A gore-filled mess.

The first time I heard about Wanted: Dead it sounded like my jam. Built by former members of Team Ninja and bringing back the classic challenging action games of yesteryear. The game immediately gives off vibes of goofy action games of the past with quirky cutscenes and outlandish characters. I thought I was in for a treat, until I got into the game. Yes this game is difficult, but not in the way that you get better as you learn how it works. Instead it throws a ton of unfair objectives and enemies at you while also being condescending at every turn when you fail. From the very start I was simply not having fun playing Wanted: Dead.

The game puts players in the shoes of Lt. Hannah Stone of the elite Hong Kong police unit known as Zombie Unit. The opening cinematic is long and full of goofy interactions strikingly familiar to past Itagaki games. The team sits in a diner ordering food when the call comes in for a mission. The dialogue is awkward and the voice acting is not great. Weirdly the audio mix is also terrible. The voices are so quiet at times I had trouble understanding what was being said. Good thing I had subtitles on. The game then kicks off and doesn’t let up from there.

MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $29.99

It is no surprise that Wanted: Dead is an action game with a mix of melee and gun combat. Coming from a team comprised of ex-Team Ninja developers this game wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The melee combat is pretty standard with a few notable differences. The sword combat is performed with the X button and has a host of combos. The pistol serves as more of a block breaker or combo extender and has its own dedicated button. Instead of shooting it like a normal shooter, it is used more like the parry in Bloodborne. The A button is used to dodge and shooting is done by holding left trigger and shooting with the right. It takes some time to get accustomed to, but is serviceable enough.

Where the issues start to come in is that the shooting just feels arbitrary. There is an auto cover mechanic, but most encounters give players no time to actually hide and shoot from cover, so I have no idea why it was added. It feels like a game that I constantly had to be on-the-move. Moving from enemy to enemy and using melee was more effective in nearly every scenario. The enemy AI will take cover at times, but the majority of the time they simply bum rush me and it devolves into a melee battle.

The melee combat is visceral and contains a ton of finishing moves. When they hit, they hit hard. It is extremely satisfying when I execute the finisher and my character uses context to eliminate enemies John Wick style. This is the highlight of the combat by far and it kept me chugging through the issues. The actual combat itself though has all sorts of issues. For starters the melee feels loose. Enemy hits don’t feel impactful at times and the softlock is just not good enough. I am constantly swinging at air and there is no hard lock-on mechanic. Also this being one of “those” games means that even the most low-level grunt can kill you quickly. The block and parry system doesn’t feel great and the enemies don’t operate on the same mechanics my character did. They recover so much quicker when blocking than I do. It just feels unfair at times.

There is an upgrade tree as well which commits the biggest gaming crime. Taking basic actions that are required and instead putting them into a skill tree. The biggest example happens early on. There are enemies with riot shields. The game immediately says that a charge move will take out the shields. This is a skill tree item which I did not have yet. I then grabbed it on my next death and tried it. Instead of it working I was knocked out of my animation by another shield character. Then once I executed it, it simply bounced off the shield. This game is packed with moments like this that make me feel the whole design behind the game is to simply frustrate the player. Ninja Gaiden was hard, but fair. Wanted: Dead feels hard just to be hard and it is not fun.

This sucks as when this game hits, it really hits. The finishing moves are so satisfying and when things are fun, they are really fun. The game just seems to realize you are enjoying yourself and decides to throw a completely unfair scenario at me to make it miserable. The game pulls the same condescending difficulty thing that Ninja Gaiden did back in the early 2000s. When I finally died enough it offered an “easy” mode. In this mode I got a ton of extra healing items and the damage taken was reduced. This also put cat ears on my character to mock me for sucking. Yeah we have moved past that nonsense and it feels completely out of touch here.

Visually the game has its moments but remains bland for the most part. Everything feels cheap and the environments are dull most of the time. The frame rate holds up pretty well and the animations on the finishing moves are outstanding. It feels like most of the budget was spent on these pieces alone. The rest just feels unfinished. The cut scenes are awkward and the meme that plays every time I load the game gets old very quickly. As I mentioned, the audio is all over the place. Voices are quiet, music is forgettable, and the ambience is just a mess most of the time.

Wanted: Dead is a mess of a game with hints of excellence strewn about. I wanted to love it a lot more than I did. Instead the game kept making me frustrated at every turn. There have been a million examples of how to make a challenging game without making it frustrating. Wanted: Dead is the epitome of the latter. It simply uses lazy tropes instead of clever game play to create its difficulty. The end result is a game that has some great ideas, but will not interest most players. I expect most to quit before finishing the first boss.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.