Wanted: Dead

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.