Wanted: Dead review: a surreal and slipshod hack’n’slash
Wanted: Dead is described to be a “love letter to the sixth generation of console,” and as a crumbling 26 year old, I of course had none of these.
Set in an alternate and futuristic Hong Kong, glittering with cyberpunk inspirations and more ‘80s bangers than in your dad’s car cassette player, Hannah Stone is one of the four former criminals that comprise Hong Kong Police Department’s Zombie Squad. The gameplay is a corn-syrupy red roux of third-person shooting, sickening katana fatalities, and waves of woolly enemies, bubbling over what is too high a heat.
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Without this fuzzy foundation of PS2 and Gamecube games to syphon off, the game is a little like being gifted a bunch of clothes from your cousin - she loved these and so will you. You’re taller at a younger age and the cotton cocoons your angular shoulders but don’t let that stop you. Now you’re just as cool as her. Theoretically.
And it’s the “theoretically” that is the part contributing to the most to the experience of playing Wanted: Dead. Obviously, the game offers a challenge in its combat, resurrecting the adrenaline-rushing mechanics of Ninja Gaiden, rewarding surgical dismemberment with torrential executions. Hannah has access to a katana and a firearm in her arsenal, however, I only bothered with the sword. The guns are about as effective as their nerf replicas, though good in a pinch to shatter the guard of a persistent foe, and swishing hither and thither in a trail of sticky scarlet is classier.
The rest of the Zombie Squad are Doc, Cortez and Herzog who, while acting as two-dimensional tropes of the brain, the heart and the body of the team, have different actions in fights. Doc offers one revive per checkpoint, Cortez staggers enemies for a finishing move and Herzog eliminates some of the lower level soldiers with a headshot. There’s also Gunsmith who offers to improve your weapons on the fly when her drone dives into the action. Again, I’m sure she’s a lovely girl, but I didn’t have much to do with her for those aforementioned reasons.
There’s also the bullet time feature which, in these endless waves of enemies in museums, parks, casinos and warehouses, is a boon to swiftly shift the odds in your favour again. Bullet time occasionally activated in some areas when entering them for the first time, though I assume this is to do with a bout of technical hiccups. Hannah was also very vulnerable to grenades despite giving them a very wide berth, causing the sound to become muffled even if I was on the other side of the room to the explosion.
When I was sliding through combos and the enemies, it was satisfying. Flashes of moments that flamboyantly describe why you lot are so hung up on the games of yesteryear. A time when the developer knew you weren’t going to waste any seconds to read that collectible note so they wrote the text in the largest font weight possible. In spite of this, I did find there to be swathes of the encounters where I was wandering around wondering what I was doing.
That’s a good question. What am I doing? At the start of the game, there’s a montage of archival footage and cutscenes to set up a tense situation between the East and West, solidified with the rise of cyber espionage and civil unrest that is allowed to spiral out of control. That’s cool- tell me more about that.
Instead, one of the loading screens recreates that “sike, that’s the wrong number” meme with the cast of characters. Funny, for the first time. Let’s be honest with ourselves: sometimes a story is secondary to a game and reinventing the wheel is getting more and more difficult by the day. But the rest of Wanted: Dead is bizarre with no basis. An early cutscene sees Hannah intone her order to a waitress, switching to squad member to squad member, and it feels about 20 minutes long. Irreverence works when you yourself have that playful perspective too, not just as a set of jigsaw pieces that actually don’t make any sort of picture at all.
And, for Christ’s sake, why is Hannah wearing jeans.
Pros: irreverence, imaginative setting
Cons: difficulty likely to turn people off, tropey, feels unfinished
For fans of: Cyberpunk 2077, Ninja Gaiden, Devil’s Third
5/10: Average
Wanted: Dead releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam (version tested) on 14 February. A review code was provided by the publisher, 110 Industries. Read a guide to our review scores here.
Topics: PC