I really like this game. I do not recommend this game to most.

This is akin to a PS2/3 game that released in 2023. Almost every gameplay element in this game is outdated, the story is nonsensical, the voice over is so bad it's good, and there's performance issues.

With all that being said, I finished this game in two sittings. I couldn't stop playing it. It's a cluster-fuck of a game, but there's something underneath the doody and poor design choices that I really enjoy. I only recommend this to those that can look past a number of issues in a game AND only buy it on a sale. I got my copy for $20 and I couldn't be happier.

Un juego con un apartado estético/visual realmente atractivo, una banda sonora BOMBA de cojones y un worldbuilding suuuuuuper interesante son lo único que mantiene a flote un juego que hace aguas por todos lados.

El combate es malo con avaricia, es un medio hack and slash/ shooter de coberturas pero ambas facetas son malísimas, los parries están reguleros, hay pocos combos y en general se hace tedioso.

Las Boss Fights son una castaña colosal y ni son épicas ni nada. Malos trámites.

Los personajes y la historia van de la malo, porque es una historia mal narrada, con poca cohesión temática y cronológica que hace que termines el juego sin enterarte de que coño has jugado... En cuanto a los personajes sufren de ser personajes animú más planos y raros que su puta madre. El voice acting es un poco exagerado pero muy disfrutón.


En general sus escuetas virtudes no salvan un juego mediocre al que hay que darle el honor de intentar hacer algo distinto. Si, ha salido mal, pero lo han intentado y eso es digno de mención coño.

Wanted: Dead es uno de esos juegos de PlayStation 2 que les faltaba dinero y tiempo pero le sobra desparpajo, ideas interesantes y una apuesta por la jugabilidad como bandera.

Es un juego increíblemente inconsistente, con unos gráficos y animaciones justitas pero suficiente para presentar su apuesta jugable. Y la apuesta jugable es divertida, con una mezcla mas que interesante entre un juego de acción y un shooter, que funciona mejor de lo que parece siendo un golpe en la mesa de que se pueden hacer cosas mas interesantes que copiar los mismos shooters una y otra vez.

La historia es interesante y, curiosamente, actual. No es nada nuevo en el genero cyberpunk pero no esta mal. Eso si, esta esta escrita por un friki de las pelis de acción de los 80 con un dominio muy bajo del ingles y claramente bajo los efectos de diferentes drogas, lo cual significa que esta desarrollada con el culo, haciéndola mucho mas confusa de lo que debería y con diálogos que a veces rayan la parodia.

El pack lo completan unos minijuegos curiosos que dan cierta variedad al juego entre mision y mision.

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.

My most anticipated game of the year, Not because I expected something of a high quality or groundbreaking, But mainly it stems from the fact that this game seems to be like a spiritual successor to the infamous 2015's Wii U exclusive, Devil's third (Which I did play in preparation at the start of the year), up to my knowledge, the concept of merging hack n slash and shooter elements isn't particularly all that fresh with games like Konami's NeverDead and already mentioned Devil third attempting and failing to blend these 2 genres in single package, So will Wanted: Dead be the one to finally nail it? The answer is a simple NO!... But it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't fun to be had, unlike Devil's Third, Wanted: Dead isn't a terrible game, Just delightful mess of game...

My first issue is that the level design doesn't contribute much to the gunplay which already feels like an afterthought element, the Gunplay plays like your modern cover shooter of taking cover and waiting for the enemy to pop out of their cover spot and kill them, yet you're not given much ammo to begin with and the only way to replenish it are the occasional enemy drops or the checkpoints, many of the areas you traverse tend to be more designed for hack n slash than a cover shooter with frequent appearances of tight corridor or paths, while secondary guns are useful against taking out some range enemies, the Grenade launcher, frag grenade and flame grenade can easily deal you a massive damage if you launch them in close proximity or in tight spots which makes them feel more like a liability.

You're left with the melee which does seem to be go to option and where the game can shines imo, especially when it receive its own dedicated tutorial, you're given a limited sets of combos with more promised later on with the skill tree unlockables, combos mainly consist of mixing up the Kitana and Pistol attacks, Overall I found it more useful to keep rushing and mashing melee attacks on the enemies instead of taking cover and shoot, slashing enemies also replenishes some health that's been lost briefly during the skirmish, the context sensitive finishing blows that can be performed on enemy at staggered or near-death state enemies and many look cathartic, While I Found the frag grenade to be practically useless with how fast the enemy AI can react and escapes it's impact, the flame grenades are good way to exploit the melee enemies and bosses as the flame keeps staggering them while you keep landing slashes on the other side, The levels try to maintain some originality with unique enemy variety is nice.

Unbalanced difficulty can also major problem with enemies even under Normal mode can be bullet sponges that barely stagger when taken damage, the melee enemies specially can take entire magazine to be killed off and the way they spawn in the levels tend to be very nonsensical, the checkpoints often tend to stretched far beyond reason which only leaves you more anxious to run out of health pickups due to the aggressive melee enemies but I will praise the game for not going with regenerating health route, the game certainly wants you to understand it mechanics more which promotes careful and good play so props on that front, The bosses are unremarkable and even in many cases are laughable considering their pattern tend to be the same as the strong melee foes where it boils down to properly reacting and parrying their attacks, the aggressive goons in groups were more intimidating than big bads themselves.

Unfortunately the storytelling tend to suffer from poor presentation, many story cutscenes that can go on with bad voice acting direction that leaves the character with not much vocal emotions, the characters facial expressions don't animate well either with some having the characters stare at the void, Although it's worth noting that the world building and characters were entertaining and interesting enough to keep my attention, Stone and her teammates are well fleshed out with defined personality traits and clear position on the bigger picture, Cortez being my personally favorite, sadly the moment I got interested in Stone's background and some of the story implications, the game decides to end with it barely feeling like an first act to a full story, ending with massive sequel bait that I'm not sure of the developers will be interested on doing after the game's poor reception.

Which now only leaves us with the side content which is very good, The Hub Police station is also quite fleshed out with unique character interactions and collectibles to keep you exploring the building passed on your story progress, The Mini-Games were also quite entertaining like the shooting practice range presents neat challenge for the players to part take in and even of the cast characters excessively challenges you in the leaderboards for a promised reward, The Crane serving as neat collectible figures for your room's diorama figures and music records and finally The arcade game, Space runaway is underrated gem that kept me addicted enough to score high first in leaderboard, but the rhythm based games like Karaoke and Ramen were bad due to the Screen tearing and Frame rate drops that occur consistently while playing them.

I won't say Wanted: Dead is a hidden gem and I do tend to have personal soft spots and bias towards jank games that try to be experimental at expense of its own quality, My recommendation only extends to those who shared same curiosity as mine and If you desire to play something that's flawed yet different from what today's major AAA market tend to offer, Please grab it at sale instead of full asking price!

Depuis que j'ai découvert Sifu, je pensais m'être trouvé un nouveau genre de prédilection : le jeu d'action 3D qui emmène directement le joueur au coeur de l'action. Alors quand j'ai entendu parler de ce Wanted: Dead, il a immédiatement fini dans ma wishlist.
Ce qui m'a choqué dès les premières secondes, c'est à quel point le jeu est cheap dans sa réalisation. Même si on pouvait deviner via les trailers que ce ne serait pas un jeu à gros budget, on est quand même loin de la réalité, la réalisation est vraiment tristoune.
M'enfin, vous me direz qu'on n'est pas là pour se toucher sur des graphismes quand on joue à un jeu réalisés par d'anciens de la team Ninja. Malheureusement, il y a un élément dont j'avais négligé l'impact avant d'acheter ce jeu : je déteste le gameplay TPS. Et comme les combats de Wanted: Dead sont un mix de TPS et de corps à corps, et bien je n'ai pas réussi à accrocher à ce jeu.
Dommage.

An absolute disaster. Every aspect of this game is a complete mess, to the point where there's no point in even criticizing anything.

It also is, I should add, absolutely hilarious. Everything is so incompetently made that it kind of circles back around to being enjoyable. It's like a bad Bruce Willis action movie in video game form.

So, my verdict is I absolutely recommend this, 2/10.

What exactly Wanted Dead aims to be? Boy, I do not know and I certainly do not want to. It is Ninja Gaiden and not Ninja Gaiden at the exact same time. Soleil has some appreciable games. I personally would advocate for Samurai Jack and even for Naruto to Boruto. Valkyrie Elysium, despite all its jankiness again, is nowhere being this bad. The voice acting is just so lame in this one. The story is nothing to be taken serious of. It somehow captures the worst parts of Ninja Gaiden mentality while leaving the best part of it (swordplay obviously) out. It has your usual Japanese/Eastern game awkwardness with Deutsch karaoke and some manga inspired cutscenes, crane games, bozo characters and so on. All combined and melted in a single pot it's just a soul devouring experience. Can be very tough overall and shames you with cat ears when you decrease the difficulty. Hurray! IDGAF. If not fun, why bother? I loved the soundtrack at least.

Outdated and born dead as unfortunate as it is.

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.

The best worst game of 2023.

The story is nonsense that doesn't know if it's trying to be serious or not.
The combat is functional yet clumsy, which isn't helped by the poor balancing and dumb AI
The presentation is all over the place and badly performed
and the mini-games are totally lifted from Like a Dragon/Yakuza series and done terribly.

It's pretty much a 2004 game that came out in 2023. (Like a HD Devil's Third, considering the devs behind this game did work on before leaving Valhalla.)

Cannot recommend this anymore than $20, especially considering it's length as I was about to beat it within about 6 hours but it's a good bad recommendation from me, even at the low score I've given it.

Played: September 2023

A masterwork in its singularity, I'm giving it 4.5 stars despite itself. I'm openly allowing the way my brain has romanticized this game since the nearly 4 months I've played it to influence my thoughts now.

Rhythm binds the experience of Wanted: Dead together, but only if you can dance with it. There are times jank is a proper, if charming, obstacle, and there are times when it's another way to refer to an unorthodox tempo. This is 10% the former, and 90% the latter. I loved mastering the offbeat sword and gunplay. The repetitions rarely got old. The arcade syncopation was funky. And while it's not as inviting a cadence as something like Metal Gear Rising, it became almost equally worth my time.

Likewise, the wildly out of sync storytelling added up towards a game that wants to do its own thing, my comprehension be damned. The off-kilter voice acting rules. The abruptness of the plotting managed to draw my attention further in. And I find it all to be effective for one simple reason: it's so confident about all these choices. I never felt this was "funny ha ha" bizarre but actually strange. And it's fine if I never fully figure out why I'm surely making excuses for it. Sometimes a person is just attractive because they are who they are unashamedly and fun to be around. Wanted: Dead is her.

Maybe my hypnosis towards it can be explained by the fact that while the game purports to have a karaoke minigame, it actually only has a "99 Luftballons" minigame. And the only song I can karaoke in real life just so happens to be "99 Red Balloons".

The three 2023 games I played in full are this, Spider-Man 2 (a nice game), and Final Fantasy XVI (a genuinely frustrating game). That makes Wanded: Dead... my GOTY 2023?