The story of Wanted Dead follows a week in the life of Hannah Stone. She is a cyborg convict who had her life sentence commuted when she agreed to take on high-risk missions for the Hong Kong Police.
Wanted Dead has you going through missions that are broken up by acts/days, couple that with a checkpoint system and it all works really well for short play sessions between segments with cut scenes and QTE events help to break up the combat-focused gameplay and to move the story forward.
The way the game plays is really fun and unique as instead of focusing on one genre, this game blends two genres; hack and slash and third-person shooter. As you clear rooms of enemies and complete objectives, you can go in guns blazing or you can take up your sword and chop up your enemies. Each genre gives you a sense of freedom that isn’t really seen in games like this, where you can sneak around and take out enemies with your sword or empty a clip into a group of enemies behind cover, the choice is yours in how you choose to take on each objective.
When enemies are hit by gunfire, the bullets hit the designated areas that you aim at such as arms, legs, etc, rather than a general indication of being hit like a bullet sponge. Despite not looking like being hit like a bullet sponge, the enemies can be bullet sponges and seem to take more bullets than they should.
Therefore it’s going to be more efficient to take out your enemies with your melee weapon, and a lot more satisfying. What I mean by this is that they took what they did with the gunplay and did a complete about-face. When you take on your enemies with your sword, you literally are cutting them down and by that, I mean you can cut off arms, and legs, cut them in half, and even decapitate them. Cutting off limbs will cause enemies to scream and somewhat die slowly, while cutting them in half or decapitating them serves as a quick death as one would expect with just the right amount of blood effects. With gunplay being slow and methodical and the melee combat being fast and fluid, it gives a yin and yang type approach to the combat.
Besides the combat, the game offers an RPG element in the sense that you can earn experience points or skill points to put towards a skill tree. These skills range from reloading your guns faster, and taking less damage, to entirely new abilities such as a ground shattering areal punch and further expanding your freedom of playing the game the way you want.
Graphically, the game is impressive in some ways and not in others. Environmentally, the lighting is very well done but the areas seem a tad bland and flat and textures on objects like desks, floors, and walls don’t have much detail. Character models look good, but like the textures, they feel a tad flat and don’t feel like they belong on current-gen hardware. But what the game lacks in the environmental and character model detail, it makes up for in the combat.
Explosions from grenades and rockets are large and loud, and cause things like paper and cups to scatter from the physics of the explosion and the bodies will rag-doll appropriately, which is really nice attention to detail. The detail in the melee combat is pretty impressive and gives a good idea of where the developer’s focus was when designing this game.
The sound in Wanted Dead isn’t much to write home about, you have the occasional one-liners from enemies or the friendly NPCs and outside of that you have the music. Now the music in the game is pretty good, it’s not spectacular, but it works to set the tone of the game. The music is fast-paced techno style, hard-hitting and punchy which emphasizes the action-packed nature of the game well. But it’s not unique to the game in the sense that other action-packed titles have similar style music.
Given all of this, is the game worth picking up? If you want an over-the-top hack-and-slash game that has third-person shooting take a back seat, then look no further than Wanted Dead. That’s not to say that this is a bad game, in fact, it shouldn’t have gotten all of the flak it’s gotten. It’s not the game that we thought we were getting, but it’s still a blast to play with very satisfying combat. I would definitely suggest checking this game out!
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.