Wanted: Dead Review

As I write this review, I’m unable to understand what Wanted: Dead is trying to be. The game’s personality is best described as a broth of Cyberpunk 2077’s aesthetics, bargain-bin Yakuza mini-games, and late 2000’s cover-based shooting, all with a hint of SWERY and a dash of Suda 51, that just needs a few more minutes to cook.

Set in an alternate timeline where cybernetics are commonplace and the world is left to pick up the pieces after a great Eurasian conflict, the Hong Kong government began hiring war criminals for a special police unit, Zombie Squad for extreme operations. You play as Lt. Hannah Stone — a no nonsense killer and team leader of Zombie Squad — equipped with a katana and an arsenal of firearms. Alongside her are marksman Herzog, specialist Cortez, and medic/support Doc, as they become embroiled in a conspiracy and are forced to uncover the plot, otherwise, they’ll be locked back up again.

Wanted: Dead was developed by Soleil Ltd. and going by the first few hours, it is an incredibly difficult game to play that will test the player’s mettle, patience, and willingness to play any further due to overbearing combat and your beginning stats being basically useless. However, after the first mission has been completed and you’ve unlocked enough experience for a balanced skill tree and upgraded your weapons, all the gameplay issues suddenly disappear.

And I can hear you say “What do you mean?! That’s how videogames always start, with you as weak as possible!”. I agree with you for the most part but in Wanted: Dead, you’re dead wrong.

For example, the first mission begins with you running into a firefight where once you have found cover — which has a delay from standing to kneeling, letting the enemy get a few shots in — you’ll only have half your health left; it only gets better from there. All the enemies you fight — except the first boss — are a bunch of bullet and blade sponges that, take five shots in the head to die with the limited amount of ammo you get with each weapon, you will undoubtedly be turned into Swiss cheese when fighting in melee.

Now some will be wondering about your support, do they help? Yes, but they are about as useless as you are. There are a few safety nets before dying in Wanted: Dead; besides the few health stims, Doc will patch you up once per checkpoint with a skippable cutscene.

When these issues disappear — as you unlock much-needed abilities and buffs that would have been better for you at the start — Wanted: Dead becomes a challenging but fair game to play and something to occupy your time during the dry period of game releases. To play it, you’d also have to put up with more than just one bad mission design.

The voice acting ranges from atrocious to passable; like the recording team used the script reads to save money. What makes it even worse is sometimes the audio doesn’t sync up with animations and characters have to start showing off their ventriloquist skills at the end of sentences. You know the voice acting is bad when the NPCs have better performances than the main character. I tried my usual trick of changing the spoken language in the settings but unfortunately there wasn’t an option to do so; forcing me to listen to the apathetic drone of Stone’s voice.

The character animations during cutscenes, especially for the main crew, is almost like the team motion-captured using the Source engine. Everyone overexaggerates in their movements and cannot stay still, even when sitting down. Not to mention, the hair textures glow with lighting, giving characters with long hair highlights (emphasis on the lights).

Wanted: Dead is also disjointed in its delivery, rather visually and spatially schizophrenic. To give an example, one full cutscene where Stone and the police quartermaster Gunsmith are interrupted while eating street ramen has an indiscriminate narration on how ramen became famous told in a fake, occa Australian accent, as well as awkward camera cuts and perspectives that makes it look like they’re being watched. Only for the five-minute unnecessary exposition dump show to be used to introduce a ramen-eating minigame that does nothing to the plot or gameplay. The cutscene could have just been Stone and Gunsmith challenging each other and it would have been shorter as well as made more sense.

From all the things I disliked, or thought was simply a waste of time and money on the developer’s part, Wanted: Dead also had some interesting and almost enjoyable parts.

The claw-game machines are fun to play, each unlocking collectables and media; like the cooking show used in the game’s marketing. In larger areas of the map, chainsaws can be found and used for quick kills especially in the large melee arenas, as well as some of the writing and dialogue being entertaining.

There is a moment in the game where Herzog is telling a crude joke to the team about a hung-over man finding he had grown an extra pair and it hit me immediately that he’s the only one who is written like a soldier who’s a war criminal that has been given a second chance of freedom. Doc comes in second with a stereotypically logical-but-deadly personality, but he could have been a veteran public servant and it wouldn’t have affected his character.

Finally, I can’t finish the review without talking about the animated sections of Stone’s past unlocked throughout playing the campaign. I only unlocked a few but they look like any cheaply made anime recently but does what it’s meant to do and that pretty much sums up my experience of the game.