I bought Wanted Dead at a convention at full price despite all of the rather harsh things said about the game and I held off playing it for a while because of it, I finally played the game and what do I think?
Game is a mess, it is very Cyber City 808 inspired from the Cyberpunk setting, the premise of "criminals" being sent on suicide missions in a police force and the hilariously bad voice acting and dialogue. Best way of describing the game is what if Ninja Gaiden, John Wick, Cyber City 808, Kill Bill, Jak sequels, Yakuza, Gears of War, Metal Gear Rising Revegenace, and Max Payne ever had a baby, you'd get Wanted Dead. It's a game that feels more like a proof of concept than a fully fleshed out game than anything.
I start Wanted Dead and I notice things right away. First being the skill tree is stupid and you need to unlock basic actions to stuff like dodge roll, throw grenades, bullet time, a counterattack after parrying, and finishing moves on dismembered enemies. Ninja Gaiden 2 lets you do the final ability I mentioned at the start, why not Wanted Dead especially since it's an important move that is a key part of combat.
Hannah can't deflect bullets while blocking and sprinting meaning you will take hits while you are attacking spongey enemies. Raiden can do this but Hannah Stone can't. To Wanted Dead's credit, there is a dedicated block button for melee attacks.
Easy mode is ideal since you can take more damage to compensate for the lack of bullet blocking, and you have more hit points since enemies are also spongey, and you can max out the skill tree much quicker, and how challenging the late game gets.
Ninjas and chaingunners are the hardest enemies in the game. They both take a lot of damage and they both break out of your combo really easily on top of being able to rip your health bar to shreds even on easy mode. You will need to use your stims whenever fighting these guys.
Outside of that you get riot shield users, firearms users and weaker enemies who use melee weapons and enemies who actively use grenades. The game has this enemy roster along with the chaingunners and ninjas for pretty much all of it's campaign with the former being thrown in around the halfway point. You fight spider robots twice and they just feel like a weird Call of Duty helicoptor fight randomly thrown into a game like this.
Wanted Dead has difficulty inspired by arcade and NES games. Game is short so they add difficulty by spawning lots of enemies, the only game the game knows how to challenge is by adding ninjas and chaingunners and have checkpoints super spaced out. To add more challenge, the harder parts of the game does not have the character of "Doc" to give you one extra life before you see the restart screen.
Parry is highly encouraged and even with the parry window skill unlocked, I still could never get the rhythmn down, I was never really good with systems like this but I thought this skill was supposed to make the whole thing more forgiving. Gun parries are easier to pull off and require less strict timing by comparison, these are nice to look at too.
Bosses can be challenging but compared to parts earlier in the game where you fight tough enemy guanlets beforehand, these guys are pushovers by comparison.
There is an ability for Hannah to do multiple takedowns but for the life of me I don't know how to activate and it seems to happen randomly.
It gives you over the shoulder aiming like Metal Gear Rising does and it feels just as awkward and pointless in that game. It would've made more sense to do the Devil May Cry thing and have two handed weapons be used in conjuction to melee rather than being able to aim. The Gears of War style cover system is also pointless since most combat will happen at close range and ammo for guns are limited. The bullet time is also pointless due to the aforementioned problem. Grenades are also useless since there is no arc for grenades throws and throwing them pretty much depends on guess work.
Game has tons of weird "quirks" about it. The voice acting and dialogue are not geniunely good, sort of reminiscent of the Cyber City 808 english dub. Then the game randomly turns into Kill Bill with anime cutscenes that happen mostly used for flashbacks. It can be jarring since the game uses a realistic art style but then randomly turn into anime for no clear reason. You will occasionally get into weird mini games during it's campaign much like Jak 2 and 3 but the mini games themselves more akin to a Yakuza game. Unlike Jak 2 and 3, these mini games aren't mandatory to progress. There is a side scroller that Hannah plays randomly as part of the campaign.
The late game twist barely has enough foreshadowing for the whole thing to land and have any emotional impact.
Good things about Wanted Dead is that the kill animations are great and are awesome to look and very John Wick inspired, I love me some good kill animations, Wanted Dead has many of them. It carried me through much of the game along with gory and over the damage and death animations.
The health system is also rather unique and I would like to see it pop up again. You take damage, but you can recover that damage by landing hits and doing takedowns all though they are parts of your health, this another aspect of the game that makes the game beatable on easy mode. This system despite how difficult the game can get helps make the game from feeling impossible to beat.
I like how there are very few combos which means Hannah won't have dozens of moves I will never use and I will just be alternating between her 2 avaliable gun combos.
The end credits and background music when I can hear it is pretty good and fits the action.
Overall, Wanted Dead definately is the weirdest recent AAA game release I have played in a long while. The game is quirky and weird and has many things that will turn people away from it from the skill tree, the presentation, and how the game as a whole feels like a proof of concept more so than a fleshed out game, but I say it's worth checking out a game so odd, it has to be seen to be believed.
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