Katana, Handgun, Katana, repeat.
Wanted: Dead is a beautiful mess in every sense of the phrase. Its story and dialogue are completely nonsensical, its voice acting is downright atrocious, and the checkpointing will absolutely infuriate you. However, despite those glaring issues, among several others that continue to pile on, Wanted: Dead is also a complete banger of an early 2000s action title that is absolutely bat-shit crazy. Yes, the game is a trainwreck, but it’s a very intentional one, for better and worse.
Built by ex-Team Ninja staff, I had a rough idea of what to expect; action, dismemberment, and more action. While Wanted: Dead does deliver on those expectations, its haphazard mix of satisfying melee and disappointing gunplay does leave a lot to be desired. Wanted: Dead is a fairly enjoyable experience, but you have to turn off the part of your brain that is expecting any sort of a polished and coherent release, largely because developer Soleil threw those concepts out the window with a brutal and janky dropkick.
Wanted: Dead is the perfect example of a game I’d recommend renting if that sort of option was still a thing in the year of our lord 2023, or even if it graced our presence down the road via Gamepass or one of the seventeen PlayStation Plus tiers. But at a full $80 cad ($60 usd), It’s sadly a price too steep for what you’re really getting here, despite the fleeting moments of fun that Wanted: Dead occasionally offers. Should Wanted: Dead significantly drop in price, either to lower its cost of entry permanently or via a sale, then it's there where I could give the title a decent but cautious recommendation.
Taking the setup right out of the Suicide Squad, Wanted: Dead takes a quartet of criminals, slaps a rifle in their hand, and sets them loose to dish out justice how they see fit. The Zombie Squad consists of Hannah Stone, whom you’ll be hacking and slashing with, as well as Doc, Herzog, and Cortez, all of which are the very cliches of cliches when it comes to the depiction of most criminals you’ve seen in various movies and tv, making them appear to be larger than life personalities than that of making them feel even remotely realistic. And while the Zombie Squad is primarily a “Riot Response” team, each member of the squad is laughably packing a very lethal kit, especially as Hannah can carve up anything that gets in her way, and she will. Arms, legs, heads; nothing is safe.
While Wanted: Dead does have something of a story through its roughly 10-hour campaign, it rarely ever makes a lick of sense, or even what it wants from its characters or player. Plotlines are dropped almost immediately after they appear and most scenes seem set up simply to allow the blood to start spraying. Even once the credits rolled, I still didn’t know much of anything that had just happened, literally staring at my screen with a big "What the fuck just happened?" look on my face. I also found it pretty bizarre that while this game takes place in Hong Kong, not a single member of the Zombie Squad or its supporting cast is Asian whatsoever.
110 Industries has stated that Wanted: Dead is a “love letter to the sixth generation of video game consoles.” Now, to those who are not keeping score, that’s the era of the PlayStation 2, Original Xbox, and Gamecube. If Wanted: Dead was aiming to play around in that now-dated sandbox, it checked all the required boxes to do so and then some.
Wanted: Dead approaches its narrative delivery with all the presence and tone of a Tarantino flick, even starting the game in a very retro diner, which coincidentally, shares a name with a certain Atomic release that has also dropped recently. This scene is to set up the team as Hannah is fairly outgoing, and loves to talk, whereas Herzog is a perv, Doc is the calm one, and Cortez speaks through his sign language.
I’ve mentioned the horrid voice acting and honestly, it’s pretty bad. And while I keep telling myself that, I found Fee Marie Zimmerman as Hannah to be oddly endearing. Wanted: Dead is her only acting credit, and honestly, it shows. But there is something about her “first take” delivery that is almost perfect in a way. It’s really bad, don’t get me wrong, but it sort of lives in the ballpark of ‘so bad it’s good’. Do I want to see her back as Hannah one day? Absolutely.
Joining the cast as well is Stefanie Joosten of Metal Gear Solid fame. While her role as Quiet was as frequent as her namesake, Joosten is actually a member of the development team here as she not only voices a character in the game, but she is also the cutscene director and lead cinematic director, which if you’ve seen her live-action spots for the game, it starts to make sense here.
While also lending her vocals to some of the game’s music, as well as during the headache-inducing karaoke mini-game, Joosten plays Vivienne Niemantsverdriet, the Gunsmith at the Police station that just so happens to have a ton of cats. If you are a deep-cut anime fan, I’m betting you understood that out-of-left-field reference right away. Joosten also recorded a few live-action shorts for the title that features Vivienne, so make sure to check those out if you want to understand just how crazy this whole game is.
Now, cliche and badly written characters aside, not to mention a batshit story that never wants to make any sense, Wanted: Dead is still oddly satisfying to play, but that too comes with a caveat. While the game is sometimes frustratingly hard, it’s largely due to a few enemy types that are often placed in environments where the camera is a villain as well, doing whatever it can to end your miserable life. And, when you take in the poorly implemented shooting mechanics that never feel as precise as you want them to be, especially with a cover system that never feels useful, you have a game that sometimes isn’t worth the effort.
Now, that said, glue that gun to my backside, cuz taking out the katana is where Wanted: Dead keeps its fun locked away and should be your focus on how you execute not just its combat, but all the meat cushions that are pelting you with a constant spray of bullets. While there is still an element of jank when it comes to pulling off any of the sword attacks, it’s still surprisingly fun to use, especially once all the body parts start flying.
And while Hannah will snag a better-looking sword in one of the early moments of the game, it simply is for aesthetics as there is no weapon customization for the sword, just for your guns, allowing you to swap in scopes and other attachments that offer give and take changes to your stats. It’s not a deep system and often feels tacked on to check that feature off on the back of the box.
Missions are all set around Hannah and her team mostly disobeying orders and gunning and slashing down every single soul they encounter. The ballet of death and blood is constantly flowing as fast as you can slash that sword or attempt to benefit from your guns. There is a pretty decent handgun/sword combat attack that is very serviceable, but the automatic rifle you get often just doesn’t feel anywhere good to shoot.
Where Wanted: Dead finds its footing, almost as if the game has you limping around in one single shoe, is via its swordplay and execution system, often seeing so many limbs flying off that you’ll swear everyone has at least a dozen arms. This whole dismemberment system really shows off the Team Ninja flavor that I was expecting, I just wish the sword itself had interesting and varied combo attacks. There is a slew of upgrades you’ll earn to enhance various skills for Hannah, but nothing here aids in making the swordplay feel more varied, which is a shame. Still, anything to do with the sword is Wanted: Dead’s best and only decent feature.
Apart from two-legged fodder, you’ll also take on a giant mech-tank, which makes a few appearances throughout the game when they feel like breaking up the constant flood of samey spongey enemies over and over again. There are a few boss encounters with an almost super-villain level of design to them that were pretty damn fun actually, I just wish there were more of them. Hell. one of the fights is against some bad guy who looks as if the developer scanned Tom Cruise’s face and simply slapped that texture on there.
In between missions, you’ll visit the Police station, an environment so comically large that you’ll quickly assume that there will be some sort of action taking place within its hallways. Still, this oversized building will allow you to explore for collectibles, find several of Vivienne’s cats, talk to various NPCs, and take in a few mini-games which include a claw game, karaoke, and a full sidescrolling shooter that is fairly decent but likely something you’ll only ever play once.
Wanted: Dead is not a terribly great-looking game even by last-generation standards. Character models are more or less fine but never impressive. Environments are a lot of the same-looking hallways and the few exteriors are often met with some painful camera work that will easily get you killed. The opening level is a rather long affair and has some of the best locations in the game, an area that easily had the most work and money spent on it.
Regardless of what settings I ran the game on, I noticed that the back half of the game ran considerably worse than the initial first few levels. I don’t have an extremely powerful PC, but I’ve heard from a lot of other people that that tended to be the case with them as well regardless of playing on PC or console. Now, I also checked out the game via the Steam Deck for a bit, but as it is not verified, I could only run it at low to medium settings and eventually had to drop it all the way down to get any sort of stable framerate in the last few levels. If the Steam Deck is your only viable means of PC gaming, I would suggest waiting until the game has been verified, if that is even in the cards.
Wanted: Dead also features several animated cutscenes that detail a bit of backstory into who Hannah is and sort of where she came from. These scenes are fairly decent but do feel like a low-budget alternative to convey some story without creating whole new models, locations, and assets. Personally, I sort of wish that the game’s main cutscenes were done this way as I really did enjoy these brief moments and feel that the game could have benefitted from more.
Wanted: Dead is by no means a bad game. It’s comprised of some intentional design that can easily look the part, but this focus on delivering a “sixth generation” action title does succeed in that regard. Still, I’m a firm believer that a game should first and foremost be fun and yet functional and Wanted: Dead lacks a lot of the latter. I appreciate the crazy that Soleil attempted here, the bizarre nature of what Wanted; Dead is, but I think there is a way to do that with still offering a better product in the end, especially one that is asking for the full AAA price and delivering a very mediocre AA game in the end.
Developer - Soleil. Publisher - 110 Industries. Released - February 14th, 2023. Available On - Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5, and Windows. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - PC via Steam. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Post Review Talk: After release, 110 Industries commented on their Twitter that additional work is being put into Wanted: Dead to ensure it meets the standards of its players. Whether that will contribute to a overall better experience, that remains to be seen.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.