This feels like another journalist or person who either wasn’t paying attention, or simply didn’t understand the characterisations and story within Marvel’s Wolverine. Carlos writes about Essex: “There’s no coherent development between his ‘I want to save mutantkind’ and ‘I will kill everyone on Earth’ mindsets.” That first part was never true. This isn’t a good guy turns bad arc, as the article implies. Essex’s virtuous act was a manipulative ruse from the beginning, as the game slowly reveals. He never wanted to save mutantkind. He always intended to steal mutant powers, just as he took his wife’s, which is how he gained his initial abilities (and why he isn’t even a mutant). He simply needed a team to help him obtain those powers and to remove anyone standing in his way. That is why he manipulated them. It is also revealed that Essex was the one who damaged Logan’s mind and memories, tearing him away from a good, wholesome life, so he could exploit him. All of this is explained in the game. How people missed it is beyond me. The IGN writer also adds: “The beginning of the conflict between Logan and Essex also falls flat because it’s largely predicated on Essex being ‘too violent’ in his methods before he turns into an omnicidal maniac at the very end. There’s a pivotal scene where Essex tortures Trask telekinetically despite Logan’s protests, so Logan mercy-kills Trask to stop his suffering. This distinction in the degrees of violence feels arbitrary when Logan spends the whole game shredding hundreds if not thousands of people with his claws.” Again, this misses important context and nuance. Logan is hyper-violent, but in the game he never takes joy in slowly and painfully torturing an enemy, especially not one who is already captured and defeated. Comparing Essex slowly mutilating and contorting an already helpless, captured scientist limb by limb, with Logan quickly dispatching enemies who are trying to kill him, is utterly absurd. The discrepancies in the article continue. At this point it feels as if some people are simply looking for reasons to criticise, even when those criticisms lack credibility or merit.

Have fun playing a less than mediocre Wolverine game.