserve a gentle ripple of applause for aiming so far above the profitable insult that was Iron Man.

Occasionally, you’ll wish the game trusted you more. Take the riot-shielded metal-fisted Goliath soldiers, who turn up half-way through the game. They seem pretty formidable, and part of the fun should be working out how to kill them. Except you don’t get to — tutorial text pops up. Attack out of a dodge, it tells you, like an annoying child who’s seen this movie before. Suddenly, the Goliaths are nothing more than “the ones you attack from a dodge roll, then lunge onto.” The same goes for the Leviathan and the W.E.N.D.I.G.O. mini-bosses — both respond to exactly the same tactic of dodge-lunge-attack-retreat, and both take slightly too long to kill to be entertaining, especially the tenth time around. The battle against four W.E.N.D.I.G.O. prototypes at Alkali Lake has to be some kind of dumb record in the field of re-using former bosses.

There are plenty of minor niggles you can level at Wolverine — the occasionally iffy platform detection, Wolverine’s repeated quips during boss battles, the aching repetition of certain types of enemies, and the feeling that sheer number of enemies is being used as a substitute for difficulty in beating them. But they don’t come close to undoing the moments when you laugh out loud at the audacious, overstated nonsense that punctuates your progress. Leaping onto a helicopter, hooking out the pilot and decapitating him with his own blades? Brilliant. Lunging from truck to truck to escape a flooding tunnel? Awesome. Crawling around ventilation shafts? Well, nothing’s perfect.

Once you approach the end of the game, however, it begins to feel like Raven might have needed a bit more time to polish it up. After what feels like an epic final battle against the monolithic Sentinel, you’re dropped into an odd bonus boss fight with The Blob before embarking on an equally epic pursuit and battle with Gambit, before loping off to The Island for a triple boss-battle from nowhere. Gambit provided the most distressing moment — out of three attempts to battle him, two ended in game-breaking moments where he simply stopped moving or disappeared.

Wolverine looks great, and deserves recognition as a game that’s far better than it had to be. It’s certainly not perfect, and it doesn’t feel entirely finished, but it’s coherent enough to gloss over the cracks and forgive the glitches. With Wolverine coming up aces and Arkham Asylum looking like it’s going to be even better, we’re not seeing comic book games grow up — but they’re becoming very sophisticated children.

On Xbox 360

+ Looks fantastic.

+ Just enough variety to keep you going.

- Instadeath platforming + reload times = seethe.

? Does it seem like a bit of a rush job toward the end to you too?

8.0