Wanted: Dead Xbox Review

Billed as a cyberpunk action game, Wanted: Dead is the latest action extravaganza from Soleil – a development team composed of ex-Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive veterans – that is heavily inspired by hard-core action games of the past with a healthy dose of B-Grade 1990’s police action movie aesthetics thrown into the mix. At its heart, the game is a hybrid 3^rd person shooter and hack/slash title, a genre Team Ninja has extensive experience in.

Set in Honk Kong, Wanted: Dead follows the exploits of a group of war criminals turned specialist police squad known as the Zombie Squad. With a high body count under their belt and itchy trigger fingers in their pockets, they are a derided group that manages to get the job done, albeit with spectacularly bloody consequences.

What seems like a routine break-in at a giant corporation, soon plunges the Zombie Squad, and our main protagonist Lt. Hannah Stone, into a rabbit hole of betrayal, corporate back-stabbing and a Blade Runner-esque storyline concerning synthetics who might not actually be all that synthetic, to begin with.

Hannah rolls with a katana as her melee weapon, an assault rifle and a handgun as her permanent load while one extra weapon can be picked up in the field from downed enemies. You also have two types of grenades and a couple of health packs. In the field, you’ll get one to revive between checkpoints from a teammate and have to make everything count.

The 3^rd person shooting works the same as you’ve encountered in every game of its type by now. You automatically jump into the cover when close while holding down the aiming button will see you pop out from the cover. You can vault cover if it’s of the low-lying variety and blind fire over or around it as needed.

The shooting section of the game is competently executed. It doesn’t stand out particularly in any way and is there for you to whittle away all the projectile-based baddies you’ll be facing off against. Hannah’s assault rifle and handgun can be customised with a variety of grips, muzzles and scopes, all of which affect weapon stats. So there’s some thought into how you want to customise your gun based upon the accuracy, stopping power and spray pattern. Very quickly you’ll find out just how important it is to your sidearm most of all.

There are two big issues to the gunplay side though. First is that you’re limited on ammo and random enemy drops from enemies are just that, random. You can hit an area and be inundated with ammo or run through sections where you’re completely empty for long stretches. This is important because every enemy in the game is a bullet sponge of the worst variety. Couple that with what seems like random damage outputs and you can find yourself emptying an entire thirty-round clip into an enemy’s noggin before they go down right after the exact same enemy type just took 10 rounds to the head instead.

The second issue is that collision detection is wonky. Bullets and RPG rounds are just as liable to fly harmlessly through an enemy as they are to hit. And few things are as frustrating as when you’re shooting one of the game’s massive assault mercs with an RPG only to watch every shot detonate behind him, even with pinpoint accuracy. Couple that with poor collision detection that sees you getting hit behind and through cover, along with melee attacks that are clearly nowhere near you, and you have a lot of frustration to deal with.

Now the reason that you have so little ammo, and why your sidearm is so important, is because the developers don’t really want you to play the game as a 3^rd person shooter. No, they want you to play it as a melee combat game. And when you’ve run out of ammo, you have no choice but to rush the bad guys to cut ‘em down.

Now, this would be fine if the melee combat system was up to snuff. But unfortunately, it isn’t. The fact is, the hack/slash side of the game is downright abysmal with one of the worst combat systems I’ve been forced to use in ages. When you consider the team’s track record, specifically in the Ninja Gaiden series, this becomes absolutely mind-boggling as to how bad this system is.

Hannah has three melee combos available, a counter and one block, a dodge step into a dodge roll and her sidearm for counters. You’ve got a skill tree to purchase new skills from including, bizarrely, your block. That’s right, you have to buy your block and you can only block one attack in a combo chain. The game actually wants you to counter enemy attacks, and, in a better-designed game, I can see it playing out as an elegant battle of counters between the player and the NPC. But, sadly, this isn’t a better-designed game, it’s a downright badly designed one.

The entire melee combat system feels stilted, awkward and slow, with canned animations having to be played through their entirety before you can execute another move, whether that’s another strike in a combo or a dodge or sidestep. So instead of a smooth-flowing combat system, you have a stilted one that feels like you’re moving in treacle or entirely stuck while hammering away at the dodge button to get out of an attack purely because you tried to counter or block and it didn’t work. And then you’re dead.

Adding to the frustration is that enemy encounters usually throw every enemy type at you at once. Prioritisation does become key, but if you’ve played any melee game with projectile enemies in it, then you know that getting to gun-toting soldiers results in you getting shot to hell. Here it’s no different. Except that you end up getting shot from all sides and stabbed all at the same time. Bullets do less damage but count up en masse and you can watch most of your health bar disappear trying to get to one enemy and while you’re dealing with them. Couple that with how long it takes to kill one enemy, if the random damage isn’t in your favour, and you’re in a world of hurt very quickly regardless of which enemy type you choose to take down first.

Then there’s the game’s auto-aim which usually prioritises neither the accuracy nor common sense. There’s nothing quite like dodging a ninjas attack only to have Hannah aim her sidearm at an enemy one floor below leaving yourself open to getting stabbed in the back because you have to wait for whatever behind the scene system is to play to decide that something has completed and you can now turn around again. To be clear there’s no lock-on, just that auto-aim, so expect blind attacks from off-screen or moments where you’re stuck in a corner and can’t get out because the camera is in a bad position and the dodge roll just doesn’t want to go the way you want to.

And if you die, be prepared to do an entire gauntlet of enemies again until you hit the next checkpoint.

You have a squad of three NPC teammates that you don’t need to look after, but it’s ridiculous watching all three of them pumping three or more clips into the same enemy before it goes down.

Even after fifteen hours, I never got used to the awkward and slow combat system and ended up resorting to cheese methods to fight my way through. For that, I simply relied on my handgun to whittle away enemy health by dodging backwards as they got close, mostly because I had no ammo and the handgun also functions as a counter. It wasn’t the way I wanted to play, but a melee combat game that makes you not want to stab something to death is clearly doing something wrong.

Combat does have some highlights. Stagger an enemy and you can perform one of the game’s many brutal finishers, which are gorgeously animated and thoroughly, bloodily cathartic. The time it right and you can finish off multiple enemies in a row.

Outside of combat, you can roam the Police Station, catching up with your teammates, playing mini-games or activating cut scenes that delve into Hannah’s past, sometimes in a nicely animated anime style. Scattered across the levels and in the police station are a wealth of collectables which includes music, 3d models and character sheets.

Wanted: Dead’s story also leaves a lot to be desired as it doesn’t really go anywhere or explain things adequately. Stuff just. . . kind of happens.

Wanted: Dead also suffers from some of the worst voice acting and dialogue I’ve heard in some time. The game is, unintentionally hilarious. I’m sorry Forspoken, but this may just have you beat.

Visually Wanted: Dead isn’t going to set your console on fire. The game looks decidedly last-gen, like an early PS4 game. While some environments do shine, the game and its character models are pretty bland overall. There’s no visual difference between a Series X version versus playing it on Xbox One X. The only significant difference came in loading times while both versions suffered from frame rate dips. The game also crashed to the dashboard frequently.

I wanted to like Wanted: Dead. I really did. I was hoping that at some point it would become the videogame equivalent of an “It’s so bad, it’s good!” movie. But, unfortunately, it never does. With its terrible dialogue and voice acting, horrendously stilted combat system and wealth of bad design and enemy placement issues, Wanted: Dead is just bad. Make no mistake, the game is incredibly hard, but for all the wrong reasons. If you must fill that hack/slash void, you’d be better off getting the Ninja Gaiden Remastered collection, or any of the Devil May Cry games because Wanted: Dead is dead on arrival.

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