WHAT if I told you that the team that made Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive was to release a love letter to the sixth generation of consoles with a hack-and-slash mixed with a shooting game? I’ll tell you, I got pretty excited.
Welcome to Wanted: Dead. A game that is light on story and heavy on action. Set in the cyberpunk world of Hong Kong, the team at 110 Industries has crafted a blend of 80’s and 90’s hard-boiled cop stories where talking will rarely get you anywhere.
In Wanted: Dead, you will play as Lt. Hannah Stone, a deadly woman with a Katana and gun in her hand as she leads the Zombie Unit, which consists of three other members; Sgt. Arnold Herzog, Sgt. Manolo Cortez and Doc.
Each of your teammates will have their own sets of skills, Arnold is a sniper, Manolo is a ‘mute brute’ and Doc, well, is the medic of the team. Not much of a surprise there. While each has their own personalities, the voice acting didn’t really leap out at me and felt rather generic. I’m not sure if that was something they were going for, but even the main protagonist seemed a bit dull in my opinion. It was nothing that really took me out of the game or had a negative impact on my overall enjoyment, I just felt a better job could have been done.
I will say supplementary characters of Wanted: Dead, such as Gunsmith and your Captain are actual standouts in the voice-over department and I genuinely left interested in what they had to say and their short time in the sun during the downtime from the action.
Get ready for a lot of blood. While you can play this game out as a cover-based shooter, much like Gears of War was made famous, that’s not where the fun is at. You will want to run out into the open recklessly armed only with your Katana and pistol and slice and dice your way through all the cannon fodder enemies you can handle. But let me tell you, at the start of the game it’s a REALLY hard game.
While the enemy variations in the game are rather limited, at the start of the game there are only really two types. The ones that shoot at you and are easy to kill then knife-wielding ones who will parry and really call on your training of combinations to take them down. If you don’t use your own parry and dodge mechanics, you’ll get over this game and put it in the too hard pile.
When I started the game I went through the settings and checked over everything because I hate subtitles in my games with a passion, but I did notice there was an aim assist option which I made sure was on. When I started shooting in the game, let me tell you, there was no aim assist, or at the very least it was so light it wasn’t noticeable.
As you play your way through the game and hit checkpoints on each level, you will find yourself with options to customise your main shooting weapons and as I added parts that improved the accuracy, so too did the auto aim.
I really don’t know if I hated this, or applauded it for its brilliance. Because I know this is not a new thing to gaming, the upgrades, but this was truly the first time I felt it made an actual difference apart from killing enemies quicker.
Your teammate’s AI system in Wanted: Dead felt like they were pretty useless, to be honest. There is an upgrade in the game so they can assist you by grabbing the enemy or sniping them in the knee but at the end of the day, I just felt like it was me doing all the hard work and Doc was probably the most useful as if you die in a section of the level, he will be able to revive you once per section.
But I wouldn’t stress too much about the dying (apart from at the start of the game) you will have health packs throughout the game which will be replenished at each checkpoint and be dropped by harder enemies.
Speaking of the enemies in the game: The variations of them are rather limited. You will be taking down the normal easy characters which don’t pose much of a threat, but as you play through the levels you will slowly be drip fed a small variation such as cyber ninjas and robotic enhance brutes. The bosses at the end of each stage however are all very different to the foes you will encounter. I would be remiss to however not mention the first boss and the troubles I had with it.
While I understood what it was I needed to do, there were no command prompts telling me how to do these. Sure, there was a tutorial at the start of Wanted: Dead, but it would have been nice to introduce this slowly throughout the game as I really thought there was a bug with the game until I looked through the controller menu and saw the ‘Special finisher’ combination of buttons – For those interested, when an enemy is flashing white, that’s when you use your finisher.
But after I learnt this, it was a one-way ticket to fun town! Once your adrenaline meter fills up your ability to go into ‘bullet time’ is ready and you can stun multiple bad guys which allows you to then finish them off in style. This rarely got old as the developers boast up to 50 unique finishing styles. I think there was one part of the game where I managed to have about 5-6 enemies stunned and the finishing animation was a thing of beauty. It actually got me out of my couch yelling ‘FUCK YEAH!’
Downtime in between missions at Police HQ also has its purposes. There are a handful of mini-games you can use to break up your time such as claw machines and rhythm-based karaoke and eating Ramen (?) The latter really is weird. But also you can locate dossiers on your crew, past missions as well as an occasional detective story that randomly appeared and had me thinking, ‘what the hell?’
Wanted: Dead is a really fun game. I will admit I was unsure of it at the start, but as I got further into the game and accepted its weirdness and sometimes its brilliance I understood that this was a game that respected my time and let me play at my pace.
I would highly recommend giving this game a go if you are over the in depth story based games out there that are taking up to 40-50 hours.
Wanted: Dead doesn’t outstay its welcome with its fun combat mechanics along with its fast-paced action and could be finished if you skip all the side distractions in a good 10-14 hours.
