Low Vision / Blind Accessibility Review – Marvel’s Wolverine

Review copy provided by Playstation Spain.

This review contains no spoilers.

As a fan of Insomniac Games’ previous titles, the announcement that they were working on a game about Wolverine was really exciting. This guide about the game’s accessibility features posted months ago and updated a bit later, increased the expectations and interest of lots of players who hoped for these. It has been a long wait, and I am sure you just want to know what features are there, how they work and more importantly, if you will be able to play this game. So as Logan would say “Less jabber, more metal.”. This is my Low Vision / Blind accessibility review for Marvel’s Wolverine.

When we launch Marvel’s Wolverine for the very first time, we’re presented with a message that tells players that the Screen Reader is enabled by default, followed by instructions telling us to press the cross button to turn it off or the circle button to keep it on. This message is read out loud since it’s enabled by default, making everything much easier. This initial message was very helpful, as I struggle a lot with other games during the setup. Now I can read everything from the very first screen through the entire experience, and the clear prompt makes it simple for anyone who wants to disable the Screen Reader.

Before creating a profile, we’re presented with an initial setup that is different from most games. You can enable some accessibility presets that are Hearing, Motion Sensitivity, Motor, Vision, and Violence. Enabling these presets will adjust a variety of settings related to that category. You can access the Accessibility Menu that contains most features, access popular settings, or view All Settings—which is the one I recommend, because features like difficulty levels, separate audio volume sliders, etc., are not present in the accessibility menu. With that said, I decided to go directly to the all Settings and talk about all those that can be useful for vision present in each traditional category.

In Gameplay, we have a bunch of interesting settings. We can separately adjust Challenge Level, Enemy Health, Enemy Damage, and Enemy Stealth Awareness between five levels. These are named in a very stylish way, all taken from different ways Wolverine has been referred to in the comics. These are The Best There Is, The Man, The Hunter, The Mutant, and The Weapon. The Best There Is being the easiest difficulty, and The Weapon the hardest. We can also set the Dodge / Parry Input Timing to Default or Increased, in case you need more time to perform these combat actions. Then we have the Lock-on feature that can be set to Off, On-Screen (which will lock onto targets that are visible in front of you), and All (which will automatically lock onto any target on or offscreen). Another important option we can Enable or Disable is Chase Assist, which reduces movement speed during chase sequences and gives you more time before targets escape.

Coming up next we have one of my two all-time favorite features: Navigation Assistance. We can enable or disable it and adjust the Navigation Assistance Turn Speed slider. This will make the camera slower or faster when it’s turning towards the objective. When using this feature, a colorful line will move towards the current objective, and we can set its color to one you prefer. The default color is light green.

In this same menu we can Enable or disable the Traversal Assist, which, once enabled, will perform jumps, slides, and climbing automatically when needed. You can also adjust the Global Game Speed to 30, 50, 75, or 100%. Next, we have QTE Auto Completion, which I personally love! This auto-completes quick-time events, which for me is crucial because I cannot see in-game prompts.

Moving on to the Controls section, there is only one setting that I believe is important to mention for Low Vision / Blind players. I am talking about Controller Vibration. We have three modes: Experiential, Functional, and None. Experiential basically causes everything to make the controller vibrate. The one I recommend for visually impaired players is Functional, because it focuses more on combat when getting hit and, more importantly, on finding clues. When looking for clues, the controller vibrates, and personally I find it helpful to know that the controller is vibrating when I’m getting closer, and not just when the ground is shaking or something else happens. Features that allow the player to filter information this way are always welcome.

Under Camera settings, we have a couple of useful settings. We have a slider for Camera Shake to adjust its intensity as you see fit, and an option for enabling or disabling Combat Camera Rotation, which assists you in combat by making sure the enemies you’re hitting are on-screen by adjusting the camera.

Under Audio, we can separately adjust Global, Music, Speech, UI, and Sound Effects volumes. We can Enable or disable Midnight mode and use one option that is always very useful to provide better directional audio: enabling 3D Audio.

Here we can also set the Controller Speaker Mode to Experiential, Functional, or Off. For some, using Functional might be useful because it only plays accessibility sounds, cues, low health warnings, etc. Personally, I always turn off the controller speakers because I never find them useful and prefer using a headset, but if you do like to use it, I recommend the Functional preset. There is also a Voice Boost feature that makes dialogue clearer. An interesting feature is Single Language that matches other languages to the one you’re using to better understand what enemies are trying to do in combat.

Next, we have one of my favorite features: Screen Reader. We can enable or disable it, and adjust its Volume, Speed, and Verbosity. Verbosity is the biggest improvement to the Screen Reader in terms of quality of life. In some games, the Screen Reader reads information in an order or amount that can be too much, or simply a matter of personal preference. This setting allows the player to control how much information is read and how, giving you even more control over your experience and thus making it better. Logan likes to do things in his own way and this feature allows us to do so too. We can set whether or not to repeat what it reads to you, set the Repeat Delay Time, and even set a Repeat Delay Scale up to a maximum of 60 seconds until it repeats something. In most cases, pausing the game and resuming will make it repeat anyways, so you can experiment and see what you prefer.

Then you can set whether to hear enemies’ heartbeats during combat or not. Enable or disable Accessibility Audio Cues and set their volume. The audio cues used in this game are the same as those used in The Last of Us, so if you played it, you’ll be very familiar with these cues already. You can always check the glossary in the pause menu at any time. Another great feature present in Marvel’s Wolverine is Audio Descriptions, which can be turned on or off, and you can also set their volume. I recommend players with limited vision to use this feature because it is incredible. The descriptions are clear, detailed, and provide so much context during cutscenes. It makes a huge difference in the level of immersion.

Last, there are a few frequency settings that can be adjusted, like high and low frequencies, but I don’t think they are very useful for Low Vision but they can help with hearing loss or other sensitivity issues. I just want to mention them in case you don’t like any kind of noise in the game.

Next, on the Subtitles menu, there are many settings to customize them. I personally can’t tell you if they are good enough or not because I cannot read them, but I’ll mention the features. You can enable or disable them and set their size to Standard, Large, or Largest. Set Subtitle Color, Subtitle Speaker Color, Subtitle Background Color, Background Opacity, toggle Subtitle Direction, and change the Direction Indicator Color. We can also enable or disable Captions, and we have the exact same options for Captions as we do for Subtitles.

Under Visuals, we have a lot of settings to mention. We can adjust Brightness and Contrast, which is pretty cool because it shows a full-screen image as an example, making it easier to adjust. Enable or disable Full-Screen Effects, Motion Blur, Film Grain (with a slider), Chromatic Aberration, and Depth of Field. I personally disabled Motion Blur and Vignette Effects. You can also choose if you want to use a Center Dot and select its color and opacity.

In this same menu, we can adjust and choose how outlines, High Contrast Mode, and Senses are shown.

First, we can choose the color for Senses, Senses Threat Color, Parry Threat Color, and Dodge Threat Color. It’s great that we have agency over these colors as every player is different. We can also choose Friendly and Enemy Outlines and adjust their Thickness and Brightness.

Then we can set and configure High Contrast Mode. We have four presets. You can choose one and customize it as you wish. We can set shader colors for Hero, Ally, NPC, Enemy, Basic Enemy, Ranged Enemy, Advanced Enemy, Heavy Enemy, Elite Enemy, Leader Enemy, Boss, Story Critical, Combat Interact, Collectible, and Interaction, and choose the Shader Fill Opacity (which can be changed between Light, Medium, Dark, and Full). And finally, choose whether to use a High Contrast Background, which removes environmental effects and darkens the sky for better contrast. It’s hard to ask for more.

Finally, we can set four Shortcuts. These are actions that we can assign to specific buttons to activate and toggle certain features. Some of the features include Collectibles / Interacts Tracker, Toggle Contrast, Screen Reader Status, Game Speed (30, 50, 75%), using abilities, etc. These shortcuts are very important for a few reasons. First, I love and absolutely need High Contrast Mode, but not all the time. Many games make the mistake of forcing the player to use High Contrast Mode all the time or not at all, and if you are like me and don’t use it all the time, you end up not using it at all. Having to pause a game and go enable a setting every time you need it is simply awful, and this way of turning it on and off with a customizable button press is perfect. Zero interruptions during the game mean more immersion. Also this eliminated the problem of having the Screen Reader reading stuff constantly when you don’t need it. If I want to know my status, a simplepress and I get it. Personally, I use D-Pad Up for Collectibles / Interacts Tracker, Left for reading my current status, and Right to toggle High Contrast Mode.

When starting the game and watching the first cutscene, we immediately notice how good the audio descriptions are. They are very detailed, clear, and provide so much context to what is happening on-screen, especially when describing expressions and little details that are impossible to see with my vision range. Also, the Screen Reader reads locations and times out loud, which is always super helpful to understand when and where the events are taking place. The immersion is immediate and constant, as it should be.

When in control of Logan for the first time, we can see the tutorials working alongside the Screen Reader. Like in Spider-Man games, the game freezes and only continues after performing the right moves. This is my favorite type of tutorial, because it reduces the learning curve a lot. When I cannot read the tutorial messages or read them with the screen magnifier, I tend to press buttons randomly, and sometimes after doing the right thing, I’ll forget how I did it. So, this type of tutorial prevents that from happening.

Unfortunately, not every tutorial message does that. Tutorials like “Press R2 to run” happen in motion, so I recommend having the Screen Reader volume a bit high at least while you’re learning how to play the game, because you won’t be able to hear it during chaotic moments. If you spend too much time in an area, the game assumes you are lost and shows some tutorials again; but once you’re comfortable with the game’s controls, you can always set the tutorials to only show once later or turn them off completely.

A lot of things happen at the beginning of the game (I am being vague to avoid spoilers), and that is excellent when testing accessibility features. The game puts you in combat very early, and here we can test the High Contrast Mode, audio, and visual cues. I must say that I had no issues whatsoever. The High Contrast Mode feature is incredible, as expected from Insomniac Games. This feature was amazing in Spider-Man, and here it’s no different. The Navigation Assistance feature works similarly to The Last of Us franchise: it guides you every 10 meters. It does not work as perfectly as in those two games because this one has more verticality, but it works great, at least for Low Vision.

This initial experience was very promising, and I was getting increasingly excited to keep playing and experience more of this story.

The overall contrast is superb, and when the conditions aren’t ideal, we always have High Contrast Mode to assist. As I’ve mentioned just now, this feature is simply amazing. Not only does it have maximum contrast, but it also gives the player the ability to adjust its colors. It is your experience, and you set your high contrast the way you want! If you want to have elements partially colored, you can do it; if you prefer fully colored, you can do it. You can even set a color for enemy outlines to maximize visibility on top of the colored shaders. This is the type of High Contrast Mode players want and need in their games: no holding back, maximum contrast, maximum visibility. I cannot praise PlayStation and Insomniac Games enough for doing things this way.

To guide us we have four different senses: Normal senses, Threat Senses, Parry, and Dodge. Threat Senses show off-screen incoming attacks. These colors can also be changed as you see fit. I personally use yellow for off-screen incoming attacks, blue for Parry attacks, and red for attacks that can only be dodged. The Normal and Threat attack senses I cannot see, but Parry and Dodge attack senses are very useful during combat. I don’t exactly know why I cannot see those former two senses, but I think it’s because the Parry and Dodge senses are easier to spot because they make enemies glow, and they are right in front of me. There are a lot of other visual effects and cues that are very important in combat, such as weapon lasers, a circle on the ground showing the radius of a grenade explosion, and a glowing shield, which helps so much in fights.

Collectibles are easy to spot. Some are colorful, and some have the same visual effect like a circular wave that we have in Spider-Man when collecting Spider-Bots. It’s basically a glowing bubble filling-up type of effect. Unfortunately, some collectibles like documents and certain other interactions are hard to see, but we have other ways to find them.

Prompt and objective marker sizes are incredible. Setting the objective markers to Always On makes the objective marker move forward as you go. The fact that it moves forward every 5 meters or so makes it very easy to follow because of the motion. The contrast on those markers is very high, with multiple layers of colors.

In sequences that require jumping and running, there are crucial objects that are very distinct, which was such a nice touch to make sure those sequences were less stressful and had less friction. Without those colorful objects, I would probably try to jump toward random places and fail much more often.

This is probably my favorite part, because Marvel’s Wolverine has so many audio cues and important sound effects that help interpret things around us. This game uses the same audio cues from The Last of Us, so most Low Vision / Blind players will be very familiar with them, especially because they represent the same actions. You can pause and go to the Audio Cue Glossary menu at any time to learn them. It is worth checking out, because there are new ones that are particular to this game, and it can get confusing during combat if you don’t know their meaning. Some of the extra audio cues are for rage thresholds, a beep noise when we can leap onto an off-screen enemy, low health, critical hits, and when abilities (Square, Cross, Triangle, and Circle button) are ready, among others.

Unfortunately, the incoming attack audio cue is the same for light and heavy attacks, so totally blind players might struggle with that. On the other hand, when they are Area of Effect projectiles, it makes a loud, distinct sound to warn the player of danger, which is pretty cool. It’s very distinctive and matches very well the information it wants to communicate. Enemies with ranged weapons are much harder to deal with than they were in Spider-Man 2, for example. In Spider-Man, the sound preparation before they shot was incredibly clear; here, it isn’t at that level, but they also still announce their intentions out loud with voice lines.

When getting close to an interaction, the game plays an interaction cue, which facilitates things a lot on many occasions when we’re not able to see them. Secondary objectives have a constant sound playing when we are near them. The same goes for important items we must pick up, along with another audio cue for collectibles that must be destroyed, and many other cues that can be learned under the Audio Glossary menu. Sadly, and this will affect totally blind players the most, when climbing, there is no audio cue to indicate you have jump from one place to another. This could be helpful for me as well, especially in sequences that require a lot of jumping. Thankfully the Traversal Assist feature can help in these situations.

The Screen Reader helps a lot to keep you in the loop of what you are doing or need to do too, as it reads the mission name and current objectives. When these change, it will read the updated ones. This allows you to never feel lost in the story. It is worth noting that when characters are talking during gameplay and cinematics, the Screen Reader pauses reading and once the dialogue ends, it resumes. This prevents overlap which could be overwhelming.

This is probably one of the most perfect areas of the game. There is nothing I cannot read or understand thanks to the Screen Reader. It works everywhere, including the Tutorial menu, Combo menu, Skills, Outfits, and any other menu. You won’t miss anything, and that is amazing to see, or in this case, to hear! You can learn about characters, collectibles, skills, and other stuff I won’t spoil.

When you pause the game, it reads the mission you’re currently on and the secondary objectives in that area. When you use the Navigation Assistance button, it reads your current objective as well as where and when events are taking place. When you pick up or unlock anything (like a new skill point), a message pops up advising you to visit the Skills menu to unlock it and it is read too. This is cool because you’re constantly warned every time you gain something new, allowing you to keep leveling up.

The biggest change under the Skills menu from previous Insomniac Games titles is how we view skill video samples. Instead of having a small skill video example shown on the right, we can press Triangle to watch it on a much larger screen with the description shown at the bottom. This is a huge improvement for me because, although it worked well before, it now requires fewer inputs. Previously, I had to use the zoom feature every single time and move to where the video sample was being displayed because it was so small. Some people might think that isn’t that hard, but having to do it repeatedly is tiresome. Now there is no need to do any of that. I greatly appreciate features like this that are designed to offer the information in a clear, accessible and easy to use way. It’s very fitting that in a game about the most iconic mutant, Insomniac Games has evolved this feature.

Last, but not least, having a Recent Settings menu is incredibly convenient to have, especially when I need to enable or disable the Traversal Assist that I only use during some challenges. The best part is that it saves between sessions. This way, I don’t have to go far to find it every time I need to change it.

Navigation Assistance is good and does its job super well, but it has some problems. The main issue is that it’s not very accurate sometimes. When pressing R3 to use this feature, the camera moves toward the next waypoint, and as it does, the guiding sense moves toward the collectible/objective. The problem is that it is hard to see where the sense is going because the camera is often centered in a different direction. If the objective is on my left side but I need to go around a building, the camera will point me in one direction while the sense goes in another.

There is no way to have the sense without using Navigation Assistance. I’d still use the feature as it is, but I believe some players would prefer to have the sense available independently whenever needed. Don’t get me wrong: most of the time, it works perfectly, but sometimes it doesn’t guide you properly during inconvenient moments, like places where you can fall and immediately die. This will bother totally blind players the most, but with a little patience, I think everyone can overcome these issues.

There is something else cool about Navigation Assistance. Remember the shortcuts? I have D-Pad Up set to Collectibles / Interacts Tracker. Basically, you can toggle between having Navigation Assistance guide you toward objectives or collectibles. In practice, you can always track collectibles because once you collect everything in range, it automatically switches back to the objective. When it changes to the objective tracker, you might need to move around a bit and toggle it again so you don’t miss anything.

There is a magnifying glass icon on the bottom center of the screen. Even if you cannot distinguish the icon, you may be able to see it appear, and if not, the Screen Reader will read it to you anyway. To be totally honest, I found this feature so cool. It’s extremely convenient to have in a game like this because it makes things much easier. The downside is that it sometimes guides you toward collectibles you don’t have access to yet. I’m sure most tracking issues will be fixed eventually, but it is incredible as it is, at least for Low Vision players.

I also want to mention the Skip Puzzle feature, which is back. You will rarely need to use it, but nevertheless, it’s there when you need it—and trust me, totally blind players might need to use it a few times.

From a Low Vision perspective, Marvel’s Wolverine is a masterpiece with features that made me forget I have a disability while playing the game. As a long-time gamer, I spend most of my time dealing with barriers that make me question if this is something I want to keep doing. Games like this where everything is effortless and enjoyable pull me back from those thoughts. When features such as Auto-QTE, Navigation Assistance, Screen Reader, and High Contrast Mode work as well as they do here, it’s impossible not to have a great time.

Sure, Navigation Assistance has a few issues that will eventually be fixed, but every other feature is perfectly executed. Not to forget features such as Chase Assist, Traversal Assist, and Skip Puzzle, which will be very handy to many.

I could sit here trying to find little things to complain about just to avoid making its accessibility sound near perfect, but honestly, I don’t remember a single time when I encountered a serious barrier. If you played Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us Part 1 and 2, you can expect a similar experience and if you need these features as much as I do, you know what that means: a really game where every aspect of the game is accessible. Insomniac Games hasn’t just put every feature we need, but has improved them, greatly leveling up the overall accessibility of the title, and creating in my opinion a masterwork again that I hope you will enjoy as much as I do.

Victor Branco( Blind/Low Vision editor )

Victor is a gamer with very low vision who is passionate about game accessibility. When he is not glued to the PC, he spends his days with his dog on long walks in green and beautiful places. Trying to improve every day in order to contribute as much as possible with the accessibility community. You can contact him on Twitter at @VictorAndre87