Video footage in this review was recorded on a Base PS5, in Performance Mode.
Releasing next week on September 15th, Marvel’s Wolverine is a narrative heavy single player action game made by Insomniac, the studio behind the PlayStation published Spider-Man games.
Considerably more linear and a lot more violent than the studio’s prior super hero adventures, Wolverine was an absolute blast to play through over the past few weeks. I probably do prefer the open world sandbox nature of Spider-Man, but I was surprised both by the amount of emotional heart to the story being told in Wolverine, and in the degree of creativity on show in the game’s combat mechanic design.
Wolverine is a first party published PlayStation title, and as such I came into the game with pretty high hopes for its potential level of accessibility. Having now completed my first playthrough of the game, I can confirm that Wolverine takes noticeable steps toward improving the accessibility seen in prior Insomniac titles. It’s got some minor issues here and there, but on the whole Wolverine is doing a lot to match the high bar set by other PlayStation published titles this console generation.
When first booting up Wolverine the game features screen reader support active by default, to ensure sightless or low vision blind players can navigate the game’s menus.
I will lightly skim over sightless blind player accessibility in this review, but if you want a more in depth discussion of the topic from someone with personal lived experience gaming with zero vision, I’ve uploaded a nearly 1 hour long episode of Ctrl, Alt, Access to this YouTube channel where I discuss Wolverine’s playability for zero vision players with accessibility consultant SightlessKombat. I’ll also be linking to his review of the game in the video description.
The short version – SightlessKombat found that the majority of Wolverine was playable without requiring sighted assistance. There were a couple of issues experienced in the review build such as points where Navigation Assist attempted to take the player the wrong way, but generally he found that the game’s assist features were sufficient to largely play unassisted.
Wolverine features Screen Reader support which can be increased in speed up to 400%, but when sped up it does appear to become a little artifacted. This reads out menu UI Text, but also things like button labels during Quick Time Events. Players can also reduce the “Verbosity” of text to speech, skipping information such as numerical position in a menu list in order to allow more quickly navigating via audio. Options also exist to change whether text to speech repeats, and how long that takes to happen.
With Navigation Assist active players can click in the R3 stick to be pointed toward game progression and enemies in combat, with options to swap between being pointed at gameplay objectives or collectables and interactables. Unfortunately this lacks the functionality seen in The Last of Us: Part 2, where an audio cue would alert the player when they needed to reorient direction again after walking forward post orientation, meaning that sightless blind players will need to pretty regularly mash the Navigation Assist prompt to not overshoot during travel.
Traversal Assist automates actions such as climbing ledges, jumping over gaps, and moving between other traversal elements.
Certain in-game puzzles, such as deciphering keypad code entry orders, can be solved using haptic feedback rather than visual information.
Accessibility audio cues are available which can alert the player to things such as the start and end of cutscenes, with a glossary available to assist players in learning the meaning of the cues.
Audio Descriptions are also available, describing cutscene visuals to players. While these are first and foremost designed for sightless or low vision players, I personally found them really useful as an autistic player in helping to confirm the intention of non verbal subtext during certain scenes.
One area of improvement seen in Marvel’s Wolverine compared to past PlayStation attempts at audio descriptions is that, in a number of instances, Wolverine features audio descriptions in moments that I wouldn’t consider traditional Capital C Cutscenes.
I’ve been advocating for a while that we should be including Audio Descriptions in games in moments where player position and action are known, but may not be traditional full length cutscenes. I do think that examples like this are a noticeable step forward, even if I would like to see their use increase going forward.
I did experience a few issues with some of the above mentioned features when playing the review build of Wolverine, such as areas where navigation assist pointed me away from progression, areas where navigation assist failed to activate, and areas where text to speech failed such as failing to read button prompts correctly or failing to correctly read all necessary text during tutorials. I flagged these issues to PlayStation during the review period, they were sent to the development team, and I have been told they will be fixed as part of the game’s day one patch. These issues should not impact you if you update the game to the latest firmware before playing, but may cause issues if you for some reason play a disc copy of the game offline.
Go check out the new episode of Ctrl, Alt, Access linked in the video description if you’re interested in a more comprehensive deep dive in sightless player accessibility in Wolverine, and do make sure to check out SightlessKombat’s review, also linked in the description.
Beyond screen reader support being automatically active on first boot, Wolverine also features an accessibility setup flow on first boot of the game.
At an initial setup screen players can select one of five difficulty levels. As a side note, I love that the easier difficulties still have strong sounding names like The Man and The Hunter. The player can then change a number of “popular settings”, calibrate their image and audio, turn on subtitles, customise accessibility presets, or view all settings.
While the initial setup screen only shows 5 difficulty options, in the main Gameplay settings menu players can customise their difficulty further by setting Enemy Health, Enemy Damage, and Enemy Stealth Awareness difficulties separately from each other.
Popular settings includes activating lock-on and deciding its degree of automation, altering blood and dismemberment levels, altering degrees of vibration (experiential vs functional and focused on gameplay cues), turn on chase assist (to slow down characters during chase scenes), turn off motion blur and film grain for vision comfort, and alter UI text size.
In audio calibration players can turn on mono audio, as well as activate “midnight mode” to reduce the dynamic range of volumes. Midnight mode is incredibly helpful for me as an autistic player to help prevent sudden spikes in volume unexpectedly, and Mono Audio is useful for me as someone who experiences intermittent hearing issues on one side, causing me to experience one sided bouts of herting loss.
Wolverine features accessibility presets for Hearing, Motion Sensitivity, Motor, and Vision disabilities, as well as a preset for the level of violence found in game. I really appreciate that Wolverine follows in the footsteps of God of War Ragnarok by offering each preset in a partial and full variant, making it easier to quickly get closer to the level of accessibility support likely to be helpful for your specific needs.
Jumping forward to the main accessibility menu, players are presented with an honestly pretty overwhelming number of potential accessibility options to customise.
Dodge and Parry input timing can be increased (super helpful for me as a player with a coordination disability), and Dodge Mode can be altered to reduce inputs needed – players can for example hold the button to continuously dodge roll, or tap once to roll until toggled off.
Game speed can be altered, with general game speed able to be altered separately from game speed during combat.
QTEs can be set to auto complete, with repeated button mashing sequences able to be set to button holds, and UI button holds able to be instead set to toggles.
Character sprinting can be altered – set to run automatically at all time, toggle on and off, or toggle on and cease when the character stops moving.
Special Techniques can be set to a toggle rather than requiring a button hold, and melee combat can be set so that mashing a single button executes a combo, or tapping a button toggles on continuous combos.
For motion sickness prone players like myself, and otherwise motion sensitive players, Wolverine has options to reduce full screen visual effects, remove film grain, reduce chromatic aberration and depth of field, alter look sensitivity, and reduce camera shake. Camera Follow and Camera Combat Rotation Assist can both be disabled if automated camera movements outside player control are a known motion sickness trigger, but there are certain cinematic sequences where you will still lack manual camera control as the player.
While there are debates regarding its level of usefulness for motion sickness, Wolverine does support having a centre screen dot reticle as well.
As someone who often struggles to pick out dialogue in cluttered scenes due to an audio processing disability, I appreciate that Wolverine offers Voice Boost as an option, but I unfortunately found it pretty unhelpful in practice. I believe the issue is that while the setting did boost the volume of audio, there were specific characters whose dialogue was by default mumbly and low pitched, making it hard to pick out from other audio. I found I needed to go to the audio settings and turn down all non dialogue sliders, turn on midnight mode, and even then I still found myself at times needing Subtitles to be certain what a character had said.
For players with reduced vision, or who like myself have ADHD and struggle to focus, there’s a number of useful visual assist features in Wolverine such as options to increase icon and button prompt sizes, alter colours for types of incoming threat, increase subtitle size and add a background behind them, add speaker names and directional indicators, and add options for non dialogue captions.
Wolverine also offers High Contrast Mode support, the execution of which is pretty great overall.
Players can choose between high contrast outlines vs full block colour high contrast, how opaque full shading should be, and whether or not to greyscale the world when high contrast is active. All colours can be customised from a palette, with high contrast outlines able to be customised with regards to things like line thickness.
The main issue I had with the execution of high contrast mode in Wolverine is that the mode unfortunately didn’t function during cutscenes, compared to something like The Last of Us: Part 2. It also turns off by default during some cinematic finishing moves.
Additionally in certain boss fight encounters thrown projectiles were not highlighted by high contrast mode, making them more difficult to see and accurately react to. This issue extended to motorcycle chase sequences, where oncoming vehicles were not high contrast highlighted. Technically thrown slabs of rock and other drivers are not “enemies”, but they still need high contrast highlighting in my opinion for a smooth gameplay experience.
In the main audio menu, players can cut particularly high or low frequencies out of the audio mix, to avoid sounds such as high pitched tinnitus ringing effects after explosions.
Lastly, players can select from a list of different accessibility settings to set as toggles on the four directions of their D-Pad, able to be switched on and off without needing to navigate through the pause menu. While I am thankful this option exists, I found its execution somewhat lacking. Wolverine doesn’t let you map any setting you like to the D-Pad, only a pre-selected list of options. I’m glad that Game Speed and High Contrast can be toggled this way, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t toggle Screen Reader on and off using the D-Pad, with the only option being one where pressing a button prompts the screen reader to read out the player’s current UI information such as health.
I would in an ideal world love to be able to map Subtitles to one of these D-Pad direction buttons, so that I could switch them on when a character I am struggling to hear is speaking, then back off during speech from louder and more enunciated characters.
Moving past the settings menu into gameplay itself, one of the core mechanics that stood out to me from an accessibility perspective was Wolverine’s “Last Stand” mechanic. If you run out of health and currently have at least one bar full on your rage meter, you can get back up and have your health restored to full. This will consume ALL your available rage meter, meaning you will need to survive a little while before you can activate Last Stand again. Having high rage is worthwhile, it improves your combat ability and allows you to do cool instant finishers on enemies, but acts as a nice safety net so you can feel as unkillable as Wolverine should narratively feel as a character.
Wolverine unfortunately lacks in game button remapping support, which I found a little frustrating initially as I wanted to swap where sprint and navigation assist were laid out on my setup. You can obviously use system level button remapping instead, but as this won’t be reflected by in game button prompts it can get pretty confusing.
One initial accessibility hurdle I experienced in Wolverine, around the time I reached the game’s first boss fight, was getting used to the fact that both parries and dodges are necessary to make progress in some fights, with parries needed to increase stagger on bosses, and dodges to avoid impossible to parry attacks. While there are good visual cues to explain which of these attack types is which, in practice there was a bit of a cognitive processing and motor reaction hurdle spike that took me a little time to adjust to.
While there are some enemies later in the game which can impale the player, reducing their maximum health, this is balanced by the player being able to use the impaled metal to get a free one hit kill on a standard enemy, regaining the lost maximum health in the process. While I initially worried this would be an accessibility barrier, it balanced itself out well in practice.
At some points during its story Wolverine makes use of essentially High Contrast Mode as a narrative and mechanical tool to emphasise ferality in the story. It may have a little less narrative impact for players already playing in high contrast mode, but it is interesting finding a way to introduce this accessibility setting to a broad range of players, and demonstrate how much easier it can make seeing where enemies are in combat.
Overall, I’m really pretty impressed with the accessibility support seen in Marvel’s Wolverine on PS5. There are definitely little critiques here and there, but broadly I’m really pleased with the execution here by Insomniac. I was able to avoid feeling motion sick at any point while playing, Audio Descriptions were great for following subtle subtext in scenes, high contrast outlines helped me to quickly process what I was seeing on screen, and increased parry windows meant I was able to play a lot more aggressively that I might otherwise have been able to with a coordination disability.
Sharing some of my broad opinions on the game, Wolverine feels in many ways closer to the modern God of War games than Spider-Man, just due to its more linear nature and narrative pacing. There is something definitely lost in the move away from Spider-Man’s super satisfying open world design, but in its place there is a super satisfying single player adventure with non stop momentum throughout.
The narrative genuinely works fantastically as an unofficial sequel to the recent movie Spider-Man Brand New Day, and offers I suspect a strong look into where the MCU is likely going as a result of Peter Parker’s actions. They’re obviously not set in the same continuity, but this game’s release feels very apt given its proximity to that film.
Much like Saros, Wolverine does feel like it was designed for the PS5 Pro as its lead format, and ported down to the base console. There were a number of moments where on the base PS5 the game struggled a little in performance mode to hold a stable 60 FPS. It wasn’t common, but it was definitely noticeable when the framerate occasionally dipped for a moment.
There are some little additional features and options fixes I would love to see, but broadly speaking Marvel’s Wolverine does a pretty rock solid job improving accessibility compared to Insomniac’s prior games, and continues to assert PlayStation as one of the most dependably reliable publishers out there when it comes to consistent top end accessibility support.