Wanted: Dead

An engaging story about a group of dirty cops in cyberpunk Hong Kong, Wanted: Dead is a modest but highly enjoyable game dripping with the atmosphere of violent B movies and full of intense, memorable shootouts and swordfights. Be prepared to die often, because the game’s difficulty level is a throwback to the PS2 era.

Like its inspirations, Wanted: Dead also gives you the entirety of itself as upfront as possible. It may require a certain amount of nostalgia for its predecessors to truly enjoy, but the package seems poised to stand well enough on its own for the audience and budget it is aiming for.

Wanted: Dead has an anachronistic flair that I am incredibly fond of… So, if you don’t exactly hate that Wanted: Dead seems like a game wholly out of time, I wholeheartedly recommend Hannah Stone’s B-Movie shenanigans.

Wanted: Dead has a very entertaining combat system based mainly on the use of white weapons, full of ultra-violence, blood, dismemberments, combos and particularly devastating final techniques, but it limps in everything else: the AI of our team and the enemies is not efficient, the minigames are sometimes a pretext to unlock some collectible, other times an interruption between one mission and another, and the story, however interesting to follow, continuously breaks the action. The final question is: is a triumph of blades enough to justify the purchase? Definitely yes, if you loved the slasher films of the early 2000s, otherwise you might find the offer a bit scarce.

Wanted: Dead is certainly an experience. It's a weird game with occasional flashes of something great. It's difficult to recommend it solely based on that. It's disjointed, repetitive, and feels more like a collection of ideas stitched together into the rough shape of a game rather than anything cohesive. For a certain kind of gamer, this is going to be catnip, but for the average person, it's probably going to be too weird to work, and unfortunately, the gameplay isn't strong enough on its own merit to overcome that.

Wanted: Dead is a great action game, it has flashy visuals, violent combat full of blood and dismemberment, and mostly it has a great interesting if unusual story, carried by interesting characters, external influences and sinister plot. The world is built in a cool, refreshing way and the moment-to-moment gameplay is engaging though sometimes simple. It promises something unique, and it delivers something not only unique but recommendable to fans of futuristic worlds and action games.

Evaluating Wanted: Dead means coming to terms with the past of the action genre. We repeat: we had a lot of fun during the most excited moments, fighting against some of the more particular bosses, or noticing the constant references to pop, cyberpunk and the history of video games from the 2000s. Unfortunately, however, the weight of technical inaccuracies and the The inconsistency of the plot, the slowness of the interludes between one explosion of violence and the next, are evidently out of tune and condition the charm of an experience which in any case is capable of entertaining the most irredeemable action fans.

Despite not living up to the character action games it clearly draws inspiration from, Wanted: Dead is a competent action game in its own right.

Wanted: Dead will make several admirers of old-time action-shooters happy, but it seems like a wasted opportunity and many gamers will find it frustrating and unrefined.

Wanted: Dead is evocative of a mid-tier 6th console generation hack & slash game in all the right ways, as well as all the wrong ones too.

Wanted: Dead starts off strong with plenty to learn and enjoy, but towards the end bogs itself down by trying to be difficult, forgoing what made it good to begin with.

Nice try. Wanted: Dead disappoints in every aspect, and it’s heartbreaking. You can see there’s an amazing game right there. But the gameplay is not precise enough to be fun. The game doesn’t have the time to tell the story of its goofball characters: it’s so short you’ll feel it hasn’t really started when you’re done with it.

Wanted: Dead is marred by issues in its gameplay, story, and characters, but most of all its main downside is its short length with credits rolling only after around 6-7 hours.

Wanted: Dead has glimpses of greatness but is held back by mediocre systems and design choices that keep it from flourishing. Brief flashes of brilliance can’t help but be overshadowed by combat that feels repetitive, and voice actors that sound bored despite the surrounding chaos. Its difficulty, combat style, and visceral style will bring it some attention, but it more than likely won't be enough to keep most players enthralled for long.

Wanted: Dead is an intentionally messy throwback, one that some people are going to adore while others lament. All the AA jank of a PlayStation 3 action game wrapped up in a janky 2023 modern gaming bow.

The fact that it successfully revives the 2000's style of games, along with their problems, doesn't mean it deserves any kind of a pass. Wanted: Dead is aimed at a strictly specific audience and no one else. It doesn't even have impressive graphics to grab the attention of the rest of us, and the voice over is mediocre and irritatingly repetitive. The fact that, price-wise at least, it's being marketed as an AAA title can only be described as another joke by its creators.

A trip back in time in both good and bad ways, Wanted: Dead is bad, but intentionally so. There is sure to be a crowd that will enjoy this PS2 throwback, but it won't hold the attention of modern gamers for long.

Violent, ridiculous, and occasionally fun, Wanted: Dead misses a lot of its marks but is still worth a look for the devoted.

Wanted: Dead is a bloodthirsty romp with challenging gameplay, but it feels unduly harsh, and more frustrating than fun. Accompanied by an inconsistent narrative, poor presentation, and repetitive boss battles, it results in a mediocre experience overall.

An intentionally janky experience that will make you laugh in amusement at its balls-to-the-wall randomness and moan in frustration at its awkward gameplay features. A fair attempt at bringing back the fun, no-nonsense action games of the PS2/PS3 era, but one that does not quite hit the same heights as those B-tier titles. A specific crowd who enjoys these less fluid action games will find something to like here, but maybe wait for a sale before taking that ride to crazy town.

Irreverence works when you yourself have that playful perspective too, not just as a set of jigsaw pieces that actually don’t make any sort of picture at all.

Wanted: Dead feels like it was released with only the game’s most basic concepts brought together. Its combat doesn’t evolve, enemy movement feels unnatural, camerawork is bad, the difficulty balance is a disaster, there is a lack of enemy variety and the story doesn’t make sense. The idea of combining sword fighting and third-person shooting in one combat system isn’t bad in itself. If the development team had focused on fleshing this out rather than adding unsatisfying minigames on the side, things might have been different.

Wanted: Dead promised a violent action game, with a badass style and unexpected mechanics, but instead we've found a frustrating experience that rarely had any fun. We cannot recommend it.

At best, a mediocre action shooter that is reminiscent of games from the turn of the millennium, mainly due to its outdated technology.

There’s an action game underneath all of Wanted: Dead’s problems that is not half bad, especially if you liked games like No More Heroes, Devil’s Third, and Wet. It’s ridiculous in its context and action. Unfortunately, for everything good I could say about this game, there was at least one or two things keeping me from enjoying it. Between cringe-worthy dialogue, game crashes, clashing moods, random and ridiculously difficult moments, and broken mechanics, Wanted: Dead takes a lot of effort just to play, let alone enjoy.

Wanted: Dead isn’t as bad as the worst games to come out recently but sloppy game design and story-telling has let down what could have been a decent game to play.

Despite its clear and comprehensive flaws, Wanted: Dead is still weirdly likeable, and will undoubtedly find a similarly strange and unique fanbase to worship at its feet.

Wanted: Dead feels like a callback to the worst games of the Xbox/PS2 era. The game has a distinct lack of polish when it comes to its enemy design, and, combined with the horrid voice acting and confusing storyline that's only explained through supplementary material, it feels like the ultimate case of wasted potential that could've become something better had the developers put a bit more thought into it.

It’s easy to rip into Wanted: Dead. Basically, everything about this game is bad, except for the bloody finishing moves. Which, incidentally, were the main thing touted by the trailers. [page 58]

Ultimately, Wanted: Dead appears to be a frankly negligible game, which has the narrative side as its only reason of interest. Too bad, because when we started it for the first time we really hoped to find ourselves in front of a modern emulator of Ninja Gaiden, but as we played we ended up only wishing more and more intensely to get to the end as soon as possible to be able to use the uninstall function and forget it.

I want everyone to play Wanted: Dead, but I don’t want anyone to spend any more money on it than they’d be comfortable spending on, say, a guilty takeaway meal. In its best moments, it feels like an oasis in a desert, a balm for the self-serious excesses of Sony‘s first party offerings. At its worst, it’s incredible how something so seemingly confident and free in its own strangeness can make such obvious and dull choices.

It's not often that the promotion campaign might be more enjoyable than the final product, but Wanted: Dead may have to grin and bear this ignominy. Despite some effort to subvert genre norms with its characters and amusing mini-games, the core action is bogged down by low production values, imbalance, and repetition. For every moment it hits its stride, there's another where it stubs its toe, and some slick execution animations are as imaginative as it gets.

Even if you adore C-tier action titles like Wet, Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico, and Stranglehold, Wanted: Dead will disappoint. The cutscenes are torturously bad and the derivative action is monotonous. Not even a collection of quirky mini-games can help save this ill-fated hack-and-slash/shooter hybrid.