Players are unhappy that Marvel's Wolverine is a movie – the game plays scenes for you

Calling out "the game plays itself" is one of the oldest and easiest tricks in game criticism. Cut a twenty second clip of a flashy finisher where the camera swoops around the hero while the player isn't touching the sticks, and the verdict is in. The problem is that half the industry falls under this standard if you look hard enough, including titles the same critics hold up as the gold standard.

But some games really do this. And this time it's the newly released Marvel's Wolverine taking the heat.

In Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the combat system built on a mix of dodges, parries, and gadgets, where flashy finishing moves served as a visual exclamation point rather than a substitute for gameplay. With Logan the challenge gets harder: claws, dismemberment, and animalistic rage call for brutal staging, but every Sony game has moments like this. Hit the right button at the right time and the scene keeps going.

Classic gameplay, except:

In the clip above, you don't have to press anything during the QTE sequence, and it just keeps playing itself.

Why even play if you can just watch a movie?

I've got a question for the developers – how did they manage to miss this after all the playtests, reviews, and internal QA?

The real question isn't whether a game has cinematic sequences, but how much of that time the player actually spends holding a controller making decisions. Uncharted 2 built an entire genre around set-piece moments back in 2009, and God of War 2018 learned how to hide its cuts inside a continuous shot, and both games still get held up as examples to follow.

Marvel's Wolverine shouldn't be judged on a single clip, but this complaint about Sony studio games comes up way too often. It seems like this issue was long overdue for a fix.