Wanted: Dead Review (PS5): Not Dead on Arrival, But Damn Close

It was a little over a month ago from writing this that I first saw a trailer for Wanted: Dead, except it wasn’t quite a trailer. Rather, it was an anime music video, reminding me of an 80’s anime OVA, featuring Cinnamon, a single mom with three jobs making the best of a cyberpunk city, all set to the infectiously catchy 80’s tune She Works Hard For the Money by Donna Summers. It struck me pretty firmly, wowing me with damn solid visuals, stellar song choice, and a touching little story. All for a low-brow hack-‘n-shoot cyberpunk mook-slaying game worked on by the folks behind Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. That said, for all the sharp and potent marketing, I cannot honestly tell if Wanted: Dead itself was meant to be a parody/love letter to early PS2-era character action games, or if instead this was an earnest attempt at a legitimate new-age character action game that got horribly botched somewhere along the way. It’s a bit complicated, to say the least.

Wanted: A Little Clarity on Where the Dialogue’s Going

Yeah, this is a pretty good approximation of how this team operates.

The story and character writing here is in a bit of a predicament. When you boot up Wanted: Dead, the artstyle, previous games by the devs, and overall gameplay might make you think this is a serious tale of a god-forsaken squad of former cellmates called the Zombie Squad acting as a police station’s personal mercenary team, kinda bringing to mind something along the lines of Army of Two. Tales of taking down cartels, high speed chases, and all-out gunfights sound like the course of the day, right? Wanted: Dead is not that kind of game. While you are still playing as the lieutenant of the Zombie Squad working as a sort of mercenary group, what is actually presented to you is almost slice-of-life-esque and far, far more whimsical. I’ll say that while the ending left at a good cliffhanger, the story’s in a bit of a sorry state, and I can’t say for certain I’d want to keep playing for it alone.

It’s here to screw around and not take itself seriously, and it can be a bit hard to see through that from time to time, but you gotta come into Wanted: Dead knowing it’s not here to write you an epic. It’s a little bit of a cyborg cop drama, like jumping into the middle of one of those cop dramas you see on reality TV, except you hopped in during season 6, episode 7 and have no guide or explanation of what’s going on and you’re just here to soak up some cheesy dialogue, references here and there, and watch some personalities at work. Don’t read too far into it, just tune in and drop out, trust me, it’s much less offensive that way. I say this not as a method of making excuses for it, more as a way to warn people ahead of time that might come in with the wrong expectations like I did.

Once I realized that the story and characters aren’t to be taken seriously, things were so much smoother for me, and I even walked away liking the characters to some degree. Cortez, one of the members of the squad, is mute and can only speak through sign language, something I find really neat! You don’t see that happen very often in gaming, and it’s always welcome to see characters working past disabilities. Doc is a soft-spoken medic with a quite a bit more of a dark side to him (if you read into his backstory notes), but a snarky humor and has a bit of a crush on the Gunsmith, Vivienne, a former cooking show star who herself is also kinda shy in a girl-next-door kind of way. The main character herself, Hannah, has one helluva resonating story, but I’d be remiss to spoil that one, since it was probably the closest thing to story content I actually actively tuned in for and I’d even go as far as to say it was rather touching. They’re all actually interesting characters in their own right, and I found myself getting attached to them in the same way I started digging into some of those off-and-on cop dramas my folks watch. All they need to be is enjoyable personalities, and while the story is in shambles overall, I can at least say the characters passed the spot check.

Wanted: Real Guns, Not Airsoft Guns

“I’m sorry but your kitty ears are…purrmanent”

So while we’re about one up in characters and one down in story, I’d be lying if I said the gameplay wasn’t even more middling. You have access to a sword, pistol, grenades, primary weapon that can’t be swapped out, and a secondary weapon that’s for weapons that can be picked up off the ground. All levels have an assortment of checkpoints where you can modify your primary gun and your pistol. There’s dashing, dodging, parrying, and executions as well. All of this and there’s even an upgrade system where you can unlock new skills (even though it takes little time and effort at all to damn near max the thing out and doesn’t contribute much besides a few meagre stat bumps and added features). This all, in theory, seems pretty complete and par for the course for this kind of game. Except the guns don’t matter hardly at all because enemies are bullet sponges. I could pump an entire clip of my primary, beefed-up assault rifle into one guy and he might die. Meanwhile, a three hit sword combo will shred that poor soul to pieces. Adding to this, the pistol is more viable than the assault rifle, but only because one of the main draws of the melee combat is weaving in pistol shots to stun the enemy (it does pitiful damage so don’t bother mistaking it for a viable sidearm for shootouts). It makes no sense to me! Why include guns when they’re neutered so badly? Nevertheless, include a full suite of customizations for both the main assault rifle and the pistol? You can customize all you want, it won’t matter much in the end when the game makes it more than known that the guns were absolutely an afterthought (and, to a lesser extent, the skill tree too).

This game’s combat is in such a strange, odd place. When it is at its best, I can see some real potential here. Executions are so savage in design, and chaining them gets me all kinds of excited, feeling this fast and fluid frenzy of blades and gunplay. You can even chain them together, sometimes snapping from flaying a mook to bits, then immediately whipping around and popping the head off another mook with a rapid headshot. But the moment it slows back down, either from getting ganged up on, dying cheap deaths, or just having to fight finicky controls, you’re reminded of how much of a slog and frustration it is. I’m almost glad that the game locked me into the easy mode (called Neko-chan mode, and unlockable by dying a bunch of times in a row) because I don’t feel this game is difficult for difficulty’s sake, it’s difficult because it’s unbalanced and clunky. Seriously, God save you if you get firebombed, because the animation for getting caught in fire can and absolutely will stunlock you to death if you’re in a bad spot. Playing on the easiest difficulty helped me poke a few holes through that lack of balance and clunkiness and see that there really could be a damn decent game and a loving callback to PS2 character action games. Maybe if it was marketed that way, I could find it in myself to forgive it for where it falls short, but as it stands, there’s just a few too many gameplay issues here to recommend the gameplay aspect of Wanted: Dead to anybody but the most hardened fans of these kinds of games. Honestly, even if it was marketed that way, I’d still be griping for at least either more game to play or more time spent making this combat run a little smoother, I’d take either at this point.

Lastly, and this is a major no-sell that I would say will drive away a good amount of people, this game is horribly short. For what is, at launch, a $60.00 you’ll be hard-pressed to find more than 10 hours of gameplay in here, and that’s even going for a high completion percentage and screwing around with the plethora of mini-games at the HQ. Under no circumstances that I could fathom should a 10-hour game ever even hit $40.00, let alone $60.00. I don’t care how much I guilty-pleasured myself into enjoy parts of this, I simply cannot forgive the sparseness of content for such a steep, steep price point.

Wanted: Someone To Tell Me What That Accent Is

You know the rhythm game’s gonna be dope when Crocodile Dundee gives you a history lesson on ramen before it starts.

Something that often gets overlooked in a lot of games is audio mixing, and Wanted: Dead shows why that’s something you really shouldn’t overlook. I’ll be trying my best to hear the dialogue only for it to be overshadowed by some obnoxious mixture of sounds in the background. It doesn’t help that the main character is too soft-spoken to be heard even in more tame environments. Gunfire sounds, screaming from dying enemies, some of it gets wonky in volumes and really should’ve had some more audio checks done. That said, I can honestly say there are some real toe-tappers you can find in the jukebox. Bit of a shame and a missed opportunity not having those songs pop up more during the main campaign, that music video I mentioned earlier sure got Donna Summers wormed well into my head by now, and I would’ve loved to have that song be the first song to show up on the karaoke mini-game (though watching the squad dance their hearts out to some 99 Luftballoons did get a goofy grin out of me). I’ll admit, the marketing team knew what the hell they were doing setting up that music video, and, if all else fails, I know I wouldn’t mind seeing a full anime set to the world and licensed songs for Wanted: Dead.

Now for the hardest part of the game, and that’s the voice acting. There’s very little dialogue that doesn’t sound offputting and phoned-in, but special mention goes to the protagonist herself, Hannah, by speaking in a dialect that I can’t for the life of me figure out (I think it’s Swedish? Maybe?). Some are worse than others, but just about everyone has this odd stiltedness to it that makes it hard to listen to sometimes. I legitimately cannot tell if the voice acting was poorly acted on purpose or not. If it wasn’t, then I’ll leave it at the point of it just being a bad voiceover in general, filled with stilted, sometimes so-bad-its-good lines. If it was meant to be that way, then I’d say it helps out quite a bit with the good ol’ narm charm. That was half the fun of some of those older games that didn’t have the budget or capabilities to pull big-time actors (here’s looking at you, Resident Evil). Personally, my headcanon is that it’s supposed to be that way, because I find myself tolerating it more like that, and that’s really it. In a way, it reminded me a bit of the situation behind Deadly Premonition, where the so-bad-its-good take actually worked a bit in its advantage and I’d even go as far as to say Wanted: Dead could wind up in that same standing as a sort of meme-generating cult classic. When you stop taking Wanted: Dead seriously and just soak in that narm charm, it can sometimes work in a weird way. Hell, I’d even go as far as to say some of the voice acting kinda grew on me after a while once I self-canonized that it was supposed to be bad on purpose. Still, not everyone’s going to share the same sentiments, and for that, I do not blame them one bit. It’s hard to rewire your brain in such a fashion, and truth be told, you shouldn’t have to, especially if you’re paying $60.00 for it.

Wanted: A Redo Maybe?

I’ll say it like this: I’m actually mad about how much I want to like this game. While the simple but effective personalities can be so-bad-it’s-good occasionally and the soundtrack certainly survived the sound check, this gameplay isn’t doing it any favors. I can’t help but feel the story might have worked better as an anime as the interactive element is what lets Wanted: Dead down the most. With some more work, Wanted: Dead could be that hilariously fun love letter to retro anime and games of the early noughties that I desperately wanted it to be. As of right now, it’s just far too short, clunky and directionless to be worth the price of admission.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 5; Publisher: 110 Industries SA; Developer: Soleil Ltd.; Number of players: 1; Released: February 1st, 2023; MSRP: $59.99

Full Disclosure: A copy of Wanted: Dead was provided to Hey Poor Player by the publisher