Released Date: February 14th, 2023
Developed by: Soleil
Published by: 110 Industries SA
Available on: Xbox, PlayStation & PC
Reviewed on: Xbox Series X
▫️ Code provided by the publisher ▫️
Gaming in 2023 is incredible. It’s easy to be cynical these days and take for granted the real golden period of gaming we are in. We are less than two months into the year and have already had some proper game of the year contenders. Despite this, sometimes we as gamers do get nostalgic for how things used to be. Enter Wanted: Dead – a complete throwback to the PS3/360 era that for better and worse, feels like a title from another time.
You play Lieutenant Hannah Stone; part of the Zombie Unit in Hong Kong’s police force. Teammates Doc, Herzog and Cortez join you in battle, controlled by the AI. They aren’t particularly helpful, although do dispatch the odd enemy. Mercifully they cannot die, which in a game this unforgiving would have felt really cheap. They are also flanked by Gunsmith Vivienne who takes a bit more of a backseat outside of story cutscenes. The narrative is no doubt thin on the ground, with the dialogue ranging from cringe to utterly bizarre. But it is serviceable enough in moving you between gameplay sections, which is where the game really shines. More than one cutscene in the game will leave you wondering what exactly the intent was.
At first, I was struck by how fast the enemies moved. I knew to expect an arcade-like experience, but it felt like these particular nameless goons were moving between cover at 2x speed, which made aiming and pulling off precision headshots a real challenge. Likewise, my early forays into melee combat amounted to little more than me being peppered with bullets and getting tossed back to the opening cutscene. Things weren’t going well, but there was enough intrigue even early on to make me want to learn the timing, the best methods of attack and to get further than I had previously.
Over time you learn when best to rush in with your katana, or hang back and use one of the guns you pick up along the way. Matching weapons with what an enemy has isn’t always the best course of action, so using cover to get closer to enemies wielding guns for a melee kill can often be more beneficial than a shootout from range. Plus stunning an enemy leaves them open for one of the many brutal finishing moves that never stop feeling awesome.
While things do become a little easier once you get your bearings in the game, there is no question that the game is punishingly difficult. By default, the only modes are normal and hard, but after hitting a wall at a particularly hard ninja enemy near the end of the first level, I found if you die repeatedly (which I very much did) the game acknowledges your failure and offers you an easier, previously unavailable “neko-chan” mode. Being the absolute shithouse that I am, I leapt at this bit of AI sympathy. Neko-chan mode doesn’t make the game a breeze. There is still a challenge to be had, but it is definitely more manageable. You also start each checkpoint with more medkits, which comes in handy.
I later found after completing the game that neko-chan mode can actually be activated straight away by inputting the following cheat code at the main menu: up, up, down, down, left, left, right, right. If entered correctly you will hear a chime and this will both unlock the easier difficulty and all the mini-games.
Speaking of mini-games, this is something I wasn’t expecting in the game. During the cutscenes between the five levels, you will encounter rhythm-based mini-games based on eating ramen and karaoke. This particular aspect of the game feels lifted right out of Yakuza, although the difficulty spike is pretty insane. There is also an arcade game and even one of those claw machines to play with at your police HQ that can be explored between main missions.
While I had a lot of fun with the combat, there are definitely aspects of the game that are lacking. Graphics are not in line with what you expect from a game in 2023. Neither is the performance, with frame rates suffering during particularly intense fights. This would be annoying at the best of times, but in a game where timing really matters, it often led to frustration and death.
There is also just a bunch of strange oversights in the game. An example of this is in the police HQ you regroup in between missions. There are certain doorways that just haven’t been made to the same specifications as the one next to it, leading to your character looking like an absolute giant as she barely gets through without smashing her forehead off the frame.
The camera also struggles at times. In larger open areas there are no issues, but the game often funnels you into tight rooms and corridors where the camera doesn’t know how to adjust and more than once I died because it wasn’t able to react to my surroundings before someone slaughtered me. It could be argued that this is a level design issue, but I actually liked the inclusion of more condensed areas where you didn’t have much room to manoeuvre.
I mentioned dialogue before and while it is less than stellar for sure, it almost has that B-movie level charm to it that I think (hope) was a design choice and not something the development team stumbled upon by accident. Music that blasts out as you slice and dice your way through wave upon wave of enemies is really fun and adds to the experience. It also includes tracks from Stefanie Joosten, who also played Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Tracks can also be accessed through a jukebox, which is a nice touch.
There are upgrades aplenty, from a skill tree that has offence, defence and utility branching paths to new attachments for guns that are drip-fed to the player at each checkpoint. The skill tree upgrades do make a genuine difference to the gameplay, which is more than can be said for the gun modifiers. The issue with both is that you end up fully upgraded a little over halfway through the game.
Obtaining the platinum of 1000G in Wanted: Dead will be a tall order. You need to complete the campaign on hard mode, which straight away will rule out most from grabbing the lot. There are also digital trinkets for completing the arcade mini-game which is tough as balls, and in an annoying move, you also need to nab all collectables in a single run.
Overall, Wanted: Dead is a mixed bag. The combat feels janky and unrefined at first, but sticking with it and possibly even dropping the difficulty open it up to being a really fun PS3/360-style action shooter. At times, I got vibes of Wet – the Behaviour Interactive game published by Bethesda back in 2009. Games like this aren’t supposed to be taken too seriously and if you can get passed the admittedly very AA presentation, there is plenty to like here.
-Craig
