Wanted: Dead Review: Where Imagination Dies

Good luck finding redeeming value in Wanted: Dead. Its mix of melee and gun combat is already mindless, with AI characters that aimlessly walk around yelling things like “There’s no escape, bitch” until you dismember them. And yet, somehow, the intermissions spent hanging around with Lt. Hannah Stone’s allies are even more tedious—sad excuses for minigames that include a karaoke performance of Nena’s “99 Luftballons.”

Unbelievably, those intermissions are arguably the best parts of Japanese developer Soleil’s game. If you’ve ever been to karaoke, you know that even a messy, drunken performance can be entertaining. Wanted: Dead’s plot, a would-be pastiche of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, is so rote and style-less that those wildly out-of-place intermissions, however disposable, end up stealing the show. Certainly the ramen-eating minigame has a sense of rhythm that doesn’t rub off on the game as a whole.

Wanted: Dead’s initial pitch to the player, a 90-second clipshow introducing the alternate reality of Stone’s world, goes something like this: Since Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, Dauer Synthetics has been developing a human-like workforce, and in August 2022, the company’s bankruptcy threatens to expose some ugly truths about those so-called synthetics. Stone, a former prisoner who’s been employed through the Hong Kong police department on Dauer’s behalf, now finds herself and her team in the middle of an uprising.

That’s the extent of the game’s plot—a flimsiness that’s made all the more transparent by how the characters feel so disconnected from the proceedings. It’s almost as if the game is going out of its way to evade matters of plot. At one point, a news report that elaborates on Dauer’s government dealings is cut off by Stone praising the food at the ’50s diner that she and her team are eating at. Later, when her boss calls in an assignment, the screen cuts to black just as she’s asking for details, and the scene resumes as the group is charging into a robbery at Dauer HQ.

More damning, this lack of specificity extends to just about every other aspect of Wanted: Dead, from the aesthetics to the gameplay. This is a game where things just happen, without rhyme or reason. The cutscenes are in-engine, until they’re suddenly presented as anime. Basic movement is that of a cover shooter, or maybe a parry-heavy slasher, until you realize that Wanted: Dead doesn’t care and you can just keep running between enemies, hacking them apart.

Elsewhere, weapons are either wildly inefficient against the litany of bullet-sponge foes, or absurdly overpowered, like a chainsaw that allows Stone to dismember any foe, including mini-bosses, with a single blow. The game relishes violence, boasting over 20 gratuitous finishing dismemberments, some of which have to be deliberately unlocked from the very basic skill tree, and yet for some reason it slaps a “Censored” banner over any chainsaw-related kill.

With only five extremely linear stages to clear, you’d think that the game would at least be short. But the random crashes, erratic difficulty spikes, and failure of enemies to load result in players having to reload and replay long stretches of so-called “game” between the unreasonably spaced-out checkpoints. As un-fun as it is to hack through enemies in Wanted: Dead a single time, having to repeat the exact same sequence becomes unbearable.

Wanted: Dead is built around killing arenas, like the hedge maze of Kowloon Park or the dance floor of Club Deaf Panther, with Stone’s team being blocked from progressing until every foe has been killed. But there’s no sense that these are real places, which makes them all bleed together. Bizarrely, as you escape down Kowloon Street, artificial barriers funnel Stone’s team through buildings and onto rooftops, all of which look and feel exactly the same, save for the way that day turns to night as you enter and exit buildings. And with only three or four different types of enemies, you’ve essentially seen everything that the game has to offer after 15 minutes.

At the start of Wanted: Dead, players are given the chance to enter a training simulator that walks them through the basic functionality of combat against holographic foes. It’s revealing when one of the levels in the game is set inside the drab and boxy corridors of that simulator. Apart from your foes now being flesh and blood, there’s functionally no difference in killing them. But, then, nearly every level of Wanted: Dead is practically the same, and no amount of stolen memes, nostalgic riffs, and non sequiturs can hide that depressing fact.

This game was reviewed with code provided by 110 Industries SA.