Wanted: Dead is infuriating. 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. 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.
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. Japanese developer Soleil’s nod to the past isn’t all rose-tinted glasses with a new coat of paint. 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.
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 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. 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.
At 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 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. 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.
Where to buy Wanted: Dead
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. Repetitive by choice, you’re able to string quick pistol shots together with deft sword attacks occasionally, turning nearby goons into bloody bags of missing limbs and lead-infused punching bags. That said, the cover system is a joke; trying to focus on one enemy without your head being used as a storage container for nearby bullets is non-existent; and the dialog will have you reaching for the mute button within the first hour.
Combined with some absurdly tough sections in levels, Wanted: Dead succeeds at feeling downright unfair with its level design. Out of health packs and functioning organs thanks to a stupidly difficult boss fight? Too bad, you’re going all the way back to a much earlier point in the level because checkpoints are for babies born after 2005.
Between levels in which you turn various Hong Kong locations into modern art with all the blood you’ve splashed on the walls, Wanted: Dead lets you engage in mini-games with your crew. And let me you, they are fantastically absurd.
Nailing prompts as you speedrun through a bowl of ramen, or engage in extreme karaoke make for some surprisingly fun downtime. There’s also an arcade game that you can try your hand at, or you can lose plenty of cash attempting to win action figures from a crane game that is obviously rigged. It’s utterly bonkers to distract yourself with these activities while listening to characters badly spout dialogue that makes Tommy Wiseau look like Tom Cruise in comparison, and I’m all here for it.
The point of all this, is that Wanted: Dead is a bad game, but an experience that’s exceptionally good at being terrible. There’s no season pass card here to grind through, no unnecessary live-service Macguffins to fork over cash for, and no cool swag locked behind a multiplayer rewards system. It looks like a remastered PS2 game with some neat ray tracing effects and bad lip-syncing. It feels incredibly antiquated when compared to contemporary games on the market. And its throwaway story will take you around 10-15 hours to complete on average.
The genius here is that the atrocious gameplay and mediocre storytelling are what make Wanted: Dead so memorable. If this game actually had some decent meat on its gameplay bones instead of the rancid bargain bin fillet that you’re forced to bite into, it’d be doomed to obscurity. But this is a game that you’ll love and loathe in equal measure, a beautiful mess that is destined to become a legend in its own lifetime. I would not be surprised if Wanted: Dead joins Second Sight, Asura’s Wrath, and Rockstar’s Table Tennis game in future discussions of cult-classic games, and I adore it for its unwavering dedication to unleashing pure Gen X bait on a crowd of unsuspecting Zoomers raised on the teat of regenerating health and multiple difficulty options.
Because fuck those guys. Let them feel what it’s like to play the equivalent of a digital hangover after it has vomited in your face.
Wanted: Dead is out now for PC, Xbox (One and Series generations), and PlayStation (4 and 5).
| Wanted: Dead review | |
Wanted: Dead is shameless with its inspirations, featuring awful writing, a cast of jerkasses, and action-heavy gameplay that is attractively appalling. It’s a mesmerizing catastrophe that flips a middle finger to anything created after 2001, resulting in one of the best worst games of all time. |
6.5 |
| Wanted: Dead was reviewed on Xbox Series X | |