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.

>Plays game
Man what the fuck is this looks like some forgotten PS3 game lmao
>dies 5 times
What the fuck I thought this was made by the Ninja Gaiden guys this shit sucks why can't I izuna drop
>discovers guard canceling
OOOHH ok ok I get it now hmmmmm
>Discovers Iron sight canceling
OH MY GOD GOTY GOTY GOTY

Poco ironicamente è la nouvelle vague videoludica, un rovesciamento completo di tantissimi stili videoludici mischiati da loro. Una scrittura alla kojima che incontra souls che incontra i musou e 2000 altre reference, pure memetiche, è a tutti gli effetti una rottura completa con qualsiasi standard. La considero una delle robe più punk di sti anni, ma allora dov'è il problema? Ik mezzo a scene anime completamente randomiche su cui costruire qualcosa è impossibile, si può notare che seppure il tentativo cosciente di rovesciamento c'è manca un obiettivo. Non si va a dire qualcosa di estremamente politico pur essendo un gioco pro honk kong e anticapitalista, non si va a creare una complessità reale nel set di combo ma ti fa comunque godere fon sta spilungona di 2 metri completamente bagnata di sangue dalla testa ai piedi. Poi ci sono minigiochi random, costruiti per perculare qualcosa che era già una perculata a suo modo (tipo yakuza). Infine boh veramente i dialoghi passano da schizofrenia totale a battute da seconda media a riflessioni sull'impossibilità di vivere in un contesto politico su cui non hai agency. Curioso di vedere che altro faranno le persone coinvolte 👍

P.S: ma poi lmao se ne sono occupati quelli che hanno fatto il gioco di samurai jack e naruto to boruto shinobi striker, qualcuno dia una qualche direzione a sta gente non è possibile sto approccio completamente schizo e competente allo stesso tempo.

P.P.S: un gioco che comunque non è difficile nonostante quello che si dica, lo è solo l'inizio in cui non hai combo e perché pensi che sia uno shooter. L'ho giocato pensando spesso a metal gear rising, quindi subito sapevo di dover colpire con spada e fare la combo

Soleil Studios is made of former Team Ninja member. You probably know Team Ninja for Ninja Gaiden and/or Dead or Alive. Their way to do games is the following one : go all in a CQC combat system, mix it up with great chara design, spicy mise en scène, not so good technique and hardecoreness at every level of the game. Honestly, even finishing one of these games is hard. They know it : I unlocked the "Hard japanese" difficulty mode when I finished Wanted Dead.

In my opinion, Team Ninja is misunderstood in the western world. Most people simply see DDDDD breasts and stop it there. But what's behind those breasts is a deep combat system, actually deeper than most combat systems.

You've understood that I like Team Ninja. That's why I follow Soleil's work with attention since its birth. I was offered Valkyrie Elysium by my sister and didn't take the time to play it (my lover finished it and she's fond of action RPGs so I guess it's quite good). Then, my lover offered me Wanted Dead. I didn't want to let it unplayed for long: that's a question of respect at this point.

So I played it. And oh pal what a game! A very controversial one at least. Why is that? Well, it's actually a very good game. But nowaday, people tend to, quite rightly, seriously dislike technical issues. This and difficulty spikes. And old school linear structure. Wanted Dead has all the three of them.

So why do I consider Wanted Dead a good game? Let's have a look at its 3Cs.
- Camera : Nothing special here. Camera is never an issue. The game uses genres standards to counter the camera's weaknesses: it zooms when you look at something and your character automatically choose a target when attacking with your sword, wether or not this target is out of frame.
- Character : A military police lieutenant expert in both gunfights and swordfights.
- Controls : A clever assignation, in which shooting gameplay relies on sticks + circle + triggers + RB and fighting gameplay relies on sticks + LB + cross + square + triangle. Really, the only thing wrong with controls is you pickup items with R3.

That's it. The game is BOTH a TPS and an Hack-n-slash. And none of these aspects are neglected. Now don't get me wrong : the shooting part isn't as good as Gears of War and the hack-n-slash part isn't as good as Bayonetta. But both parts are good, and more important : they're smartly articulated together. For instance : long range enemies are weak to katana whereas CQC enemies are weak to bullets. This leads to a constant high-risk-high-reward decision making, in which you have to choose between charging and exposing yourself to enemy fire or force retreating the best you can to create space between you and the short range enemies.

This high-risk-high-reward mentality of design is applicated to every aspect of the game. Upgrading your weapon is much more about personalizing your weapon. Each thing you buff in a hand leads to another thing nerfed in the other hand: increasing your clip size decreases your reload time. Healing yourself is also a high-risk-high-reward move, considering it slows you hard making you ultra vulnerable, and can be interrupted.

Ammo managment is also high-risk-high-reward based. Basically, you have... Very few clips for both your main weapon and your secondary one. This forces you to switch between your main weapon and the other one, because enemies drop weapons for one or the other, not for both. Considering you can change your secondary weapon for more funky weapons, like greandes launcher or shotguns, considering the higher damages a weapons deals, the less ammo it has, this lead to interessting gunfights, in which switching weapons is common and the order in which you switch weapon is essential.

A parry system similar to the souls' one is implemented. It works very well, provinding you either a low-risk-low-reward permanent protection in the detriment of your speed either a high-risk-high-reward timing parry system. Unfortunately, mastering this system, paired with the counter attack binded on triangle, is necessary (I mean it: NECESSARY) to finish the game. This would not have been an issue if this system was necessary as well to reach the final boss, which it isn't.

Wonderful transition to bosses, characters and narration. In ne word for each of them: unequal, nice and surprising. Bosses are overall interessting, with many patterns and a good variety in their move set and the one you have to assume to deal with them. Some of them even have very clever design, like the rain one, vanishing into invisibility, which lead to a stressful deadly hide and seek game, or Tom Cruise, or should I say Tom CruiseS because there are two of them, which double the patterns you have to watch for and leads to interessting decision making about whom to down first. Unfortunately, there are the second boss and the last one, whom are very harsh difficulty spike, forcing you to learn things you didn't had to learn before (like perfect parrying), and relying and what can be seen as unfair design: insta-kill moves and arenas flooded with henchmen.

Characters rely on objections. Herzog is both popular and upopular, is both an ass and a nice dude. Doc does surgery while being drunk. Cortez is silent, which makes you over attentive to his moves and animation. Gunsmith is -you get it- a gunsmith, but also a former idol fan of cats. Captain lectures you and your team, but eventually asks for a kiss at the end of the meeting to forgive you (the meeting was about how many people you killed and how much it cost). Bad guys are really cool : I talked earlier of the invisible girl and Tom ruise, but Richter and the club owner are wonderful too. Eventually, Hannah, the main character, is a brutal yet soft abandonned mother, very empathic, whilst being a true killing machine, hurt by wars that aren't her's.

All these people are brilliantly mise-en-scène in a Kojima's way. There a huge attention to futile details, like how gelly is their gelly (spoiler: anti-gravity tiers). The switch between art style is wonderful and well-thought: outside the club is realistic, inside it's anime. Shoutout to this level by the way, which is by far the best one featuring the best enemies and level design.

The world and story told are a post-80 pro capitalist society that killed public services and destroyed many lives in its insatiable appetice for profit. Pretty much our world, just a little bit more fascist. Private armies tend to destroy police to conquier this last market. Girls with no family and a kid have no futur: there are no social services to help them. They'll, as shown in a cutscene, marry a douch that'll eventually come home drunk and kill them. Not gonna lie, it can be harsh. This is very nicely constrasted to the colorful sound and visual design, which is based on the 80s culture, quite happy-go-lucky and egocentric.

Wanted Dead isn't a perfect game in any way. But, as the other Team Ninja (in this case, their child Soleil) games, it focuses on things it considers important and delivers a 20/20 game on these things. If you want a well told anticaptilistic game, based on mixed combat system, featuring great sword AND gun fights, Wanted Dead is for you. If you want a game that runs perfectly on a PS4, that has no difficulty spikes nor linear level design, this isn't for you.

Once you're in on the bit you'll get what Wanted Dead is, a wild game that absolutely deserves a look if you like weird kooky third person action, period. Sorry, but all the half star reviews and "worst game of 2023" videos I've seen are a total joke. This isn't a "triple A god tier" title but a little jank never hurt anybody, especially when it's done this stylish and zany. You can slice dudes into several pieces and pull off gun-fu finishing moves, this is a GOOD game people.

It's hard as hell sometimes, the checkpoints get brutally spaced out in the later levels, resulting in some cheap deaths from tough enemies and repetitively playing the same sections over and over that make you want to rage quit. This was my main problem with the game, but it's hard to say when difficulty should be a factor when criticizing a game - FromSoftware get away with it all the time. But when you do get through, you feel so fucking badass. I can't count how many times I was getting my ass handed to me by squads of goons and ninjas, but then tried again and sliced and shot my way through like a combat master, perfectly dodging and countering attacks with ease. When the combat clicks, it fucking goes hard.

In between the Metal Gear-ass strange plot you have arcade cabinets, claw machines, karaoke and ramen eating minigames like you're in a Yakuza game suddenly, and it's just so cool and silly. You don't like a game that lets you sing "99 Luftballons"? Bite me!

More games like this, please, always

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.

looks at the avg. rating, steam reviews, general reception of this game

this is why we can't have nice things anymore, genuine good games like this one will be treated at best like they're "so bad it's good!" and never get the recognition they deserve for their incredible game design.

Replayed on the latest (1.13) update with combat overhaul on Japanese Hard difficulty. While i'm at it, I'm not a huge fan of this update (it makes the game easier in some ways and favors a more rushdown approach especially on some encounters and boss fights). Still it's a good pretext to revisit the game, and definitely still a very enjoyable experience.

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.

é meio complicado falar sobre esse jogo, de certo modo, ele é o jogo mais nota 6 existente, não é taaaao bom em maior parte do que se propõe a fazer, mas da pra relevar alguns dos problemas, por que ainda assim, me diverti bastante com ele.

começando pelo lado ruim, o jogo não tem muito polimento, a gameplay é sim bem divertida porem existem alguns erros impossiveis de ignorar. A câmera é meio truncada e de vez em quando pode te atrapalhar a mirar ou dar parry, um sistema de lock-on faz falta apesar de não ser exatamente necessário, o jogo parece que esquece que seu personagem não consegue pular e o design das fases acaba te atrapalhando bastante por isso e em vários momentos parece que só esqueceram de balancear certas coisas do combate, além de faltar um pouquinho mais de variedade, entretanto, o jogo é curto então isso não incomoda muito. A questão é, o jogo é MUITO curto, a história não faz sentido nenhum pq parece q ela é só 1/3 de uma narrativa completa, não acontece quase nada, e o que acontece não tem muito desenvolvimento nem impacto.

Agora, onde o o jogo sucede de fato é na sua apresentação, o estilo visual, a estética retro futurista, os finalizadores durante o combate, o jogo tem estilo e charme de sobra. Além dos design dos personagens e de todo o visual do jogo, entre as missões de ação dignas de uma série policial ou filme de ação dos anos 80(com direito a uma missão dentro de uma balada e uma cutscene tocando maniac), temos minigames, jogo de ritmo de comer ramen, karaokê cantando uma musica alemã que eu amo, retro shooter em um arcade. Esses detalhes ajudam muito no carisma da obra toda. Além disso, apesar de ter dito que a história não faz muito sentido, ainda assim toda a apresentação dela é ótima, ênfase nas cutscenes em anime mostrando o passado da personagem principal.

no geral, é um jogo com um potencial enorme, porém segurado por um orçamento médio e ideias de mais, ainda assim com todo o estilo e charme que ele tem, se tivesse uma história maior com certeza conseguiria ver wanted: dead sendo cultuado assim como jogos do suda51. É uma pena realmente, gostaria de ver uma versão mais realizada desse jogo.

This is clearly one of those 7/10 games in many different ways... I don't even know where to start. I'd rather focus on the positive aspects which seem to be more overlooked in reviews.

- The voice acting is done by VA of different nationalities, which gives a certain flavour to it. I don't know if it's just the different accents/cadence of people not speaking their native language or just that they are doing their best but it has those ending-1990s/begining-2000s kind of cheesy voice acting which contributes to its "7/10 out of the past times" identity.

- At the beginning the combat may seem to be a little bit janky, and some parts of it indeed are with the genre-characteristic wonky camera, attacks coming out of it sometimes and stuff, but it's really satisfying in general. The finishers felt fine to pull off and the bosses are a mixed bag, although not many, half of them are cool. Fun and direct combat that is fun to play, what else did you want from this?

- The OST is quite good to be honest. I was disappointed in the club stage where they played a remix of "Maniac" by Michael Sembello to not be used on the actual level... damn, I really wanted to kill mobs while listening to it.

- The story has some interesting points here and there and others are just all over the place. You know, 7/10 vibes. The dialogue has some funny bits and there're plenty of references to pop culture that some younger audiences may not get but they are kinda corny so I'm all in for it anyways. The ending and the story end way too soon, like something was missing there, but fuck it, if we get another game down the line then fine, if not, you can accept it as is and roll with it.

- It has in-between levels minigames! They're not all great but again, add up to give the traits of a 7/10 game. The bullet hell side-scroller mecha minigame rules though.

- Also, it's got an explorable hub, which is always a plus in an action game for me.

- Chainsaw.

Just play for the vibes and the action and you won't get dissapointed.

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.

Es sin lugar a dudas el juegos más caótico y aleatorio que he jugado en mucho tiempo. Su historia es absurda y las cinemáticas para contarla no tienen ni pies ni cabeza. Sigo sin saber muy bien a que he jugado, y pese a ello puedo decir que lo bueno es que una vez te metes en su sistema de juego puede llegar a divertir un rato. Creo que el juego pretendía ser algo increíble y no es la gran cosa, habiendo más cariño por los minijuegos absurdos sacados de un Yakuza que en el propio juego normal.

No es un juego que recomiende, salvo que (como a mi), te guste la basura dentro del mundo de los videojuegos. Soy sincero, Gollum es mejor juego.

O sentimento de se jogar Wanted:Dead é de que o jogo estava pronto a anos, mas não viu a luz do dia até ano passado, sua estrutura, sua estética, seu combate, são muito semelhantes ao que se veria num jogo base da sétima geração de consoles, e vejo isso com muito bons olhos e um sorriso no rosto.

Imaginem que Suda51 e SWERY estão trabalhando num projeto e o melhor de dois mundo se juntam (espero que Hotel Barcelona seja foda, ok?) essa é meio a ideia que eu tenho desse jogo, o combate é muito divertido, serio, e a primeira vista talvez soe estranho, mas serio, é muito daora, e por se tratar de um jogo com tanta personalidade, é o que adiciona ainda mais gosto em tudo.

Apesar das atuações de voz super blasé e fps cair durante cutscenes (igual Deadly Premonition, quem diria) o jogo se segura pelo seu carisma, partes em anime, momentos rítmicos, os diálogos ala Tarantino ou até mesmo, a galhofa pela galhofa são algumas das coisas que tornaram a minha experiencia com Wanted:Dead agradável.

De certa forma, dentro de um contexto aonde cada vez mais os jogos se parecem uns com os outros por causa da reprodução das tendências (leiam Walter Benjamin) é muito interessante ver um jogo ir contra a maré, usando de técnicas e forma do passado agora com estética, o que me faz pensar em Wanted:Dead com um jogo anômalo para o seu momento dentro da indústria.

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.

After wrapping up Bayonetta and before starting the next game I just had to come back to Wanted: Dead. I love it and wanted to try it out again now that it has been updated.

At first I needed to re-adjust to this game, as I kept hitting the wrong buttons for dodge and reload and was playing kind of awkwardly, but after a bit of time it was clicking again. Quickly sprinting and rolling around as Hannah Stone while ripping, shooting and parrying your way through enemies is so much fun. The charm and characters of this game are still great too. So what’s new or different?

First of all are the fixes and improvements. I played through the game on PS5, on normal difficulty. Then I got the itch to keep playing this again and did Hard and Japanese Hard, which takes me up to 8 play throughs now. I had fewer issues and no crashes but there were still performance problems, particularly during Kowloon Street. So it’s a smoother experience but still needs a little more work and of course this game still has its bit of jank.

There is a big change to difficulty. The first ninja now has three Stimpacks right in front of him and all the tougher enemies drop them too. I don’t know how I feel about this. The game already has an easy mode, which is now easier to access. It feels like the game lost its edge a bit and like the creators have compromised their vision. It seems a bit late too, all the reviews are out and the game has been on shelves for over a year. Is this really going to pull in more people? I almost managed a no death run first go despite not playing it since last year and not trying for it. During the last chapter there were just a lot health drops that I was leaving behind. The game just feels quite a bit easier. At first I thought no problem normal difficulty has been made more accessible, which is fine, but new players will be missing something. However these changes were made to hard and Japanese hard as well. Holy crap why did they lower the difficulty of the entire game? Now if I want to play the game as the developers originally intended and how I enjoyed it I need to not install the update, which means playing a buggier version that likes to crash. It’s still an incredibly fun game and I know many will prefer it now but it has really lost something. I liked that it demanded you learn how to play, it was rewarding and the journey to getting better was one of Wanted: Dead’s highlights. I liked that you had to be on your game or get punished. I liked the tension and palm sweats the difficulty and checkpoint system created. I liked that it made you learn to get through strings of encounters rather than just one encounter at a time with heaps of health or checkpoints in between. I want more people to play Wanted: Dead so maybe this is going to be good in the long run but I don’t like that it’s been toned down either, it does negatively impact the experience and there was no reason to change the higher difficulties. Surely there was a better way to get new people on board.

They added player stats so you can track your progress for some trophies. The severance pays trophy has been fixed as well and I unlocked it. I’m never getting that Platinum trophy though because of how damn hard it is to do really well at the mini games, seriously why is the ramen game harder than beating the game on Japanese Hard mode? They also added the ability to toggle in and out of cover with a button press. I’m not a fan of it and changed it back straight away. I want to move around quickly in this game and snapping in and out of cover just feels better.

I’d love to see more improvements and content added to this game like an even harder difficulty that changes up enemy placement, a boss run mode, chapter select and a ranking system. As much as I’m really happy this game got an update, it feels like two steps forward and one step back, when the game needed to be taken four steps forward.

The reviews and how they have almost certainly impacted this game’s sales and how it will be remembered by many (if remembered at all) really sucks. Some of the bad reviews I have read gave me God Hand 3/10 flashbacks, hopefully this game get’s some of the recognition I think it deserves one day. Overall Wanted: Dead is an amazing, addictive game. It’s hard to describe just how good this game feels. I’ve played it 8 times now and have it down to about 2 hours and no deaths, if I’m careful, and I’m still keen on playing it more. It’s just such a special game and I think if I were to review it again now I’d put it in the 8 out of 10 range, which for me makes it a must own and play game.

Added more after another update in April:

I had to go back to Wanted: Dead again after another big update released and this now brings me to ten playthroughs. It’s been further improved but also comes with the cost of difficulty being nerfed even more.

There’s actually quite a long list of changes. First up is an expanded skill tree with some new skills and some changes to previous skills. The biggest changes here are a quick little grenade toss, sliding attack makes enemies drop shields and adrenaline rush, which gives you slow mo after bullet time and you are more powerful during it. On top of this there’s been rebalancing to damage and stun and adrenaline seems to build quicker. The additions are nice but the changes are taking things too far. They simply make you more powerful and make the game easier.

There are additional fixes for bugs and improvements have been made to visuals and performance which is always very welcome but some performance issues still remain. You can now transfer your save from PS4 to PS5 as well.

The Space Runaway minigame has been made easier and one of the trophies for the Ramen minigame has been made easier too.

Wanted: Dead is fantastic and it is wonderful to see the game getting this much attention and improvement I just wish it didn’t come with the cost of lowering the game’s difficulty. It is especially frustrating when a lot these changes could have only been made to Neko and maybe Normal mode while Hard and Japanese Hard could have been left as they were. It is still an incredibly fun game but it has lost some of its edge and the experience has been negatively impacted. Tension is reduced and it no longer has the same good balance between challenging and rewarding. It is highly likely that new players won’t be pushed to learn to play. This means newer players may not discover what this game has to offer and that the rewarding journey of getting better will often be missed. This is really important as one of Wanted: Dead’s strengths is how good it is at making you feel good. It is disappointing that Soleil hasn’t been able make it more accessible without impacting how challenging and rewarding it was.

If you were put off by or dropped Wanted: Dead because of bugs, issues and/or difficulty then now is the time to jump in or jump back in. It is in a better state now (at least on PS5) and is quite a bit easier to play through. You will be missing something due to the easier difficulty of the whole game but I know a lot of people won’t care about this.

Wanted: Dead has become my favourite PS5 game, that isn’t some kind of re-release. I very, very rarely have wanted to come back and replay a game so much or so often since the early PS3 days, which is now around 15 years ago. If gaming is not doing well right now then games like Wanted: Dead is the medicine, even with the all the issues that were present in the game at launch.

I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a bit more discussion around the story, world and characters too but I guess not many people played it. I feel bad about how much I initially glossed over and didn’t think about it. It’s actually really good. This world is really cool, I love the characters and I’m really hoping for a sequel.




STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS




It’s a cyber punk, alternate version of our world, set in Hong Kong but with a very international cast of characters. Meat is rare and there seems to be clear separation of the different classes of people. It is about a corporation convincing the public that they have made synths (= working class) but really they haven’t. The corporation literally owns people, has their own security force and seems to have a lot of control over politics and the police. Then there is the whole ending with the reveals and the anime cut scenes. I didn’t expect the game to hit this much and have a story this good after that opening diner cut scene. I was just expecting stylish, irreverent fun. There’s so many interesting deliberate choices as well, like the voice actors, only one karaoke song and it’s 99 Luftballons, Stone’s police car is a Maserati from the early 90s and there is one random Nems song. There’s just too much to list. I have so many questions as well, like how did this game even get made? Why is the technology the way it is in this world? Why are there live action cooking segments? Will Hannah/Emma find peace and/or resolution?