Luckily, we have video games. For all its flaws, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine didn’t care about the squeaky-clean image the films were trying to manicure. It let Wolverine off his leash, uncollared him, and let him run rampant through the scattered forces of Col. Stryker’s disbanded Team X. Taking inspiration (apparently) from the likes of Devil May Cry and God of War, the game is effectively a series of rooms with people in that you could butcher. That’s it. Yes, it was repetitive, and yes, it was braindead – but hey; that’s what pulpy games are for, right? At least it was leagues ahead of, say, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. There’s an element of ‘guilty pleasure’ to it – booting up the game to rinse/repeat the same fight in a slightly different room, again. But hearing Hugh Jackman’s specifically-recorded voice lines, listening to that satisfying snikt as combat ramps up and your claws come flying out, and lunging at an enemy before rending them limb-from-limb? No other game has come close to capturing that Wolverine dream quite so perfectly. And a lot of that comes down to how well developer Raven Software (later condemned to the Call of Duty salt mines) balanced the three key tenets of Wolverine’s power: his rage, his claws, and his healing factor. That last one, in particular, is what made the game so memorable: watching Logan get eaten up by a railgun or something, only for his flesh to slowly crawl back over that adamantium frame… that’s action game catnip, right there. Knowing you can push yourself to the brink of death in a violent haze, then watch as your body rebuilds itself cell-by-cell – it’s a fantastic ability to have in an action game, and realised so well in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. When you need a minute to palm the congealing blood off your washboard abs and take a breath, you get to drink in the gorgeous cutscenes that were put together by Blur Studio (the animation artisans that have since done the cinematics for Halo Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Valorant, and Modern Warfare 2019). If you still had a foul taste in your mouth from the movie this licensed game was – tenuously – tied to, you could just focus on these cutscenes and pretend it never happened. The game was leagues ahead of that tripe, and that’s probably why I’m remembering the game so fondly some 13 years later, if I’m being perfectly honest. And X-Men Origins: Wolverine wasn’t just a series of events strung together for X-Men nerds, either – the game even had knowing nods to other cult properties of the time. As any ardent achievement hunter will tell you, there were rewards hidden in the game for players that found references to the Lich King’s sword from World of Warcraft, the cake from Portal, or a hatch that bore a striking resemblance to the mysterious bunker on the island in Lost. What these actually have to do with Wolverine is anyone’s guess, but the more creative amongst you might be able to knit some bullshit multiverse theory together about how GLaDOS and John Locke teamed up to help Wolverine get his healing factor back after it was stolen by the Scourge. Or something. Sadly, if you do want to play this game today – in the year of our lord, 2022 – you’ll need to either own a copy of it physically or go about your business in more underhanded ways. Back in 2014, following the expiration of Activision’s licensing deal with Marvel, the game was delisted and removed from all digital storefronts. That means you cannot buy it digitally any more, you cannot download it and play it via backwards compatibility on Xbox consoles, and you cannot get it on Steam. A quick Google shows that you can at least nab the game for about £8 in CEX, though. But that means you’d have to go to a CEX, and nobody wants that. Until we get to see whatever Spider-Man botherer Insomniac Games is up to with its mysterious Wolverine project, we’re just going to have to live with X-Men Origins: Wolverine as the best game to boot up if you want to have a little adamantium-powered tantrum in video game form. It may have egregious platforming sections, it may have some real stinkers when it comes to boss fights, and it may love the QTE a little too much, but X-Men Origins: Wolverine remains one of the purest expressions of the character we have outside the comics – and I, for one, will never get bored of that.
