![]() ![]() Just like its inspiration, Wanted: Dead hurls you into stages that feel more like a shooting gallery than a tight construction of peril that pushes you to experiment with newly unlocked skills. Imagine if Devil May Cry had a baby with Gears of War, and 21 years later a constantly inebriated version of that little bastard kicked down the door while yelling about how he’d been dumped, and you’d sort of have an idea of what to expect here. It’s repetitive action with awful lock-on mechanics, a disproportionate number of grenades that’ll rock your momentum, and gunplay scenes where there’s never enough ammo. Each character has the same amount of depth as an explosion in a Transformers movie, juxtaposed against some of the most mind-boggling cutscenes involving these heavily armed weirdos.Īt its core, Wanted: Dead is a series of meat grinder corridors that you’ll run, gun, and samurai sword eviscerate through while you tap your foot to the beat of some heavy synth music. ![]() It’s the MJF of its genre, committed to kayfabe to an extreme degree as you take control of a black ops team sent in to clean up Hong Kong’s cyberpunk criminal underworld. ![]() Wanted: Dead plays like a car wreck in motion on purpose, but there’s something unmistakably charming about a game that commits so thoroughly to this bit. It’s the charm of an older era of gaming with its ugly side intact – a Frankenstein creation that stitches together the rotting corpse of sixth-generation action games with the more attractive flesh of modern graphics. ![]() Japanese developer Soleil’s nod to the past isn’t all rose-tinted glasses with a new coat of paint. Make no mistake, Wanted: Dead will be responsible for your food budget being spent on new controllers after you’re driven to smash your current one into plastic atoms. And yet I’m mesmerized by this love letter to the early noughties, this brash and shallow tale of loose cannons unleashed on the streets of Hong Kong to take care of terrorists, rampaging machines, and the occasional cyborg ninja gone rogue. It’s a janky throwback by design to the action games of the PS2 era, complete with infuriating difficulty spikes, characters who sound like an English dub of anime circa 1997, and anachronistic gameplay that makes you yearn for more modern interactive conveniences. ![]()
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