Wanted: Dead Review

Wanted: Dead is a strange beast. It’s going to appeal best to those who like things a little bit off-kilter, somewhat needlessly hard, and not without it’s share of jank. And yet, I find myself coming back to it over again, soldiering on despite the game trying its utmost to put me off.

I’ll get it out of the way: when I started Wanted: Dead, I pretty much disliked everything about it. Combat was stiff and not any fun, the story is just inane random moments that are written and performed with all the calibre of a early ’90’s arcade game, and although it uses Unreal it looks and performs pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong, most of this remains true even as I’ve progressed through the game, but there’s something here that has got it’s hooks in me for one reason or another.

Combat is the main aim of Wanted: Dead, and as I say above, it’s pretty poor for the most part. A hybrid of melee and ranged combat is fine in theory, but at least one of these should ideally be both fun to play as well as, you know, useful. Playable character Stone has some wimpish sword strikes, and her machine guns and pistols may as well be spitting out marshmallows for all the good they do. Enemies take an age to defeat, and are prone to simply ignoring our attacks while depleting our life bar in one or two hits of their own.

Advertised as coming from some of the makers of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive, I had high hopes for an action game that would be fast and fluid to play. As it is, this feels more like a fan attempt at copying Team Ninja’s style. Attack animation is incredibly stilted, and while we’re able to block and parry, these are hard enough to pull off when we’re prepared, but it’s even harder to interrupt our attacks to do so. There’s no camera lock on either, meaning often times we’re smacked from behind by an unseen enemy or worse, hit by one of their super powerful weapon attacks that all but wipe our entire life gauge out in one swoop. This in itself can be parried, though it requires a different button press. I actually found this one easier to pull off mind, as not only can it interrupt our animation, but there’s also a slight warning noise that at least gives us a little heads up – though mainly it’s because we use the Y button, which is also part of our combo buttons so I often hit it by mistake.

Of course, hard combat has been popularised by the likes of the Souls series, but Wanted: Dead is hard by virtue of our options being useless rather than any distinct challenging designs of enemies. All combat encounters find us up against anywhere in the region of a dozen foes at once too, so we can’t even generally take a step back and deal with enemies one on one.

I died a lot early on, and while the checkpointing is decent at times – at the end of each combat encounter, with a chance to restock ammo and upgrade weapons – this is just as prone to baffling choices too. About halfway through the opening level we encounter a large room full of enemies that keep bursting out of smaller rooms as we move through the area. Dealing with these was a slow painful process, but we’re then treated to a kick in the balls with the release of a super quick and powerful ninja who promptly split us in half in an instant despite having a full health bar. Checkpoint loads, and guess what? We have to slowly work our way through the whole room again before Ninja once again makes light work of us.

In all honesty, that’s nearly where this review stopped as it was not only disheartening, but incredibly annoying and tedious. I must have died to that ninja a dozen times at least before I finally got a prompt to knock the difficulty down a peg. One neat twist though is that we can choose to only have the difficultly lowered for that one section if we want and once beaten, it’ll go back to whatever we had it set to before.

However! I finally beat this slippery git (thanks to the new lower difficulty) and moved on, and from here, things got mildly better. I found a bit of a rhythm to the combat (though it is still poor), I managed to unlock some upgrades that gave me more of a fighting chance, and even a surprise re-appearance of the ninja only held me up for a couple of minutes this time despite resetting the difficulty to it’s original mode.

Upgrades take the form of extra combo attacks, as well as lessening damage taken, granting us new offensive options like incendiary grenades, and new finishing moves. These break up a fight nicely, letting us quickly finish off any stunned enemies in quick succession with admittedly cool looking animations while being impervious to damage for a moment. Doesn’t stop them smacking us as soon as the animation ends, but it’s a welcome reprieve while we get it.

Boss fights are just as hard as the main combat – for the same reasons – though at least there we’re generally not as outnumbered so can take it a little slower.

The problem is that every time I find myself warming to the game and dealing with its idiosyncrasies something else pops up to undo all the good will earned. Having a good run of clearing rooms fairly quickly? Have a super tough mini-boss to force us to go through those rooms again. Finally unlock a half useful skill? Well, we’re going to kill you instantly and make you have to sit through the need to go back and reassign your skill points over and over again. Or simply, Stone will just decide to get stuck on some invisible item, causing us to – you guessed it – die right at the end of a tough fight. I’m all for a challenge in games but when the failure point is my skill, not the game actively trying to ruin my good time.

So the combat ebbs and flows in it’s enjoyment the more we’re willing to grind to understand it’s awkward rhythm, but as for the story? I mean, I’m not looking for an epic tale of humanity here, but Wanted: Dead has some serious scatter brain when it comes to this aspect. One moment the entire crew are sitting in a café chatting, the next, we’re eating ramen in a bizarre rhythm minigame, or we get some fantastic looking anime section before transitioning back to the pretty uninspiring 3D visuals. The cutscenes also go on waaayyyyyyy too long. Between one boss fight and the next mission we were subjected to about 30 minutes of short scenes, none of which were interesting or engaging outside of yet another rhythm minigame (this time, karaoke, naturally). Once again, fans of the weird will no doubt find some enjoyment here – and I’d count myself among them usually – but this is not what you’d call a shining example of the genre.

As I mentioned above, this is not a good looking game either. Unreal does a lot of heavy lifting, but much as the combat feels like a poor imitation of better work, the devs seem to have just toggled on every effect in the options menu and hoped for the best. Scenes are loaded with lens flare, blur, reflections, lighting and much more, all of which makes it looks a bit of a mess, as well as making things run poorly. Most fights had huge chunks of slowdown, and added to the already poor animation this did not make combat much better to play. Sometimes this overdone aesthetic actually hinders pretty severely, such as throwing a grenade when the floor is super shiny – it actually reflects the throwing arc indicator which not only looks pants but makes it hard to see where we’re throwing it.

And yet, there’s something here that keeps me coming back outside of the desire to play as much as I can stand for review purposes. When it works – which is sadly rarely – there can be quite a cool b-movie vibe to the gameplay as Stone and her compadres deal out over the top violence to anyone in their way, be that lopping off limbs or heads, darting between enemies in slick slow motion dealing finishing blow after finishing blow, or filling the screen with all manner of graphic carnage. The mini-games, although bizarre, offer a certain charm and a break from the action in between missions, though I could have done without the needlessly large Police HQ to run around between these as well – it’s too easy to get lost and frankly a waste of time.

Conclusion

But it falls back to the fact that I just can’t get past the constant hurdles Wanted: Dead throws is my way. Less time spent on the needlessly long cutscenes and in-between mission sections, and more on the feel of the combat and we could have had a little gem on our hands. As it is, this only gets a recommendation for those willing to suffer for their entertainment.