Review by: Brandon "Beserker" Cackowski-Schnell

Remember that time in the Wolverine comics when he picked that dude up and then tore him in half right before he lunged to that next dude and stuck his claws through the guy's face? Yeah, me neither, but that doesn't mean you can't do it in Wolvie's latest videogame. You can do that as well as impale people on tree limbs and stumps, chuck people off of ledges, slice arms and legs off, puncture groins and my personal favorite, throw four-armed ninja ladies into cement mixers. Yeah, that sentence doesn't make any sense to me either and I did the throwing.

As you can probably tell, this isn’t your father's Wolverine game. Gone are the bloodless kills from the various digital incarnations of He Who Is The Best At What He Does, replaced with a bloody, action packed romp through waves and waves of soldiers, mutants and giant beasties. It's obvious that the folks at Raven enjoyed the God of War series, because Wolverine plays very similarly to Sony's action franchise. To a certain degree it makes sense. Kratos is a bare-chested Spartan with blades permanently attached to his forearms and Wolverine is a bare-chested Canadian with blades permanently attached to his forearms. Plus, if you're going to model your action game after something, God of War is a heck of a place to start.

To do his dirty deeds, Wolverine has a full arsenal of light slashes, heavy attacks, airborne attacks, grabs and combinations of all of those things to dish out plenty of damage. Along with these moves, he has a quick kill move which allows him to grab enemies and then dismember them in all sorts of gruesome ways, provided the player presses the right button at the right time. It's not quite a quick time event, but timing is important. Wolvie also has a lunge attack, one of the most fun attacks in the game where the player can target an enemy with the right bumper and as long as Wolvie is in range, with a press of the left bumper Wolvie will fly across the screen and impale his opponent. The game uses the lunge attack in various forms, both as a means to quickly get out of the way of danger and attack enemies, as well as flying across great divides and jumping from vehicle to vehicle. Apparently Wolverine can only jump across a chasm if he intends on impaling someone.

In addition to all of these attacks, Wolverine has Fury Attacks. Every time Wolverine kills someone, or breaks open items in the environment he'll collect rage. Get the rage meter high enough and Wolverine can pull off one of four Fury Attacks. Whether it's simply flipping on his berserker rage, or spinning around like a cross between a child's top and a weed-whacker, the Fury Attacks are great for when Wolverine gets overwhelmed with enemies, a common occurrence.