Wanted: Dead

Wanted: Dead has truly been an experience. Combat takes center stage, though the fun of hacking and slashing away at lesser enemies is soon overshadowed by getting pummeled into oblivion during boss fights. Some aspects of the game could use some ironing out, but, otherwise, it’s a fun enough experience to pass the time and wrack up achievements & trophies.

In the end, I still enjoyed it enough to put in more than fifty hours in and still want to play more, despite all its problems. When it’s running as intended, it’s clear that this is the kind of game I’d like to see a lot more of — bloody, unpretentious, and gameplay-focused in a manner that’s eminently replayable thanks to strong core combat. That said, the good stuff in Wanted: Dead is buried under a mountain of problems — and when I say buried, I mean buried deep.

Although it is from the creators of Ninja Gaiden, Wanted: Dead still has a good way to go to become one. Good ideas and an interesting action design lost due to technical problems and poorly calibrated difficulty.

Wanted: Dead is a game not for everyone. A lot of modern players will hate their time with this title, but if you have a fondness for that old-school challenge and love cutting people into Shish Kabob, you'll really like this game. However, even if you're in that camp, you should wait for a sale, as the game's not worth the $60 price tag with only five stages. Plus, other elements, like no additional melee weapons and poor performance at times, do drag the game down a bit.

Even though I think the difficulty can be a little over tuned at times and the checkpoints are a little too spread out at times, for every moment I had frustration, I was still compelled to move forward and try again and again. Sometimes you just need a game where you turn off your brain to slash and blast everything in your way and can have fun doing so with some over the top violence, Wanted: Dead delivers that, even if it does feel way over the top with its style.

Wanted: Dead has poor execution, lack of possibilities, and repetitive structure. It's far from Ninja Gaiden legacy.

Less time spent on the needlessly long cutscenes and in-between mission sections, and more on the feel of the combat and we could have had a little gem on our hands. As it is, this only gets a recommendation for those willing to suffer for their entertainment.

Wanted: Dead is very much an acquired taste, but those for whom its eclectic nonsense clicks will likely love it, even if it's not technically a great game. It's a throwback to a bygone age of gaming that's clearly made with passion, with the team just doing whatever the hell it likes rather than sticking to typical gaming standards to create something that certainly stands out in the modern landscape, if not always in the way it intends to. Stingy checkpointing can kill the game's momentum should you fall foul of a tricky encounter and have to replay large portions of a level, but there will be some folks who like that extra punishment for failure — just as with more or less everything else about Wanted: Dead, it's all going to land for someone out there, and I can see this one going down as a bit of a cult classic.

The visuals are great, and the story may be a tad generic but fits well into the kind of world they built. I hope to get better at the game and think we need more games that bring melee action into the blend of shooters, but the controls need to feel just right for it to work on a grand scale. Wanted: Dead is an okay hybrid game and despite it giving me vibes from my time with Devil’s Third, this is a way better experience overall and would-be players should check all the videos before making that final decision.

Wanted: Dead doesn’t give a damn what you think. It throws ideas at you left, right and centre, with reckless abandon. Luckily, most of them stick to form this weird and wonderful video game.

Wanted: Dead falls short of the reputation of Ninja Gaiden's developers. Not only it doesn't bring anything new, but it also demeans everything that already exists, adding elements that detract from what is essential in a video game, regardless of genre. The characters are hollow, the story is superficial, and the combat, which should be the strong point, is a complete mess. In the middle of 2023 and with a resume of weight, it was expected a different result from Soleil.

Wanted: Dead is only half a successful experiment. The idea of mixing the shooter genre with the hack'n'slash action game one is good, but it is dwarfed by the shallowness of some of the mechanics, a substandard technical realisation and problematic balancing.

There are things about Wanted: Dead that I really liked and others that really annoyed me. With technical tweaks and quality of life improvements it can become a very enjoyable game that seeks a niche of players who missed certain transgressive, immature and fun-seeking games from a few years ago.

Wanted: Dead has a charm and sense of humor that is rarely found in modern games, and it backs that up with an amazing combat system that only gets better the more you play.

The experience, while good, was somewhat uneven. The empty storyline and narrative don't live up to the feeling of pure, frenetic action, which is the best thing about the game. Wanted: Dead hits the mark with its action, but loses solidity with the story.

Everything in Wanted: Dead is over-the-top. It's clichéd, it's deliberately preposterous and a clear nod to a bygone era. A frequently frustrating experience that requires constant full focus, and due to the brutal difficulty level it won't suit everyone but for those of us who have long dreamed of a resurrected Ryu Hayabusa, it's a gift from heaven.

Frankly, this game just isn’t very good.

Wanted: Dead is a mess of a game with hints of excellence strewn about. I wanted to love it a lot more than I did. Instead the game kept making me frustrated at every turn. There have been a million examples of how to make a challenging game without making it frustrating. Wanted: Dead is the epitome of the latter. It simply uses lazy tropes instead of clever game play to create its difficulty. The end result is a game that has some great ideas, but will not interest most players. I expect most to quit before finishing the first boss.

On paper, Wanted: Dead has everything you could possibly want from an action game, but it’s mired in poor execution, ropey presentation, and more than a few unusual design choices. Wanted? We’re not so sure.

Wanted: Dead is an incredibly disappointing action effort that presents some decent ideas but fails to execute any of them properly. The idea of fusing hack and slash combat with shooter mechanics has lots of potential here, and the cyberpunk setting is initially intriguing. However, in practice it's all very clunky and janky and frustrating and beset by performance issues. There's a bunch of odd side activities thrown in to try to lighten the mood between battles, but it's just not enough in the end. With a very weak narrative, poor voice-acting, rubbish action and drab level design, this is one game that's best avoided.

While there’s an audience out there for Wanted: Dead’s schtick, the myriad of issues with the whole game make it a tough sell.