Wolverine's reveal trailer has a gore problem

Insomniac's Wolverine got a lengthy gameplay reveal at PlayStation's State of Play, and it is extremely bloody. Kotaku's critic — self-described gore enthusiast, Braindead devotee, Cronenberg fan — came away deflated, and lays out exactly why.

The second kill, barely a minute in, is where it starts to fall apart. One guard gets stabbed through the shoulders, another is lifted on Logan's claws through her stomach and then skewered through the side of her face, drenching him in blood — and that pace doesn't let up for the next six minutes. The issue isn't the violence itself; it's that none of it feels earned. The best gore in cinema — Cronenberg's The Fly, the lawnmower scene in Braindead — lands because it's the payoff of emotional groundwork laid beforehand. The Wolverine trailer skips that entirely, opening on brutality and repeating it until the shock dissolves into numbness.

Wolverine as a character has genuine tragedy baked in — the Weapon X program, centuries of suffering, violence as psychological scar tissue. That's rich material. But the trailer doesn't use any of it to frame what we're watching. The kills just happen, one after another, without the human context that would make them mean something.

This isn't a complaint about Insomniac making a dark game — it's a complaint about craft. Gore without narrative weight isn't disturbing or cathartic; it's just loud. The full game could still deliver on the character's depth, but the reveal didn't make that case.