PlayStation and Insomniac Games just dropped a new cinematic trailer for Marvel's Wolverine, and it puts Lady Deathstrike front and center for the first time. The roughly 90-second teaser goes by "Ain't No Hero," and it lands with the PS5 launch, which is just two months out (September 15th).
For a game that was announced all the way back in 2021 and then spent years off the radar, the finish line is suddenly VERY close.
There's no gameplay this time. It's a cinematic trailer built around who this version of Logan is: a man with a violent past that keeps showing up with claws, ready to fight. He spends most of the 90 seconds getting beaten, stabbed, and thrown around, which is a bold way to sell your lead character two months before launch. The whole thing closes on the mission statement: "I ain't no hero. I'm Wolverine."
Lady Deathstrike is the star of the show. She leads a squad of red-clad ninjas against Logan and does plenty of the damage herself, carving into him with adamantium talons of her own. For gameplay, that detail is the whole ballgame. Every enemy Insomniac has shown us so far, Logan could out-heal. Deathstrike brings metal that cuts as deep as his does, and that gives this game a villain who can make the health bar mean something!
In the comic books, Yuriko Oyama is a cyborg rather than a mutant, with adamantium bonded to her skeleton and a grudge that couldn't be more personal: her father developed the adamantium-bonding process that was later used on Logan. Insomniac has said all along that this is its own spin on the mythology, so some of that history may get remixed, but the claws-versus-claws matchup is clearly intact.
This is the same matchup that gave us one of the best fights in the entire X-Men film franchise. Kelly Hu's Deathstrike pushed Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to his absolute limit in 2003's X2. That brawl only ended when Logan pumped her full of liquid adamantium. The bar for this boss fight is set high!
The other familiar face in the trailer is Sabretooth, and the footage has it both ways: Victor Creed fights alongside Logan in some shots and trades blows with him in others. That fits the history Insomniac is drawing from. Creative director Marcus Smith has described the game as "our own unique take on the world," one where Logan "has been around for a while" and ran with the black-ops outfit Team X. In the comics, Team X was the covert strike team that had Logan and Creed running missions side by side back in their Weapon X days, and those stories rarely end with the two of them still friends. Anyone who knows this pair can guess where that partnership is headed.
Don't expect the X-Men to bail him out, either. This story is set in a modern world where mutants are still mostly hidden, and game director Mike Daly has said that "making sure that the story was fully and deeply about Wolverine was the top thing" for the team.
If you missed the extended gameplay reveal at June's State of Play, that showing already had Logan shredding through the Reavers, with Mystique, Omega Red, and a mutant-hunting Sentinel all confirmed, plus a globe-hopping itinerary that runs from Canada to Tokyo to Madripoor. The red-ninja ambush in this new cinematic sure looks like our first taste of that Japan chapter.
Marvel's Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 were all monster sellers for Sony, but they were built for everyone. Wolverine goes darker and a LOT bloodier, and it's the studio's first real test outside the Spidey sandbox. If the roadmap from that infamous 2023 Insomniac leak still holds, this is the first of three planned X-Men games.
The rundown:
- Marvel's Wolverine launches exclusively on PS5 later this year, on September 15th
- Pre-orders are live now, with both digital and physical disc versions
- The Digital Deluxe Edition runs $79.99 with exclusive suits, claws, and extra technique points
- Liam McIntyre (Spartacus) voices James "Logan" Howlett
As a HUGE fan of the 4-player X-Men arcade game in the 90s (we used to drive out to the Gateway Mall in Eugene every weekend and hang out at the arcade for an hour or two before AND after the movies), I'm SUPER excited for this. It reminds me of Batman: Arkham Asylum, but on steroids with adamantium claws! I can't wait!
Are you guys grabbing this day one, or waiting on the reviews? Who's going to get the claws on your first playthrough: Deathstrike, Creed, or Omega Red?
Sound off in the comments below!
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