Developer: Soleil
Publisher: 110 Industries SA
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PS5
Wanted: Dead – Review
Wanted: Dead has probably been on the radar of many gamers for quite some time now. We have featured a lot of promotional trailers on our site as well, and we were also quite stoked to see what this game would have in store for us. On Valentine’s Day, the game was finally released and we were curious to see what some of the developers of both Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive could come up with. What looked extremely interesting at first turned out to be a bland and frustrating mess.
Story
In Wanted: Dead you’ll be playing as Lt. Hannah Stone who will command the Zombie Unit. The unit consists of highly-trained operatives who have committed crimes in the past. The game slowly introduces some of the characters through short cutscenes, but the overall story remains very shallow. You’ll play through several missions, which all feature some dialogues, a bit of banter, and some cutscenes, but the game never truly kicks off. The characters are all very eccentric, but they never get fleshed out properly. The wacky character designs and very silly dialogues had us thinking of No More Heroes more than once. No More Heroes, however, does everything better when it comes to story delivery.
Graphics
In terms of graphics, Wanted: Dead is quite underwhelming. Don’t get us wrong, we loved the overall character designs of the main cast as well as the brutal finishers, but the environments are quite bland and empty, everything lacks details, the textures are of PlayStation 3 quality, and so on. As a whole, this game feels like a budget-bin release for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The most interesting parts were shown either during the mini-games or during cutscenes, which is quite disappointing. A bit more asset variety, better set design, and a few layers of polish would have boosted the game’s graphical prowess exponentially.
Sound
The sound design is also a mixed bag. The game’s background music is okay but forgettable, but it’s mainly the voice acting that stands out. The voice acting in Wanted: Dead reminded us a lot of a poor B-quality film, which you either love or hate. The thick accents and overacting carry a certain charm, in a No More Heroes kind of way. We personally loved this cheesy way of delivering voiced lines, but this is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea.
Gameplay
Wanted: Dead is a third-person action game that blends components from hack-and-slash games and elements from shooters. In the game, you’ll play through five levels which heavily increase in difficulty and it is your goal to take out the hostiles in said levels. The game will have you combine your sword combos with gun attacks. This sounds quite cool on paper to combine the best aspects of a hack-and-slash title with the core gameplay of a shooter, but it all ends up being very bland, unpolished, and oftentimes frustrating. The latter is not only because the game is very difficult, it’s often simply rather unfair. As you progress, you get to unlock a few new skills, but these feel rather underwhelming. This would have perhaps been a redeeming aspect of the game, but the skill tree simply provides you with basic skills and upgrades that do not change the gameplay that much.
The first hurdles already lie in the game’s overall controls and mechanics. Not only are the controls a bit loose and unpleasant, the mechanics of the game feel like you’re playing a two-decade-old game. The game doesn’t have a lock-on feature, the shooter portion feels more like an arcade game, and everything simply feels unfinished. There is no nice flow of combat due to you just having so little to counter certain attacks and even when you master certain combos, the enemies will still soak so much damage or will still block almost everything. More than once we took a single hit from a grunt to see half our health bar disappear or at times we didn’t even notice what hit us. When you die this way, the game becomes very frustrating.
The further you progress, the difficulty becomes higher and higher, to the point the game becomes a chore rather than a fun experience. We eventually found ourselves having more fun with the mini-games embedded in the game than actually progressing through the story. We did our best to soldier on, only for us to go back to the mini-games to actually wind down and have some fun.
Conclusion
Wanted: Dead is one of those games that sounds great on paper but ends up being utterly disappointing. While the game still has a certain charm because of its overall atmosphere, the original cast of characters, the mini-games, and the cheesy story delivery, it ends up falling short due to its shoddy graphics and extremely unsatisfying gameplay loop. As mentioned earlier in the review, the title reminded us of a sales bin title from two generations ago. At this point in time, Wanted: Dead is not worth its current asking price.
Wanted: Dead - Review,
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