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Did an AI write this game? - Wanted: Dead Quick Review

13K View2023-02-18

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip it. Wanted: Dead advertises itself as from the makers of Ninja Gaiden, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that means it will have the tightly designed gameplay of that legendary series. Instead, this game offers a messy blend of ninja action and third-person shooter that never gels together into something cohesive. And layered on top of it all is one of the most egregious examples of bad video game writing paired with even worse voice acting that I’ve seen since the days of the original Xbox. Is that the only part of Ninja Gaiden they were trying to learn from?

TIME PLAYED

I played three hours of Wanted: Dead. I completed one-and-a-half of the game’s lengthy missions and watched some inexplicably bizarre cutscenes. But even that short amount of time left me exhausted and bored with the undercooked gameplay.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Stylish kills. Wanted: Dead’s rogue police officer protagonist, Hannah Stone, puts her one robot arm to great use by slicing open baddies with a katana. The game’s combat often felt too sloppy to get a handle on, but when I managed to stun enemies, I could initiate a finishing blow. These were brutal, well-animated, and satisfying, and the game reportedly has over fifty variations. Shame about everything else going on here.

WHAT SUCKS

• The rest of combat. First things first: Wanted: Dead’s third-person shooting is abysmal. Stone takes cover automatically when situated near it, but she does so in a slow, carefree way that guaranteed I took damage regularly while trying to get out of sight. The guns themselves all feel similarly low-impact, and bullets strike enemies with all the impact of a piece of wet salami striking the pavement.

Worse, though, is how the game wastes what should be its strongest combat element: the melee fighting. As you might expect “from the makers of Ninja Gaiden,” swordplay feels significantly better than gunplay in Wanted: Dead. Not Ninja Gaiden good, but passable at least. However, swapping to melee combat is a death wish whenever more than one enemy is around. Switching targets is inconsistent, the camera sucks at keeping up with the action, and if any of the enemies have guns, they’ll just continue taking potshots at you from afar until you die.

• Level design. Despite ostensibly taking place in a neon-lit cyberpunk city of the near future, Wanted: Dead has Stone and her allies in the Zombie Unit traipsing through office buildings and warehouses and, from what I saw, very little that shows off anything unique about this world. On top of the boring locations, the levels all progress in a completely linear fashion, even going so far as to have barriers blocking Stone’s path that she would be able to vault over in any other context.

• Friendly AI. Stone’s Zombie Unit partners will fight alongside her regularly, but don’t expect them to actually help much. I can’t count how many times I watched one of my buddies run in front of me as I was trying to shoot, jog up to the nearest enemy, aim their gun at close range, and then just stare for a good five to ten seconds before taking a shot. Incredible work. The only saving grace is that the enemy AI is about just as good.

• The writing. The tone of Wanted: Dead’s dialogue is so off-the-wall and goofy that for a while I was almost charmed by it. Unfortunately, while I think the game’s writers were going for something winking and self-aware, the script isn’t sharp enough to deliver the goods. Instead, the overlong cutscenes descend into self-parody of a self-parody, with stilted animations, intensely awkward pauses in conversation, and sentences that feel like they were written using auto-complete—or maybe one of those fancy new AI chatbots.

• Voice acting. Oh, it’s not just the writing either. There were moments where I wondered if a robot was reading Wanted: Dead’s script to me. The voice actors for basically every character in the game, including Stone, speak their lines with a monotone deadpan that goes beyond emotionless and into the territory of feeling totally disconnected from reality. The only line that had a spark of life in it was when Stone enthused about the quality of the shitty diner breakfast she was eating. Hey, I love pancakes too, but...what?

💬 Are you still going to check out Wanted: Dead despite my problems with it, or is this one a skip for you as well? Leave a comment and share your opinion.

Mentioned games

Wanted: Dead

7.6

Action RPGActionLinearBullet TimeAlternate HistoryAdventureSingleplayerThird Person

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Comments

$5|90|_|R|\|3`/$

5|90|_|R|\|3`/

I was disappointed to see how this game turned out. It looked really cool when they first showed it. It looks pretty bad though honestly from what I've seen recently.

2023-05-04

Author liked

Kef Author

very agreed! I thought some of the trailers seemed quirky and fun and was hoping the full game would be too :(

2023-05-04

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