James “Logan” Howlett, also known as the superhero Wolverine, loves himself good whiskey. I, too, poured myself some whiskey the other night while fighting Omega Red, the startlingly challenging first boss in Marvel’s Wolverine. It seems I’m far from alone here: As players start diving into the game, many seem surprised at just how much of a skill check Omega Red poses.
Released Sept. 15 for PlayStation 5, Marvel’s Wolverine is the latest from Insomniac Games, set in the same fictional universe as the studio’s popular Spider-Man series. Wolverine takes a bit of a different tack than those games: It’s a linear action game, rather than an open-world RPG, and befitting its star, is significantly more violent to boot. Wolverine carves through waves of enemies, dismembering and decapitating goons by the dozen.
Omega Red is a shockingly difficult skill check
So it is a bit of a shock when you come across an enemy you can’t just slice through. At the end of the first mission, which tasks you with rescuing Nathanial Essex from a paramilitary facility, you’re stopped by Omega Red, the sad result of a Soviet experiment meant to recreate Captain America’s super-soldier serum. The Omega Red boss fight is, dare I say, almost Soulslike in nature: survival means dodging, parrying, and counterattacking at the right time across three increasingly challenging phases.
“Beat Onimusha a few days ago and died a total of five times- meanwhile Omega Red took about 15 tries on the hardest difficulty,” one player wrote in the Wolverine subreddit (for the character, not the game; tagline: “Celebrating the very best and most bad-ass of all the Super Heroes.”) This is quite the claim. Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Capcom’s recent revival of its long-dormant samurai action series, is notoriously one of the more challenging new games of 2026. By contrast, Wolverine is more of a power fantasy.
Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter
A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no
commitment — just saving for later.
Sign up free
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
Social media is awash with semi-viral posts from players saying how they’ve been tossed around by Omega Red. One player recreated a version of the popular “damn got hands” meme. Another shared a GIF of Bart Simpson’s face getting used as a speedbag. Players have also been revealing candid death stats, which you don’t often see in a community that tends to hold up flawless playthroughs as a badge of honor. One player said they were “sick of Omega Red’s stupid face after he killed me 11 times on hard difficulty.” Another noted how they died 18 times (difficulty level unclear).
In the interest of transparency, on normal difficulty, I died… Look, I lost count. (Blame the whiskey.) But it was somewhere in the 10-to-15 range, most of which happened in the final two phases of the fight.
My first mistake was assuming that you can just run up to Omega Red and slice him to pieces like anyone else. You can’t. Instead, you need to parry his disgusting carbonadium tentacle things, increasing his stagger meter with each parry, and then pummeling him when he’s stunned. (Thankfully, Marvel’s Wolverine has a fairly generous parry window.) It’s straightforward enough, once you get the hang of it. Then, in the second and third phases of the fight, his attack patterns speed up, and he adds a few more moves to the rotation.
With one move, he grabs you with both tentacle things, and you have to jam Square until you escape; the longer you take to complete this quick-time event, the more health he restores, potentially minimizing any progress you’ve made during that phase. I also found myself trying to dodge-roll through his unblockable attacks. Turns out the trick there is to simply dodge rather than dodge-roll, which leaves you open to a follow-up attack.
On paper, it’s not like a pattern-recognition boss fight is that out of the ordinary for a glossy action game like Marvel’s Wolverine. So why is Omega Red posing such a challenge to players? For me, at least, it isn’t about the fight itself so much as its out-of-left-field nature. In the hour leading up to Omega Red, Marvel’s Wolverine encourages you to play as aggressively as possible. Then the strategy changes on a dime. The Omega Red fight stresses patience, careful observation, and defensive posturing. It catches you off guard.
I’m still fairly early on, but I’m curious to see how much of a challenge the rest of the game’s bosses will pose. If Omega Red is a one-off in terms of difficulty, it strikes me as an incongruous skill check in an otherwise minimally frictional game. But if the boss fights to come are similar Soulslike-like gauntlets? Well, if nothing else, that means I’ve got a lot of whiskey bottles to hunt down.