It's here. Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine launches today on PS5, and it brings the rarest thing in superhero gaming: an M rating it actually earns. Blood, claws through faces, the whole violent package. Superhero Hype has the rundown, and the short version is critics are mostly on board.

I was a little nervous for this one, I'll admit. When the early review scores surfaced last week they looked shakier than we're used to from the Insomniac of Spider-Man and Ratchet fame. But the fuller picture as launch day arrived is a lot kinder, with reviewers praising the combat in particular. And that tracks with everything we'd seen. Wolverine is a character who's been waiting decades for a game where the violence actually matches the fantasy. You're not playing a polite brawler here. You're playing a guy with knives for hands who heals from everything, and the game finally commits to what that means.

The M rating matters more than it sounds like it would. Marvel spent years treating its games like merchandise, squeaky-clean and safe for every demographic at once. Letting Insomniac make a genuinely bloody Wolverine game is the same instinct that gave us the Daredevil-style street-level swings in recent Marvel projects: trust the creators, pick the right fit, step back. Insomniac earned that trust twice over with Spider-Man.

What I keep hearing from early players is that the combat is the star, aggressive and punishing, built around Logan's healing factor letting you play reckless in a way most action games never allow. If you spent any time in the 2000s X-Men games mashing buttons as a Wolverine who felt weightless, that's a small miracle. The character has been in a lot of games. This is maybe the second one that feels like him.

For the co-op and multiplayer crowd, this one's strictly solo, and that's fine. Not everything needs a raid group. And I say that as someone who lives in raid groups. Some stories are about one grumpy Canadian alone in a bar, and that's a story best told single-player.

If you're picking it up today, drop your first impressions in the comments. I want to know if the combat lives up to the hype once you're a few hours in, or if the reviews are being generous with an old favorite. My backlog says wait for a sale. My heart, which has loved this character since the Saturday morning cartoon, says download it immediately. My heart usually wins these.