Rage, and what sits at the top of it
🔥 Three Rage tiers
The Rage meter runs through three tiers: at Tier 2 you can heal with Last Stand, and at Tier 3 your attacks hit much harder and critical strikes open up. The Hot Head trophy is "Hit Rage Tier 3", story-related during mission 2 A Debt Repaid, so the game walks you to the top of the scale early. The meter builds through combos, charged kicks, parries and skills.
💢 Berserker Rage
At full Rage Wolverine enters a berserker state and dispatches enemies in quick succession. Berserker Unleashed — "Fly into a Berserker Rage" — is story-related after mission 8 Something Much Stronger, so it is granted by the campaign rather than bought.
🩸 Stagger, then finish
Staggered enemies become vulnerable to graphic finishing moves. Those finishers are also what the violence settings govern: dismemberment can be switched off independently of any difficulty setting.
🧬 Techniques and Adaptations are swappable
Techniques and Adaptations are swappable and let you stalk, ambush or overpower, and combat builds aggressive momentum to gain Rage. Skills unlock through story-based levelling, and the tree's modifiers are small — deflecting ranged attacks while sprinting, for example — rather than reshaping how the fighting works.
The inputs the trophy list names
| Move | Input | Where it is named |
|---|---|---|
| Parry | L1, against attacks that glow blue | Parry Perfected — 500 parries across the run |
| Tornado Spin | L2 + Square | Spiral Cut — 75 kills with it |
| Environmental impale | Hold Square to kick an enemy into a hazard | Shish Kebab |
| Stealth kill on a blinded enemy | R1 to stagger with Jean, then Square | Blindsided — 10 of them |
| Helix Claws blast | Unlocked at the end of mission 17, Death Comes to Death | Cut Just As Deep — 100 kills with it |
| Critical Strike | L2 + R2 — or reach Rage Tier 3 | The Death By 1000 Cuts trial asks for three |
Blue means parry
Parry Perfected wants 500 parries, and the only instruction is to press L1 when an attack glows blue. It is the one input the trophy list expects you to use five hundred times, so it is worth getting comfortable with it in the Telambang missions rather than in Japan.
Stealth, and how far it goes
🌿 It exists, and it is optional
Stalking and ambushing are offered as alternatives to overpowering, and mission 27 I'm Still Here has an enemy area that can simply be sneaked past. Nothing in the trophy list requires a silent run.
😐 The reviewers were not impressed
GameRant calls the stealth fairly straightforward and rote — approach an enemy and press a button — and says traversal is perfunctory, with limited paths between objectives. Push Square's review does not discuss stealth as a system at all.
👁️ Detection is a slider
The difficulty settings list awareness — how quickly you are detected during stealth sequences — as its own adjustable setting, separate from enemy health and damage.
Where the reviews split
| On | One side | The other |
|---|---|---|
| The combat | GameRant, 8/10: visceral, and the Rage and finisher loop is the highlight of the game. | IGN, 6/10: the combat wears thin well before the end. GameSpot, 6/10: solid combat, but not doing much beyond the basics. |
| How it evolves | Push Square, 8/10: fast, gory and approachable throughout, with brutal finishing animations. | GameRant: repetitive in prolonged encounters, and the gameplay does not evolve much from beginning to end. Push Square calls the skill tree somewhat limited. |
| Boss design | Push Square and GameRant both praise how the fights look. | GameRant: the bosses follow a pattern of parry or dodge, attack, repeat, and do not innovate. |
Cross-checked
Cross-checked on 22 September 2026 against the guides of PowerPyx and GameRant, the GameRant and Push Square reviews, Push Square's report on the August features trailer, PlayStation's official game page, PlayStation Blog's hands-on report of 13 August 2026 and Wikipedia's reception section for the IGN and GameSpot scores. Nothing is said here about combos, damage numbers or enemy tells, because nothing we read describes them. Not from a playthrough: nobody here has played it, and what the sources do not describe is not on this page.