Wanted: Dead Review 6/10 "This game is a mess, but that's part of its charm" 🤺 @110industries #IndieGame #GameDev

With Wanted: Dead coming from some of the team behind the Ninja Gaiden series, I was looking forward to a challenging melee combat experience with a nice cyberpunk aesthetic, as shown in the trailers. 

You get flashes of both, but it doesn't come together in the way I would have hoped.

The opening cinematic establishes a vague alternate-history plot, where following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, the Dauer company began to develop and sell humanoid workers. 

In the present day (well, 2022) the company goes into bankruptcy, revealing...well, it's not actually that clear, as rather than explain, the game seems to focus more on comedy cutscenes involving the main characters. 

You play as Hannah Stone, an ex-con drafted into the Zombie Squad, a specialist police unit made up of, well, other criminals, but they're all super-hard so that's OK, I guess.

The game feels a little bit undecided as to what it wants to be. You get a mix of hack and slash and gunplay that feels like it wants a slice of the Devil May Cry or Bayonetta cake, where you use sword-and-pistol combos to take down close-range enemies. Or you can use the triggers to aim and fire a range of secondary weapons like assault rifles, which combined with the cover system gives it a bit of a Gears of War feel. 

That said, the cover mechanics aren't very slick, meaning you can accidentally step into the open and get shot up quite easily. Luckily, you can take quite a number of bullets, meaning you can clear a lot of situations by sprinting up to enemies and chopping them up instead, including with a surprising number of finishers. Some battles do force the use of cover shooting though, including boss battles and the odd chokepoint, so you can't get away with it completely. Having it forced on you just makes you resent it a bit even though it's not the worst implementation ever.

This game has been described as something like a love letter to PS2-era action games, and there is a little bit of the Syphon Filter/Metal Gear Solid about it (particularly Revengeance). However, the controls feel stuck in that era too - when you pull off a slick combo with finisher it looks and feels good, but the gunplay is very lightweight and feels forced. Ironically, if this had been set in the Ninja Gaiden era (i.e. no guns) it probably would have been excellent.

The graphics and sound effects are decent, but the voice acting comes and goes. The cutscenes are OK - a mix of in-engine and anime - even if the Zombie Squad is straight out of central casting, whereas the overheard and ambient conversations as you wander around aren't up to much. And there are several Yakuza-style minigames that feel completely out of place even though they are pretty fun, such as singing 99 Luftballons on karaoke or eating ramen using rhythm controls.

SUMMARY

All in all, this game is a mess, but that's part of its charm. It tries to be lots of different things, never nailing any of them, but it's still fun and probably worth a look if you've got nostalgia for the good-ish old days.