REVIEW ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AND POSTED ON MARCH 3RD 2023
Oh, boy. I’ve been putting this one off, but here we go.
So Wanted: Dead found its way onto my radar when a friend showed me the trailer to this game at work. Off of this trailer, I got hooked on wanting to get this game for months, so much that I decided to pick up a collectors edition of the game, as my optimism for the game went hand-in-hand with all the nice little pieces that came with this edition of the game, but to my bewilderment, opening up these items was one of the best parts that came with purchasing this game.
Off of the promotion from this game, the game gave me the impression that this was going to be a very fast-paced hack-and-slash set in a very colourful cyberpunk-like universe, with an impressionable cast of characters that I was hoping to love when one of the first things that I saw in this game was the classic roast GIF recreated with the main characters in this game. Oh, how wrong was I?
To dive a little deeper into the general gameplay of this game, the gameplay from the trailers was compared a lot to games like Ninja Gaiden, but also introduced some third person shooting sprinkled on top. The gunplay is simple, with an assault rifle and a sidearm constantly on deck, as well as a secondary which you can pick up a variety of guns from the enemy forces as you take them out. The gunplay was featured, but not highlighted as the main aspect of the gameplay in the trailers, which is why I was very confused playing through the game and finding out just how much it feels like they actually prioritized this, and how it feels mandatory to abuse the gunplay against the shoddy AI through the game bearably.
I remember rushing into the very first section in the game and getting gunned down right away with all of the enemies being scattered across this giant lobby room. Immediately, I’m having to throw the hack-and-slash out the window, and play the game the way that they clearly intended… A cover shooter. At a moment's notice, I was actually playing The Division, and if you know me, you know that I really don’t get along with the recent line of Tom Clancy games. This goes on for most of the first stage of the game, and there’s only five stages in this entire game, so 20% of the way through, and I still haven’t gotten to really play the game the way that they very prominently promoted and pulled me in with, no matter how much they wanted to launch tutorials at me on the melee combat, as well. I would say that it fortunately turned around in the second stage of the game, and I finally got to play around with the melee a lot more, but that’s where we really started to spiral downwards with this game.
Whatever you learned in the tutorial, you may as well throw it out of the window, because none of it is actually going to help you get far. The combos are so simple, yet feel so rough to perform, probably thanks to the game not consistently reading inputs (oh boy I have a bone to pick with this) and even if you decide you want to even try and use these combos, just be ready for even the weakest of grunts armouring through the combo and rinsing your health from one tap. There was times where just tapping square was a bit of mindless fun, but that was well after I decided that this game wasn’t what I wanted out of it, and wanted to be done with it, AND THAT’S WHEN THE ARBITRARY DIFFICULTY SPIKES COME INTO PLAY!
Most of the enemies in this game are unnecessarily damage sponges, and on top of that, the resources that you get in this game are incredibly scarce, and are also randomly generated whenever they actually appear. If an enemy even drops some ammo when you kill them, you’ll usually get 10 bullets for whatever gun they was holding onto, and while you’re already getting a small amount, you can’t hold onto a lot of ammo either. No more than two full magazines in the reserve, actually. While it seems like a nitpick, what doesn’t help is the stat tradeoffs with the gun customisation. Every kind of attachment has stat increases and decreases, and one of the main tradeoffs that comes with increasing your magazine size and ammo count, is your damage with that gun for some reason. By the way, unless you happen to have the Flying Pig as your secondary weapon, a fair few of these enemies will take every single bullet you can hold in your primary, AND secondary weapons, all while still being ready for a good sword fight. Oh, but at least the handgun has infinite ammo with lock-on. That’s gotta be good if you decide to cheese out the katana wielding enemies, right? Hahaha, fuck… Just so I don’t keep complaining excessively, I’ll just add on a quick note that on top of the problems with the enemies and their iron resolve and the lack of resources, the checkpoint system is a huge blow to the games progression as well. The amount of times that I’ve been sent so far back in this game because of these checkpoints being a marathon apart at times just hurts so bad.
The gameplay isn’t the only place where this game falls on its face. Honestly, there’s hardly anywhere that the game has a gracious landing on. The game has a very nice soundtrack, however it feels like a lot of the music was used in the wrong places in the game. I couldn’t even slightly tell you what the story of this game was, looking back on it. Some zombie defence force that barely even fought any zombies, or something? The characters were also immensely flat as well, and the voice acting felt like it was pulled from the first table read of the script, getting to know what they were working with, rather than actually getting into the studio to act it out. I think I only liked one character in the entire game, and she wasn’t even a part of the main team, either. She was just the gunsmith who also showed up once or twice in the final stage of the game.
This one hurts the most, however. There’s a selection of mini-games in this game, including an old-school arcade game (which no one seems to be able to finish by the way) and one of my favourite mini-games thanks to Yakuza, karaoke. Now, the Yakuza games created a perfect formula for karaoke if you ask me. Nothing complicated, hit the buttons to match the rhythm, it’s worked for so many games, and others have imitated this format with no trouble. SO HOW DID THIS GAME MANAGE TO IMITATE SAID STYLE, AND DO IT WRONG!? I said I had a bone to pick with the ghosting button inputs, and this is exactly why, but on top of that, trying to overcomplicate the game with a LOT more buttons, having to hit multiple buttons at the same time, AND the combination of buttons they want you to hit with zero reaction time. If you can’t get the karaoke right, then I’m sorry, but it’s all over.
To thankfully conclude my review on Wanted: Dead, it’s not often at all that I think to sell a game on when I finish it. Wanted: Dead was one of those games. I was very excited to play this game, and once the main game was all said and done, I had absolutely no motivation to ever consider going back to it to finish the 100%, which is good, because it still appears that almost three weeks after the game has released, it’s still bugged, and nobody can get the 100%. By time I finished playing the game, I was sitting on a 3, maybe 3.5/10, but after writing this, and really putting the whole game into perspective, I think I was just holding on to hoping that this game was going to be something great. It’s an amazing idea on paper, but there’s no execution. 2/10, sadly.
Oh, boy. I’ve been putting this one off, but here we go.
So Wanted: Dead found its way onto my radar when a friend showed me the trailer to this game at work. Off of this trailer, I got hooked on wanting to get this game for months, so much that I decided to pick up a collectors edition of the game, as my optimism for the game went hand-in-hand with all the nice little pieces that came with this edition of the game, but to my bewilderment, opening up these items was one of the best parts that came with purchasing this game.
Off of the promotion from this game, the game gave me the impression that this was going to be a very fast-paced hack-and-slash set in a very colourful cyberpunk-like universe, with an impressionable cast of characters that I was hoping to love when one of the first things that I saw in this game was the classic roast GIF recreated with the main characters in this game. Oh, how wrong was I?
To dive a little deeper into the general gameplay of this game, the gameplay from the trailers was compared a lot to games like Ninja Gaiden, but also introduced some third person shooting sprinkled on top. The gunplay is simple, with an assault rifle and a sidearm constantly on deck, as well as a secondary which you can pick up a variety of guns from the enemy forces as you take them out. The gunplay was featured, but not highlighted as the main aspect of the gameplay in the trailers, which is why I was very confused playing through the game and finding out just how much it feels like they actually prioritized this, and how it feels mandatory to abuse the gunplay against the shoddy AI through the game bearably.
I remember rushing into the very first section in the game and getting gunned down right away with all of the enemies being scattered across this giant lobby room. Immediately, I’m having to throw the hack-and-slash out the window, and play the game the way that they clearly intended… A cover shooter. At a moment's notice, I was actually playing The Division, and if you know me, you know that I really don’t get along with the recent line of Tom Clancy games. This goes on for most of the first stage of the game, and there’s only five stages in this entire game, so 20% of the way through, and I still haven’t gotten to really play the game the way that they very prominently promoted and pulled me in with, no matter how much they wanted to launch tutorials at me on the melee combat, as well. I would say that it fortunately turned around in the second stage of the game, and I finally got to play around with the melee a lot more, but that’s where we really started to spiral downwards with this game.
Whatever you learned in the tutorial, you may as well throw it out of the window, because none of it is actually going to help you get far. The combos are so simple, yet feel so rough to perform, probably thanks to the game not consistently reading inputs (oh boy I have a bone to pick with this) and even if you decide you want to even try and use these combos, just be ready for even the weakest of grunts armouring through the combo and rinsing your health from one tap. There was times where just tapping square was a bit of mindless fun, but that was well after I decided that this game wasn’t what I wanted out of it, and wanted to be done with it, AND THAT’S WHEN THE ARBITRARY DIFFICULTY SPIKES COME INTO PLAY!
Most of the enemies in this game are unnecessarily damage sponges, and on top of that, the resources that you get in this game are incredibly scarce, and are also randomly generated whenever they actually appear. If an enemy even drops some ammo when you kill them, you’ll usually get 10 bullets for whatever gun they was holding onto, and while you’re already getting a small amount, you can’t hold onto a lot of ammo either. No more than two full magazines in the reserve, actually. While it seems like a nitpick, what doesn’t help is the stat tradeoffs with the gun customisation. Every kind of attachment has stat increases and decreases, and one of the main tradeoffs that comes with increasing your magazine size and ammo count, is your damage with that gun for some reason. By the way, unless you happen to have the Flying Pig as your secondary weapon, a fair few of these enemies will take every single bullet you can hold in your primary, AND secondary weapons, all while still being ready for a good sword fight. Oh, but at least the handgun has infinite ammo with lock-on. That’s gotta be good if you decide to cheese out the katana wielding enemies, right? Hahaha, fuck… Just so I don’t keep complaining excessively, I’ll just add on a quick note that on top of the problems with the enemies and their iron resolve and the lack of resources, the checkpoint system is a huge blow to the games progression as well. The amount of times that I’ve been sent so far back in this game because of these checkpoints being a marathon apart at times just hurts so bad.
The gameplay isn’t the only place where this game falls on its face. Honestly, there’s hardly anywhere that the game has a gracious landing on. The game has a very nice soundtrack, however it feels like a lot of the music was used in the wrong places in the game. I couldn’t even slightly tell you what the story of this game was, looking back on it. Some zombie defence force that barely even fought any zombies, or something? The characters were also immensely flat as well, and the voice acting felt like it was pulled from the first table read of the script, getting to know what they were working with, rather than actually getting into the studio to act it out. I think I only liked one character in the entire game, and she wasn’t even a part of the main team, either. She was just the gunsmith who also showed up once or twice in the final stage of the game.
This one hurts the most, however. There’s a selection of mini-games in this game, including an old-school arcade game (which no one seems to be able to finish by the way) and one of my favourite mini-games thanks to Yakuza, karaoke. Now, the Yakuza games created a perfect formula for karaoke if you ask me. Nothing complicated, hit the buttons to match the rhythm, it’s worked for so many games, and others have imitated this format with no trouble. SO HOW DID THIS GAME MANAGE TO IMITATE SAID STYLE, AND DO IT WRONG!? I said I had a bone to pick with the ghosting button inputs, and this is exactly why, but on top of that, trying to overcomplicate the game with a LOT more buttons, having to hit multiple buttons at the same time, AND the combination of buttons they want you to hit with zero reaction time. If you can’t get the karaoke right, then I’m sorry, but it’s all over.
To thankfully conclude my review on Wanted: Dead, it’s not often at all that I think to sell a game on when I finish it. Wanted: Dead was one of those games. I was very excited to play this game, and once the main game was all said and done, I had absolutely no motivation to ever consider going back to it to finish the 100%, which is good, because it still appears that almost three weeks after the game has released, it’s still bugged, and nobody can get the 100%. By time I finished playing the game, I was sitting on a 3, maybe 3.5/10, but after writing this, and really putting the whole game into perspective, I think I was just holding on to hoping that this game was going to be something great. It’s an amazing idea on paper, but there’s no execution. 2/10, sadly.
So ziemlich das schlechteste Action-Spiel, welches ich je gespielt habe.
Der Nahkampf ist extrem clunky und janky (auch wenn man Animationen canceln kann, wodurch es etwas flüssiger läuft). Fernkampf ist auch nicht gut, da man permanent Munitionsmangel hat. Zum Teil sind grundlegende Fähigkeiten wie Granaten benutzen in einem Skilltree.
Dazu noch gegnerische Nahkämpfer, die zu viel aushalten und nervige Fernkämpfer mit Granaten-Spam. Beim zweiten Boss war ich so genervt, dass ich das Spiel nie wieder anfassen will.
Der Nahkampf ist extrem clunky und janky (auch wenn man Animationen canceln kann, wodurch es etwas flüssiger läuft). Fernkampf ist auch nicht gut, da man permanent Munitionsmangel hat. Zum Teil sind grundlegende Fähigkeiten wie Granaten benutzen in einem Skilltree.
Dazu noch gegnerische Nahkämpfer, die zu viel aushalten und nervige Fernkämpfer mit Granaten-Spam. Beim zweiten Boss war ich so genervt, dass ich das Spiel nie wieder anfassen will.