Marvel’s Wolverine Reviews Are In, and It’s the ‘Fart Gas’ Scent Trail Stealing the Spotlight
Marvel’s Wolverine’s review embargo lifted on September 10, and five days before the PS5 exclusive hits shelves on September 15, the numbers are in: a solid but unspectacular 78 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic from over a hundred reviews. What’s actually dominating the conversation online, though, isn’t the score. It’s a glowing blue scent trail that follows Logan around the screen, a mechanic critics and players have taken to calling “fart gas.”
What Is the “Fart Gas” Scent Trail?
The nickname comes from Washington Post games writer Gene Park, who used it to describe the blue particle effect trailing behind Wolverine whenever the game wants to point him toward something. YouTuber Skill Up picked up the term in his review, calling out the trail as one of four separate layers of on-screen guidance in Marvel’s Wolverine, alongside a waypoint marker, glowing vines pointing at nearby collectibles, and environmental lighting cues. His argument, echoed across a chunk of the early reviews, is that stacking all four at once undercuts a game that’s supposed to be about a gritty, self-reliant mutant tracker.
Marvel’s Wolverine combat gameplay
There is currently no setting to turn the scent trail off, and several outlets have reported that disabling it could actually break certain mission logic, since some sequences are built around following it.
Insomniac’s Community Director Responds
With the discourse picking up steam, James Stevenson, Insomniac’s director of community and marketing, addressed it directly on X on September 11. “The scent trail isn’t always on. It represents Logan’s canon mutant super senses,” he wrote, explaining that the effect only appears when Logan is actively tracking a specific scent or sound, whether that’s a person, a clue tied to a story mission, or a nearby collectible, rather than running constantly as a generic waypoint.
Not Insomniac’s First Run-In With Wolverine Backlash
This isn’t the first time Stevenson has had to publicly wade into criticism of the game. Back in August, after a press hands-on preview event, clips comparing one of the game’s Sentinel boss fights to dated, early 2000s design went viral and racked up millions of views. Responding to that separate wave of criticism, Stevenson wrote that “it’s a relentless onslaught that I cannot believe is good for anyone’s mental health,” a comment aimed at how social media algorithms amplify negative reactions rather than a defense of any specific mechanic.
How the Reviews Are Shaping Up Otherwise
Outside of the scent trail discourse, the review consensus so far is fairly consistent: praise for Logan’s characterization, voice performance, and genuinely brutal combat, set against criticism of repetitive fight encounters, a predictable story, and design that leans harder into hand-holding than Insomniac’s Spider-Man games ever did. It’s a more mixed reception than Insomniac’s last two blockbusters, though far from a disaster, and we already covered everything else worth knowing before launch when the game went gold last month.
Release Details
- Release date: September 15, 2026 (reviews are live, but the game itself isn’t out yet)
- Platform: PlayStation 5 exclusive, PS5 Pro enhanced
- Editions: Standard Edition ($69.99) and Digital Deluxe Edition ($79.99)
- Current scores: 78 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic, based on over 100 reviews (subject to change as more come in)
Whether the scent trail ages into a forgotten launch-week joke or becomes the thing everyone still brings up a year from now probably depends on how the rest of Marvel’s Wolverine holds up once players get their hands on it. For now, it’s Logan’s claws sharing the spotlight with, of all things, his nose.
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Picture Source: PlayStation
