Soleil Studios is made of former Team Ninja member. You probably know Team Ninja for Ninja Gaiden and/or Dead or Alive. Their way to do games is the following one : go all in a CQC combat system, mix it up with great chara design, spicy mise en scène, not so good technique and hardecoreness at every level of the game. Honestly, even finishing one of these games is hard. They know it : I unlocked the "Hard japanese" difficulty mode when I finished Wanted Dead.
In my opinion, Team Ninja is misunderstood in the western world. Most people simply see DDDDD breasts and stop it there. But what's behind those breasts is a deep combat system, actually deeper than most combat systems.
You've understood that I like Team Ninja. That's why I follow Soleil's work with attention since its birth. I was offered Valkyrie Elysium by my sister and didn't take the time to play it (my lover finished it and she's fond of action RPGs so I guess it's quite good). Then, my lover offered me Wanted Dead. I didn't want to let it unplayed for long: that's a question of respect at this point.
So I played it. And oh pal what a game! A very controversial one at least. Why is that? Well, it's actually a very good game. But nowaday, people tend to, quite rightly, seriously dislike technical issues. This and difficulty spikes. And old school linear structure. Wanted Dead has all the three of them.
So why do I consider Wanted Dead a good game? Let's have a look at its 3Cs.
- Camera : Nothing special here. Camera is never an issue. The game uses genres standards to counter the camera's weaknesses: it zooms when you look at something and your character automatically choose a target when attacking with your sword, wether or not this target is out of frame.
- Character : A military police lieutenant expert in both gunfights and swordfights.
- Controls : A clever assignation, in which shooting gameplay relies on sticks + circle + triggers + RB and fighting gameplay relies on sticks + LB + cross + square + triangle. Really, the only thing wrong with controls is you pickup items with R3.
That's it. The game is BOTH a TPS and an Hack-n-slash. And none of these aspects are neglected. Now don't get me wrong : the shooting part isn't as good as Gears of War and the hack-n-slash part isn't as good as Bayonetta. But both parts are good, and more important : they're smartly articulated together. For instance : long range enemies are weak to katana whereas CQC enemies are weak to bullets. This leads to a constant high-risk-high-reward decision making, in which you have to choose between charging and exposing yourself to enemy fire or force retreating the best you can to create space between you and the short range enemies.
This high-risk-high-reward mentality of design is applicated to every aspect of the game. Upgrading your weapon is much more about personalizing your weapon. Each thing you buff in a hand leads to another thing nerfed in the other hand: increasing your clip size decreases your reload time. Healing yourself is also a high-risk-high-reward move, considering it slows you hard making you ultra vulnerable, and can be interrupted.
Ammo managment is also high-risk-high-reward based. Basically, you have... Very few clips for both your main weapon and your secondary one. This forces you to switch between your main weapon and the other one, because enemies drop weapons for one or the other, not for both. Considering you can change your secondary weapon for more funky weapons, like greandes launcher or shotguns, considering the higher damages a weapons deals, the less ammo it has, this lead to interessting gunfights, in which switching weapons is common and the order in which you switch weapon is essential.
A parry system similar to the souls' one is implemented. It works very well, provinding you either a low-risk-low-reward permanent protection in the detriment of your speed either a high-risk-high-reward timing parry system. Unfortunately, mastering this system, paired with the counter attack binded on triangle, is necessary (I mean it: NECESSARY) to finish the game. This would not have been an issue if this system was necessary as well to reach the final boss, which it isn't.
Wonderful transition to bosses, characters and narration. In ne word for each of them: unequal, nice and surprising. Bosses are overall interessting, with many patterns and a good variety in their move set and the one you have to assume to deal with them. Some of them even have very clever design, like the rain one, vanishing into invisibility, which lead to a stressful deadly hide and seek game, or Tom Cruise, or should I say Tom CruiseS because there are two of them, which double the patterns you have to watch for and leads to interessting decision making about whom to down first. Unfortunately, there are the second boss and the last one, whom are very harsh difficulty spike, forcing you to learn things you didn't had to learn before (like perfect parrying), and relying and what can be seen as unfair design: insta-kill moves and arenas flooded with henchmen.
Characters rely on objections. Herzog is both popular and upopular, is both an ass and a nice dude. Doc does surgery while being drunk. Cortez is silent, which makes you over attentive to his moves and animation. Gunsmith is -you get it- a gunsmith, but also a former idol fan of cats. Captain lectures you and your team, but eventually asks for a kiss at the end of the meeting to forgive you (the meeting was about how many people you killed and how much it cost). Bad guys are really cool : I talked earlier of the invisible girl and Tom ruise, but Richter and the club owner are wonderful too. Eventually, Hannah, the main character, is a brutal yet soft abandonned mother, very empathic, whilst being a true killing machine, hurt by wars that aren't her's.
All these people are brilliantly mise-en-scène in a Kojima's way. There a huge attention to futile details, like how gelly is their gelly (spoiler: anti-gravity tiers). The switch between art style is wonderful and well-thought: outside the club is realistic, inside it's anime. Shoutout to this level by the way, which is by far the best one featuring the best enemies and level design.
The world and story told are a post-80 pro capitalist society that killed public services and destroyed many lives in its insatiable appetice for profit. Pretty much our world, just a little bit more fascist. Private armies tend to destroy police to conquier this last market. Girls with no family and a kid have no futur: there are no social services to help them. They'll, as shown in a cutscene, marry a douch that'll eventually come home drunk and kill them. Not gonna lie, it can be harsh. This is very nicely constrasted to the colorful sound and visual design, which is based on the 80s culture, quite happy-go-lucky and egocentric.
Wanted Dead isn't a perfect game in any way. But, as the other Team Ninja (in this case, their child Soleil) games, it focuses on things it considers important and delivers a 20/20 game on these things. If you want a well told anticaptilistic game, based on mixed combat system, featuring great sword AND gun fights, Wanted Dead is for you. If you want a game that runs perfectly on a PS4, that has no difficulty spikes nor linear level design, this isn't for you.
In my opinion, Team Ninja is misunderstood in the western world. Most people simply see DDDDD breasts and stop it there. But what's behind those breasts is a deep combat system, actually deeper than most combat systems.
You've understood that I like Team Ninja. That's why I follow Soleil's work with attention since its birth. I was offered Valkyrie Elysium by my sister and didn't take the time to play it (my lover finished it and she's fond of action RPGs so I guess it's quite good). Then, my lover offered me Wanted Dead. I didn't want to let it unplayed for long: that's a question of respect at this point.
So I played it. And oh pal what a game! A very controversial one at least. Why is that? Well, it's actually a very good game. But nowaday, people tend to, quite rightly, seriously dislike technical issues. This and difficulty spikes. And old school linear structure. Wanted Dead has all the three of them.
So why do I consider Wanted Dead a good game? Let's have a look at its 3Cs.
- Camera : Nothing special here. Camera is never an issue. The game uses genres standards to counter the camera's weaknesses: it zooms when you look at something and your character automatically choose a target when attacking with your sword, wether or not this target is out of frame.
- Character : A military police lieutenant expert in both gunfights and swordfights.
- Controls : A clever assignation, in which shooting gameplay relies on sticks + circle + triggers + RB and fighting gameplay relies on sticks + LB + cross + square + triangle. Really, the only thing wrong with controls is you pickup items with R3.
That's it. The game is BOTH a TPS and an Hack-n-slash. And none of these aspects are neglected. Now don't get me wrong : the shooting part isn't as good as Gears of War and the hack-n-slash part isn't as good as Bayonetta. But both parts are good, and more important : they're smartly articulated together. For instance : long range enemies are weak to katana whereas CQC enemies are weak to bullets. This leads to a constant high-risk-high-reward decision making, in which you have to choose between charging and exposing yourself to enemy fire or force retreating the best you can to create space between you and the short range enemies.
This high-risk-high-reward mentality of design is applicated to every aspect of the game. Upgrading your weapon is much more about personalizing your weapon. Each thing you buff in a hand leads to another thing nerfed in the other hand: increasing your clip size decreases your reload time. Healing yourself is also a high-risk-high-reward move, considering it slows you hard making you ultra vulnerable, and can be interrupted.
Ammo managment is also high-risk-high-reward based. Basically, you have... Very few clips for both your main weapon and your secondary one. This forces you to switch between your main weapon and the other one, because enemies drop weapons for one or the other, not for both. Considering you can change your secondary weapon for more funky weapons, like greandes launcher or shotguns, considering the higher damages a weapons deals, the less ammo it has, this lead to interessting gunfights, in which switching weapons is common and the order in which you switch weapon is essential.
A parry system similar to the souls' one is implemented. It works very well, provinding you either a low-risk-low-reward permanent protection in the detriment of your speed either a high-risk-high-reward timing parry system. Unfortunately, mastering this system, paired with the counter attack binded on triangle, is necessary (I mean it: NECESSARY) to finish the game. This would not have been an issue if this system was necessary as well to reach the final boss, which it isn't.
Wonderful transition to bosses, characters and narration. In ne word for each of them: unequal, nice and surprising. Bosses are overall interessting, with many patterns and a good variety in their move set and the one you have to assume to deal with them. Some of them even have very clever design, like the rain one, vanishing into invisibility, which lead to a stressful deadly hide and seek game, or Tom Cruise, or should I say Tom CruiseS because there are two of them, which double the patterns you have to watch for and leads to interessting decision making about whom to down first. Unfortunately, there are the second boss and the last one, whom are very harsh difficulty spike, forcing you to learn things you didn't had to learn before (like perfect parrying), and relying and what can be seen as unfair design: insta-kill moves and arenas flooded with henchmen.
Characters rely on objections. Herzog is both popular and upopular, is both an ass and a nice dude. Doc does surgery while being drunk. Cortez is silent, which makes you over attentive to his moves and animation. Gunsmith is -you get it- a gunsmith, but also a former idol fan of cats. Captain lectures you and your team, but eventually asks for a kiss at the end of the meeting to forgive you (the meeting was about how many people you killed and how much it cost). Bad guys are really cool : I talked earlier of the invisible girl and Tom ruise, but Richter and the club owner are wonderful too. Eventually, Hannah, the main character, is a brutal yet soft abandonned mother, very empathic, whilst being a true killing machine, hurt by wars that aren't her's.
All these people are brilliantly mise-en-scène in a Kojima's way. There a huge attention to futile details, like how gelly is their gelly (spoiler: anti-gravity tiers). The switch between art style is wonderful and well-thought: outside the club is realistic, inside it's anime. Shoutout to this level by the way, which is by far the best one featuring the best enemies and level design.
The world and story told are a post-80 pro capitalist society that killed public services and destroyed many lives in its insatiable appetice for profit. Pretty much our world, just a little bit more fascist. Private armies tend to destroy police to conquier this last market. Girls with no family and a kid have no futur: there are no social services to help them. They'll, as shown in a cutscene, marry a douch that'll eventually come home drunk and kill them. Not gonna lie, it can be harsh. This is very nicely constrasted to the colorful sound and visual design, which is based on the 80s culture, quite happy-go-lucky and egocentric.
Wanted Dead isn't a perfect game in any way. But, as the other Team Ninja (in this case, their child Soleil) games, it focuses on things it considers important and delivers a 20/20 game on these things. If you want a well told anticaptilistic game, based on mixed combat system, featuring great sword AND gun fights, Wanted Dead is for you. If you want a game that runs perfectly on a PS4, that has no difficulty spikes nor linear level design, this isn't for you.
Solid if slightly baffling little game. I'll be keeping my eye on Soliel.
it's got a very specific kinda camp to it dat probably caters to some niche audience, but it's not for me
I don't know what the devs were thinking, but I like it.
Que si que si, que es un juego consciente de sus defectos y los abraza no se qué… pero es que ni aún con ese pretexto consigue que sea lo suficientemente sólido como para que valga la pena. Deadly Premonition es un buen ejemplo de juego con sus pedazo defectos que puedes amar aún con todo por sus bondades, este no.
someone might say to you "they made a new game that's like a ps2 game." instead of thinking "that sounds fun" you should run far far away from that person
honestly one of the most lived in worlds ive ever experienced in a more linear level by level type of game. rlly appreciate how fleshed out and real everything feels and how truly ambitious this is. love how bright the gore in this looks and how often there’s rlly impressive and genuinely beautiful set pieces and levels. rlly casually cruel and oppressive atmosphere which is like rlly special given the fact that the story is never too self serious. just way too hard for me to finish lmao😖
based and stefanie joosten pilled
Once you're in on the bit you'll get what Wanted Dead is, a wild game that absolutely deserves a look if you like weird kooky third person action, period. Sorry, but all the half star reviews and "worst game of 2023" videos I've seen are a total joke. This isn't a "triple A god tier" title but a little jank never hurt anybody, especially when it's done this stylish and zany. You can slice dudes into several pieces and pull off gun-fu finishing moves, this is a GOOD game people.
It's hard as hell sometimes, the checkpoints get brutally spaced out in the later levels, resulting in some cheap deaths from tough enemies and repetitively playing the same sections over and over that make you want to rage quit. This was my main problem with the game, but it's hard to say when difficulty should be a factor when criticizing a game - FromSoftware get away with it all the time. But when you do get through, you feel so fucking badass. I can't count how many times I was getting my ass handed to me by squads of goons and ninjas, but then tried again and sliced and shot my way through like a combat master, perfectly dodging and countering attacks with ease. When the combat clicks, it fucking goes hard.
In between the Metal Gear-ass strange plot you have arcade cabinets, claw machines, karaoke and ramen eating minigames like you're in a Yakuza game suddenly, and it's just so cool and silly. You don't like a game that lets you sing "99 Luftballons"? Bite me!
More games like this, please, always
It's hard as hell sometimes, the checkpoints get brutally spaced out in the later levels, resulting in some cheap deaths from tough enemies and repetitively playing the same sections over and over that make you want to rage quit. This was my main problem with the game, but it's hard to say when difficulty should be a factor when criticizing a game - FromSoftware get away with it all the time. But when you do get through, you feel so fucking badass. I can't count how many times I was getting my ass handed to me by squads of goons and ninjas, but then tried again and sliced and shot my way through like a combat master, perfectly dodging and countering attacks with ease. When the combat clicks, it fucking goes hard.
In between the Metal Gear-ass strange plot you have arcade cabinets, claw machines, karaoke and ramen eating minigames like you're in a Yakuza game suddenly, and it's just so cool and silly. You don't like a game that lets you sing "99 Luftballons"? Bite me!
More games like this, please, always
Wanted: Dead verfolgt eine klare Vision und hat mich dabei mit seinem Gameplay-Loop, dem Setting und der Over the Top-Art von vorne bis hinten komplett mitgerissen. Ich finde es gibt heutzutage viel zu wenig Spiele, die sich nicht darauf konzentrieren unfassbar ernst oder realistisch zu sein, sondern die einfach nur Spaß machen wollen.
what an incredible odd game. It's charmingly bad, like funny bad. it's one of those games you can tell are made by humans that are just scrambling shit together. has really dope anime sequences for some reason though.
They don't make em like they used to anymore
Played: September 2023
A masterwork in its singularity, I'm giving it 4.5 stars despite itself. I'm openly allowing the way my brain has romanticized this game since the nearly 4 months I've played it to influence my thoughts now.
Rhythm binds the experience of Wanted: Dead together, but only if you can dance with it. There are times jank is a proper, if charming, obstacle, and there are times when it's another way to refer to an unorthodox tempo. This is 10% the former, and 90% the latter. I loved mastering the offbeat sword and gunplay. The repetitions rarely got old. The arcade syncopation was funky. And while it's not as inviting a cadence as something like Metal Gear Rising, it became almost equally worth my time.
Likewise, the wildly out of sync storytelling added up towards a game that wants to do its own thing, my comprehension be damned. The off-kilter voice acting rules. The abruptness of the plotting managed to draw my attention further in. And I find it all to be effective for one simple reason: it's so confident about all these choices. I never felt this was "funny ha ha" bizarre but actually strange. And it's fine if I never fully figure out why I'm surely making excuses for it. Sometimes a person is just attractive because they are who they are unashamedly and fun to be around. Wanted: Dead is her.
Maybe my hypnosis towards it can be explained by the fact that while the game purports to have a karaoke minigame, it actually only has a "99 Luftballons" minigame. And the only song I can karaoke in real life just so happens to be "99 Red Balloons".
The three 2023 games I played in full are this, Spider-Man 2 (a nice game), and Final Fantasy XVI (a genuinely frustrating game). That makes Wanded: Dead... my GOTY 2023?
A masterwork in its singularity, I'm giving it 4.5 stars despite itself. I'm openly allowing the way my brain has romanticized this game since the nearly 4 months I've played it to influence my thoughts now.
Rhythm binds the experience of Wanted: Dead together, but only if you can dance with it. There are times jank is a proper, if charming, obstacle, and there are times when it's another way to refer to an unorthodox tempo. This is 10% the former, and 90% the latter. I loved mastering the offbeat sword and gunplay. The repetitions rarely got old. The arcade syncopation was funky. And while it's not as inviting a cadence as something like Metal Gear Rising, it became almost equally worth my time.
Likewise, the wildly out of sync storytelling added up towards a game that wants to do its own thing, my comprehension be damned. The off-kilter voice acting rules. The abruptness of the plotting managed to draw my attention further in. And I find it all to be effective for one simple reason: it's so confident about all these choices. I never felt this was "funny ha ha" bizarre but actually strange. And it's fine if I never fully figure out why I'm surely making excuses for it. Sometimes a person is just attractive because they are who they are unashamedly and fun to be around. Wanted: Dead is her.
Maybe my hypnosis towards it can be explained by the fact that while the game purports to have a karaoke minigame, it actually only has a "99 Luftballons" minigame. And the only song I can karaoke in real life just so happens to be "99 Red Balloons".
The three 2023 games I played in full are this, Spider-Man 2 (a nice game), and Final Fantasy XVI (a genuinely frustrating game). That makes Wanded: Dead... my GOTY 2023?
O jogo mais Metal Gear Rising que eu joguei desde Metal Gear Rising
não é uma merda
Es sin lugar a dudas el juegos más caótico y aleatorio que he jugado en mucho tiempo. Su historia es absurda y las cinemáticas para contarla no tienen ni pies ni cabeza. Sigo sin saber muy bien a que he jugado, y pese a ello puedo decir que lo bueno es que una vez te metes en su sistema de juego puede llegar a divertir un rato. Creo que el juego pretendía ser algo increíble y no es la gran cosa, habiendo más cariño por los minijuegos absurdos sacados de un Yakuza que en el propio juego normal.
No es un juego que recomiende, salvo que (como a mi), te guste la basura dentro del mundo de los videojuegos. Soy sincero, Gollum es mejor juego.
No es un juego que recomiende, salvo que (como a mi), te guste la basura dentro del mundo de los videojuegos. Soy sincero, Gollum es mejor juego.
O sentimento de se jogar Wanted:Dead é de que o jogo estava pronto a anos, mas não viu a luz do dia até ano passado, sua estrutura, sua estética, seu combate, são muito semelhantes ao que se veria num jogo base da sétima geração de consoles, e vejo isso com muito bons olhos e um sorriso no rosto.
Imaginem que Suda51 e SWERY estão trabalhando num projeto e o melhor de dois mundo se juntam (espero que Hotel Barcelona seja foda, ok?) essa é meio a ideia que eu tenho desse jogo, o combate é muito divertido, serio, e a primeira vista talvez soe estranho, mas serio, é muito daora, e por se tratar de um jogo com tanta personalidade, é o que adiciona ainda mais gosto em tudo.
Apesar das atuações de voz super blasé e fps cair durante cutscenes (igual Deadly Premonition, quem diria) o jogo se segura pelo seu carisma, partes em anime, momentos rítmicos, os diálogos ala Tarantino ou até mesmo, a galhofa pela galhofa são algumas das coisas que tornaram a minha experiencia com Wanted:Dead agradável.
De certa forma, dentro de um contexto aonde cada vez mais os jogos se parecem uns com os outros por causa da reprodução das tendências (leiam Walter Benjamin) é muito interessante ver um jogo ir contra a maré, usando de técnicas e forma do passado agora com estética, o que me faz pensar em Wanted:Dead com um jogo anômalo para o seu momento dentro da indústria.
Imaginem que Suda51 e SWERY estão trabalhando num projeto e o melhor de dois mundo se juntam (espero que Hotel Barcelona seja foda, ok?) essa é meio a ideia que eu tenho desse jogo, o combate é muito divertido, serio, e a primeira vista talvez soe estranho, mas serio, é muito daora, e por se tratar de um jogo com tanta personalidade, é o que adiciona ainda mais gosto em tudo.
Apesar das atuações de voz super blasé e fps cair durante cutscenes (igual Deadly Premonition, quem diria) o jogo se segura pelo seu carisma, partes em anime, momentos rítmicos, os diálogos ala Tarantino ou até mesmo, a galhofa pela galhofa são algumas das coisas que tornaram a minha experiencia com Wanted:Dead agradável.
De certa forma, dentro de um contexto aonde cada vez mais os jogos se parecem uns com os outros por causa da reprodução das tendências (leiam Walter Benjamin) é muito interessante ver um jogo ir contra a maré, usando de técnicas e forma do passado agora com estética, o que me faz pensar em Wanted:Dead com um jogo anômalo para o seu momento dentro da indústria.
fever dream game with actually fun counter-based combat
Un juego con un apartado estético/visual realmente atractivo, una banda sonora BOMBA de cojones y un worldbuilding suuuuuuper interesante son lo único que mantiene a flote un juego que hace aguas por todos lados.
El combate es malo con avaricia, es un medio hack and slash/ shooter de coberturas pero ambas facetas son malísimas, los parries están reguleros, hay pocos combos y en general se hace tedioso.
Las Boss Fights son una castaña colosal y ni son épicas ni nada. Malos trámites.
Los personajes y la historia van de la malo, porque es una historia mal narrada, con poca cohesión temática y cronológica que hace que termines el juego sin enterarte de que coño has jugado... En cuanto a los personajes sufren de ser personajes animú más planos y raros que su puta madre. El voice acting es un poco exagerado pero muy disfrutón.
En general sus escuetas virtudes no salvan un juego mediocre al que hay que darle el honor de intentar hacer algo distinto. Si, ha salido mal, pero lo han intentado y eso es digno de mención coño.
El combate es malo con avaricia, es un medio hack and slash/ shooter de coberturas pero ambas facetas son malísimas, los parries están reguleros, hay pocos combos y en general se hace tedioso.
Las Boss Fights son una castaña colosal y ni son épicas ni nada. Malos trámites.
Los personajes y la historia van de la malo, porque es una historia mal narrada, con poca cohesión temática y cronológica que hace que termines el juego sin enterarte de que coño has jugado... En cuanto a los personajes sufren de ser personajes animú más planos y raros que su puta madre. El voice acting es un poco exagerado pero muy disfrutón.
En general sus escuetas virtudes no salvan un juego mediocre al que hay que darle el honor de intentar hacer algo distinto. Si, ha salido mal, pero lo han intentado y eso es digno de mención coño.
I haven't played this game but the protagonist (pretty 8 foot tall cyborg lady) is transition goals
After wrapping up Bayonetta and before starting the next game I just had to come back to Wanted: Dead. I love it and wanted to try it out again now that it has been updated.
At first I needed to re-adjust to this game, as I kept hitting the wrong buttons for dodge and reload and was playing kind of awkwardly, but after a bit of time it was clicking again. Quickly sprinting and rolling around as Hannah Stone while ripping, shooting and parrying your way through enemies is so much fun. The charm and characters of this game are still great too. So what’s new or different?
First of all are the fixes and improvements. I played through the game on PS5, on normal difficulty. Then I got the itch to keep playing this again and did Hard and Japanese Hard, which takes me up to 8 play throughs now. I had fewer issues and no crashes but there were still performance problems, particularly during Kowloon Street. So it’s a smoother experience but still needs a little more work and of course this game still has its bit of jank.
There is a big change to difficulty. The first ninja now has three Stimpacks right in front of him and all the tougher enemies drop them too. I don’t know how I feel about this. The game already has an easy mode, which is now easier to access. It feels like the game lost its edge a bit and like the creators have compromised their vision. It seems a bit late too, all the reviews are out and the game has been on shelves for over a year. Is this really going to pull in more people? I almost managed a no death run first go despite not playing it since last year and not trying for it. During the last chapter there were just a lot health drops that I was leaving behind. The game just feels quite a bit easier. At first I thought no problem normal difficulty has been made more accessible, which is fine, but new players will be missing something. However these changes were made to hard and Japanese hard as well. Holy crap why did they lower the difficulty of the entire game? Now if I want to play the game as the developers originally intended and how I enjoyed it I need to not install the update, which means playing a buggier version that likes to crash. It’s still an incredibly fun game and I know many will prefer it now but it has really lost something. I liked that it demanded you learn how to play, it was rewarding and the journey to getting better was one of Wanted: Dead’s highlights. I liked that you had to be on your game or get punished. I liked the tension and palm sweats the difficulty and checkpoint system created. I liked that it made you learn to get through strings of encounters rather than just one encounter at a time with heaps of health or checkpoints in between. I want more people to play Wanted: Dead so maybe this is going to be good in the long run but I don’t like that it’s been toned down either, it does negatively impact the experience and there was no reason to change the higher difficulties. Surely there was a better way to get new people on board.
They added player stats so you can track your progress for some trophies. The severance pays trophy has been fixed as well and I unlocked it. I’m never getting that Platinum trophy though because of how damn hard it is to do really well at the mini games, seriously why is the ramen game harder than beating the game on Japanese Hard mode? They also added the ability to toggle in and out of cover with a button press. I’m not a fan of it and changed it back straight away. I want to move around quickly in this game and snapping in and out of cover just feels better.
I’d love to see more improvements and content added to this game like an even harder difficulty that changes up enemy placement, a boss run mode, chapter select and a ranking system. As much as I’m really happy this game got an update, it feels like two steps forward and one step back, when the game needed to be taken four steps forward.
The reviews and how they have almost certainly impacted this game’s sales and how it will be remembered by many (if remembered at all) really sucks. Some of the bad reviews I have read gave me God Hand 3/10 flashbacks, hopefully this game get’s some of the recognition I think it deserves one day. Overall Wanted: Dead is an amazing, addictive game. It’s hard to describe just how good this game feels. I’ve played it 8 times now and have it down to about 2 hours and no deaths, if I’m careful, and I’m still keen on playing it more. It’s just such a special game and I think if I were to review it again now I’d put it in the 8 out of 10 range, which for me makes it a must own and play game.
Added more after another update in April:
I had to go back to Wanted: Dead again after another big update released and this now brings me to ten playthroughs. It’s been further improved but also comes with the cost of difficulty being nerfed even more.
There’s actually quite a long list of changes. First up is an expanded skill tree with some new skills and some changes to previous skills. The biggest changes here are a quick little grenade toss, sliding attack makes enemies drop shields and adrenaline rush, which gives you slow mo after bullet time and you are more powerful during it. On top of this there’s been rebalancing to damage and stun and adrenaline seems to build quicker. The additions are nice but the changes are taking things too far. They simply make you more powerful and make the game easier.
There are additional fixes for bugs and improvements have been made to visuals and performance which is always very welcome but some performance issues still remain. You can now transfer your save from PS4 to PS5 as well.
The Space Runaway minigame has been made easier and one of the trophies for the Ramen minigame has been made easier too.
Wanted: Dead is fantastic and it is wonderful to see the game getting this much attention and improvement I just wish it didn’t come with the cost of lowering the game’s difficulty. It is especially frustrating when a lot these changes could have only been made to Neko and maybe Normal mode while Hard and Japanese Hard could have been left as they were. It is still an incredibly fun game but it has lost some of its edge and the experience has been negatively impacted. Tension is reduced and it no longer has the same good balance between challenging and rewarding. It is highly likely that new players won’t be pushed to learn to play. This means newer players may not discover what this game has to offer and that the rewarding journey of getting better will often be missed. This is really important as one of Wanted: Dead’s strengths is how good it is at making you feel good. It is disappointing that Soleil hasn’t been able make it more accessible without impacting how challenging and rewarding it was.
If you were put off by or dropped Wanted: Dead because of bugs, issues and/or difficulty then now is the time to jump in or jump back in. It is in a better state now (at least on PS5) and is quite a bit easier to play through. You will be missing something due to the easier difficulty of the whole game but I know a lot of people won’t care about this.
Wanted: Dead has become my favourite PS5 game, that isn’t some kind of re-release. I very, very rarely have wanted to come back and replay a game so much or so often since the early PS3 days, which is now around 15 years ago. If gaming is not doing well right now then games like Wanted: Dead is the medicine, even with the all the issues that were present in the game at launch.
I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a bit more discussion around the story, world and characters too but I guess not many people played it. I feel bad about how much I initially glossed over and didn’t think about it. It’s actually really good. This world is really cool, I love the characters and I’m really hoping for a sequel.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS
It’s a cyber punk, alternate version of our world, set in Hong Kong but with a very international cast of characters. Meat is rare and there seems to be clear separation of the different classes of people. It is about a corporation convincing the public that they have made synths (= working class) but really they haven’t. The corporation literally owns people, has their own security force and seems to have a lot of control over politics and the police. Then there is the whole ending with the reveals and the anime cut scenes. I didn’t expect the game to hit this much and have a story this good after that opening diner cut scene. I was just expecting stylish, irreverent fun. There’s so many interesting deliberate choices as well, like the voice actors, only one karaoke song and it’s 99 Luftballons, Stone’s police car is a Maserati from the early 90s and there is one random Nems song. There’s just too much to list. I have so many questions as well, like how did this game even get made? Why is the technology the way it is in this world? Why are there live action cooking segments? Will Hannah/Emma find peace and/or resolution?
At first I needed to re-adjust to this game, as I kept hitting the wrong buttons for dodge and reload and was playing kind of awkwardly, but after a bit of time it was clicking again. Quickly sprinting and rolling around as Hannah Stone while ripping, shooting and parrying your way through enemies is so much fun. The charm and characters of this game are still great too. So what’s new or different?
First of all are the fixes and improvements. I played through the game on PS5, on normal difficulty. Then I got the itch to keep playing this again and did Hard and Japanese Hard, which takes me up to 8 play throughs now. I had fewer issues and no crashes but there were still performance problems, particularly during Kowloon Street. So it’s a smoother experience but still needs a little more work and of course this game still has its bit of jank.
There is a big change to difficulty. The first ninja now has three Stimpacks right in front of him and all the tougher enemies drop them too. I don’t know how I feel about this. The game already has an easy mode, which is now easier to access. It feels like the game lost its edge a bit and like the creators have compromised their vision. It seems a bit late too, all the reviews are out and the game has been on shelves for over a year. Is this really going to pull in more people? I almost managed a no death run first go despite not playing it since last year and not trying for it. During the last chapter there were just a lot health drops that I was leaving behind. The game just feels quite a bit easier. At first I thought no problem normal difficulty has been made more accessible, which is fine, but new players will be missing something. However these changes were made to hard and Japanese hard as well. Holy crap why did they lower the difficulty of the entire game? Now if I want to play the game as the developers originally intended and how I enjoyed it I need to not install the update, which means playing a buggier version that likes to crash. It’s still an incredibly fun game and I know many will prefer it now but it has really lost something. I liked that it demanded you learn how to play, it was rewarding and the journey to getting better was one of Wanted: Dead’s highlights. I liked that you had to be on your game or get punished. I liked the tension and palm sweats the difficulty and checkpoint system created. I liked that it made you learn to get through strings of encounters rather than just one encounter at a time with heaps of health or checkpoints in between. I want more people to play Wanted: Dead so maybe this is going to be good in the long run but I don’t like that it’s been toned down either, it does negatively impact the experience and there was no reason to change the higher difficulties. Surely there was a better way to get new people on board.
They added player stats so you can track your progress for some trophies. The severance pays trophy has been fixed as well and I unlocked it. I’m never getting that Platinum trophy though because of how damn hard it is to do really well at the mini games, seriously why is the ramen game harder than beating the game on Japanese Hard mode? They also added the ability to toggle in and out of cover with a button press. I’m not a fan of it and changed it back straight away. I want to move around quickly in this game and snapping in and out of cover just feels better.
I’d love to see more improvements and content added to this game like an even harder difficulty that changes up enemy placement, a boss run mode, chapter select and a ranking system. As much as I’m really happy this game got an update, it feels like two steps forward and one step back, when the game needed to be taken four steps forward.
The reviews and how they have almost certainly impacted this game’s sales and how it will be remembered by many (if remembered at all) really sucks. Some of the bad reviews I have read gave me God Hand 3/10 flashbacks, hopefully this game get’s some of the recognition I think it deserves one day. Overall Wanted: Dead is an amazing, addictive game. It’s hard to describe just how good this game feels. I’ve played it 8 times now and have it down to about 2 hours and no deaths, if I’m careful, and I’m still keen on playing it more. It’s just such a special game and I think if I were to review it again now I’d put it in the 8 out of 10 range, which for me makes it a must own and play game.
Added more after another update in April:
I had to go back to Wanted: Dead again after another big update released and this now brings me to ten playthroughs. It’s been further improved but also comes with the cost of difficulty being nerfed even more.
There’s actually quite a long list of changes. First up is an expanded skill tree with some new skills and some changes to previous skills. The biggest changes here are a quick little grenade toss, sliding attack makes enemies drop shields and adrenaline rush, which gives you slow mo after bullet time and you are more powerful during it. On top of this there’s been rebalancing to damage and stun and adrenaline seems to build quicker. The additions are nice but the changes are taking things too far. They simply make you more powerful and make the game easier.
There are additional fixes for bugs and improvements have been made to visuals and performance which is always very welcome but some performance issues still remain. You can now transfer your save from PS4 to PS5 as well.
The Space Runaway minigame has been made easier and one of the trophies for the Ramen minigame has been made easier too.
Wanted: Dead is fantastic and it is wonderful to see the game getting this much attention and improvement I just wish it didn’t come with the cost of lowering the game’s difficulty. It is especially frustrating when a lot these changes could have only been made to Neko and maybe Normal mode while Hard and Japanese Hard could have been left as they were. It is still an incredibly fun game but it has lost some of its edge and the experience has been negatively impacted. Tension is reduced and it no longer has the same good balance between challenging and rewarding. It is highly likely that new players won’t be pushed to learn to play. This means newer players may not discover what this game has to offer and that the rewarding journey of getting better will often be missed. This is really important as one of Wanted: Dead’s strengths is how good it is at making you feel good. It is disappointing that Soleil hasn’t been able make it more accessible without impacting how challenging and rewarding it was.
If you were put off by or dropped Wanted: Dead because of bugs, issues and/or difficulty then now is the time to jump in or jump back in. It is in a better state now (at least on PS5) and is quite a bit easier to play through. You will be missing something due to the easier difficulty of the whole game but I know a lot of people won’t care about this.
Wanted: Dead has become my favourite PS5 game, that isn’t some kind of re-release. I very, very rarely have wanted to come back and replay a game so much or so often since the early PS3 days, which is now around 15 years ago. If gaming is not doing well right now then games like Wanted: Dead is the medicine, even with the all the issues that were present in the game at launch.
I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a bit more discussion around the story, world and characters too but I guess not many people played it. I feel bad about how much I initially glossed over and didn’t think about it. It’s actually really good. This world is really cool, I love the characters and I’m really hoping for a sequel.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS
It’s a cyber punk, alternate version of our world, set in Hong Kong but with a very international cast of characters. Meat is rare and there seems to be clear separation of the different classes of people. It is about a corporation convincing the public that they have made synths (= working class) but really they haven’t. The corporation literally owns people, has their own security force and seems to have a lot of control over politics and the police. Then there is the whole ending with the reveals and the anime cut scenes. I didn’t expect the game to hit this much and have a story this good after that opening diner cut scene. I was just expecting stylish, irreverent fun. There’s so many interesting deliberate choices as well, like the voice actors, only one karaoke song and it’s 99 Luftballons, Stone’s police car is a Maserati from the early 90s and there is one random Nems song. There’s just too much to list. I have so many questions as well, like how did this game even get made? Why is the technology the way it is in this world? Why are there live action cooking segments? Will Hannah/Emma find peace and/or resolution?
A playable B movie
БЛЯ И КТО ПИЗДЕЛ
отличная игра, одна из лучших реализаций идеи смеси шутера и слешера/битемапа со времен ре4 наверное. игру серьезно портит кривизна, недоделанность и малобюджетность (моменты когда удары по врагам не регаются или медкиты отказываются подбираться), однако одна из немногих современных не-инди игр унаследовавших аркадный геймдизайн
отличная игра, одна из лучших реализаций идеи смеси шутера и слешера/битемапа со времен ре4 наверное. игру серьезно портит кривизна, недоделанность и малобюджетность (моменты когда удары по врагам не регаются или медкиты отказываются подбираться), однако одна из немногих современных не-инди игр унаследовавших аркадный геймдизайн
LOVE !!!!
Conversando com alguns amigos, cheguei a conclusão que Wanted Dead, é um jogo irritante. Nesse mesmo dia, um amigo que participou dessa conversa, citou casualmente Evil Within, mesmo sendo contextos diferentes, o sentimento que tenho por ambos é de estresse.
Refletindo melhor sobre as proximidades de ambos, entendo que eles, mesmo sendo jogos diferentes, compartilham de elementos similares e são essas semelhanças, que me irritam.
Conceitualmente, Wanted Dead, pode até ser interessante, como alguns amigos defenderam suas escolhas de design absurdas, respeito, mas os acho malucos. E é isso que me pegou negativamente, são conceitos interessantes, mas tão pouco polidos e aplicados, muitas vezes, de uma forma tão irritante, como a utilização do checkpoint, que no instante que eu morria no game, a diversão1 acabava.
Evil Within, é meio que isso também: ideias interessantes, que no conjunto, até faz sentido e funciona, mas tem tão pouco tato ao mesmo tempo, que só me irrita. Não acho que ideias salvem alguma obra, Wanted Dead é cheio de ideias legais, executadas, hora de forma boa, noutras do pior jeito possível.
Wanted Dead, é um jogo que tem personalidades, não nego, mas, ao mesmo tempo, é tão perdido no que quer, que parece tá tentando repetir um estilo de jogo (que nessa altura do campeonato, no mínimo, podemos chamar de tendência.), que gerou vários dos clássicos cults da era do PS3. Uma amiga, muito mais sabida que eu sobre videogame, comentou sobre isso também e concordo com tudo que ela disse, menos na parte disso ser positivo.
Esses jogos, que saiam tudo atrapalhado e que acabaram por fomentar uma legião de fãs ao decorrer do tempo, é algo muito mais acidental e difícil de emular essa estética. Eles foram tipo Acossados, que originalmente era pra ser de um jeito, mas por questões externas, o filme foi todo picotado e acabou saindo muito melhor que o que era pretendido. Sinto que é a mesma coisa pra esses jogos clássicos cult.
Wanted Dead, só tenta ir nessa onda, mas não consegue. Tem personalidade, mas não é único e não consegue fazer a soma de tudo, ser marcante. É um jogo que rapidamente você esquece que jogou e mesmo seus melhores momentos, não seguram.
E seus melhores momentos, são o combate meele, que mesmo tendo outra forma de jogar, que soa até mais planejado, não foi introduzido e sinceramente, não é um game que me interesso pra sequer aprender a jogá-lo desse jeito. De qualquer forma, mesmo no combate corpo-a-corpo, a existência de esponjas de danos e o contra-ataque dos inimigos, arrancarem muita vida, deixa o duelo monótono e pouco satisfatório. Satisfação essa, que mais surge nos momentos de execução, do que lutando de fato.
Mas sinceramente, onde ele mais peca é em juntar tudo isso, em um level design que só não funciona. É um caminho apenas, não tem expressão, não tem nada, é vazio e ignorável; pode apagar tudo e deixar um corredor sem textura, o resultado seria bizarramente, o mesmo.
Contudo, ainda gosto de algumas coisinhas aqui e ali, mesmo as cutscene sendo todas, agora falando cinematograficamente, erradas, ainda são legais de assistir e gosto como ele trabalha seus personagens, dando um charme divertido. Pena que isso não vale pro jogo todo...
Enfim, eu abandonei na reta final, porque eu cansei de ser morto por inimigos que me matam em um combo idiota e que se recusam a morrer. Quem sabe na próxima, eu mato o chefe final e talvez, mude de opinião.
1. Não tenho nenhuma vontade em debater se o termo: “diversão”, faz sentido quando se fala de arte, então pra resolver, entenda diversão como interesse.
Refletindo melhor sobre as proximidades de ambos, entendo que eles, mesmo sendo jogos diferentes, compartilham de elementos similares e são essas semelhanças, que me irritam.
Conceitualmente, Wanted Dead, pode até ser interessante, como alguns amigos defenderam suas escolhas de design absurdas, respeito, mas os acho malucos. E é isso que me pegou negativamente, são conceitos interessantes, mas tão pouco polidos e aplicados, muitas vezes, de uma forma tão irritante, como a utilização do checkpoint, que no instante que eu morria no game, a diversão1 acabava.
Evil Within, é meio que isso também: ideias interessantes, que no conjunto, até faz sentido e funciona, mas tem tão pouco tato ao mesmo tempo, que só me irrita. Não acho que ideias salvem alguma obra, Wanted Dead é cheio de ideias legais, executadas, hora de forma boa, noutras do pior jeito possível.
Wanted Dead, é um jogo que tem personalidades, não nego, mas, ao mesmo tempo, é tão perdido no que quer, que parece tá tentando repetir um estilo de jogo (que nessa altura do campeonato, no mínimo, podemos chamar de tendência.), que gerou vários dos clássicos cults da era do PS3. Uma amiga, muito mais sabida que eu sobre videogame, comentou sobre isso também e concordo com tudo que ela disse, menos na parte disso ser positivo.
Esses jogos, que saiam tudo atrapalhado e que acabaram por fomentar uma legião de fãs ao decorrer do tempo, é algo muito mais acidental e difícil de emular essa estética. Eles foram tipo Acossados, que originalmente era pra ser de um jeito, mas por questões externas, o filme foi todo picotado e acabou saindo muito melhor que o que era pretendido. Sinto que é a mesma coisa pra esses jogos clássicos cult.
Wanted Dead, só tenta ir nessa onda, mas não consegue. Tem personalidade, mas não é único e não consegue fazer a soma de tudo, ser marcante. É um jogo que rapidamente você esquece que jogou e mesmo seus melhores momentos, não seguram.
E seus melhores momentos, são o combate meele, que mesmo tendo outra forma de jogar, que soa até mais planejado, não foi introduzido e sinceramente, não é um game que me interesso pra sequer aprender a jogá-lo desse jeito. De qualquer forma, mesmo no combate corpo-a-corpo, a existência de esponjas de danos e o contra-ataque dos inimigos, arrancarem muita vida, deixa o duelo monótono e pouco satisfatório. Satisfação essa, que mais surge nos momentos de execução, do que lutando de fato.
Mas sinceramente, onde ele mais peca é em juntar tudo isso, em um level design que só não funciona. É um caminho apenas, não tem expressão, não tem nada, é vazio e ignorável; pode apagar tudo e deixar um corredor sem textura, o resultado seria bizarramente, o mesmo.
Contudo, ainda gosto de algumas coisinhas aqui e ali, mesmo as cutscene sendo todas, agora falando cinematograficamente, erradas, ainda são legais de assistir e gosto como ele trabalha seus personagens, dando um charme divertido. Pena que isso não vale pro jogo todo...
Enfim, eu abandonei na reta final, porque eu cansei de ser morto por inimigos que me matam em um combo idiota e que se recusam a morrer. Quem sabe na próxima, eu mato o chefe final e talvez, mude de opinião.
1. Não tenho nenhuma vontade em debater se o termo: “diversão”, faz sentido quando se fala de arte, então pra resolver, entenda diversão como interesse.
Bought this one on a whim and it was, um, interesting, to say the least. I'm still intrigued and will give it another go at an undetermined time in the future.
so perfectly unfinished in that PS360 sort of way to where you almost have to wonder if it's intentional
a less-smart-but-better-playing version of Binary Domain, seriously if you think this game had a cool world but failed to explore its premise you have to check that game out, the Yakuza people made it and everything
this game should've had a multiplayer mode, Devil's Third multiplayer was incredible and you should feel bad you never got to play it
a less-smart-but-better-playing version of Binary Domain, seriously if you think this game had a cool world but failed to explore its premise you have to check that game out, the Yakuza people made it and everything
this game should've had a multiplayer mode, Devil's Third multiplayer was incredible and you should feel bad you never got to play it
The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/-qajdeYdJdA
Wanted: Dead is an anomaly within the modern video game market. The game wasn’t created to dazzle people with a phenomenal presentation, it isn’t some avant-garde break from typical action gameplay, and the narrative doesn’t go anywhere a video game hasn’t dared to go before. Instead, what makes Wanted: Dead stand out is Soleil’s unique game development philosophy. Similar to games like Axiom Verge, Dusk, and Disco Elysium, Soleil made a game in a style that is no longer catching the attention of the money-men who control the big studios. Wanted: Dead adheres closely to Soleil’s signature style: it is an over-the-top action game with elements that would be right at home on the Playstation 2. I can imagine that description alone can be enough to convince some players to go out and give the game a shot, but I can also understand the concerns this could raise in others. “Looks like a PS2 game” is a frequently used pejorative term nowadays so it’d take something really special to convince those people not to immediately write Wanted: Dead off. Soleil has used many modern game development techniques to deliver an experience that wouldn’t have been possible on that old hardware, while still holding true to a lot of the conventions from the time - which I think is a good way to summarise this game. The player uses swords and guns and grenades and chainsaws, they roll around and parry enemy attacks - which makes it a soulslike - there are boss fights, long, linear levels, tons of stylish kill animations, 80s music, minigames, weird character designs, and a lot of funny cutscenes. It might share many of these features with other games, but the combination is distinctly Soleil’s own. Wanted: Dead is basically an Extermination redux which is exactly what the world needs right now. But, since this game wouldn’t be filled with purchasable cosmetics or offer the publisher some means of selling the players’ personal information, Wanted: Dead’s budget was remarkably small, and that lack of funding is very apparent throughout the game. There are a slew of technical issues that are detrimental to the experience, then there are a few gameplay segments that would probably have been left out had the studio been playtesting more thoroughly, and then the game’s difficulty balancing could have benefitted from some extra time for refinement. With all that said, however, I don’t think this is a bad game, and the air of negativity surrounding it is completely unearned.
A while back I played Devil’s Third, the infamous WiiU game that was brutalised by professional reviewers at the time. I liked it quite a lot - the cutscenes made me laugh, the gameplay is solid, and Ivan is a character who deserved the trilogy that the developers had been dreaming of, but it was far from flawless. The developers’ inability to secure a publisher and target hardware put a big dent in Devil’s Third that I’m happy to overlook. I definitely attributed far more of Devil’s Third to Valhalla Game Studios than to Soleil which has ultimately proven to be incorrect. Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead are very similar games but Valhalla had no hand in the latter. And now I’m questioning what Itagaki and co even did. Both games feature similar third person hack-n-slash elements, cover-shooting, party mechanics, a war criminal main character, and ambiguous world-ending stakes that are kind of trans-humany. In one game there’s synthetic humanoids, in the other there’s Joe Rogan clones. I think the mechanical differences favour Wanted: Dead overall, but I laughed a lot less. Whether this was due to having played Devil’s Third first and thus I was ready for the kind of wacky nonsense Wanted: Dead contained, or if the humour just doesn’t quite land as well is something I can’t really pin down. But at least the parry-counter system is cool.
As the player makes their way through Wanted: Dead’s linear levels they’ll frequently be presented with a new batch of enemies to fight. Pretty much all of these enemies are some form of humanoid, but the variety of guns and armour values they have force the player to interact with different enemy types in different ways. When entering the first level the player is shown the two guns Stone has been issued; not so subtly prompting them to try both out during the upcoming battle, which demonstrates to the player how the rifle and the handgun will be used. The rifle facilitates a cover-shooter gameplay style where the player can post up behind chest-high walls and play whack-a-mole with the enemies that are also hiding in cover. It’s the same cover-shooting we’ve all seen before but I was more than content to click on dudes throughout both playthroughs. If you wanna get spicy there is a range of other guns to grab from defeated enemies that include things like grenade launchers, shotguns, and LMGs. The selection isn’t gigantic, but I think every forageable weapon fulfilled a unique role, which is great. The handgun is more a component of the hack-n-slash gameplay. It’s mostly used as a parry: whenever an enemy’s attack shines a red danger indicator, pressing the handgun button interrupts the attack and stuns the enemy for a short period. There’s also a super the player can use to stun a bunch of enemies simultaneously and then watch as Stone dashes around to each stunned enemy, performing a brutal kill animation each time. The super is charged by landing melee swings with the sword, which was the primary weapon I used throughout the game. Stone only ever learned 2 combos when she was taught how to swing that sword, resulting in a melee combat system that is extremely simple. The sword has its own parry too, though, activating the parry can be done by simply mashing the block button until the parry triggers; no additional complexity or skill requirement is added. I don’t think the melee combat being simple is necessarily bad, but it means relying a lot on the enemies to offer interesting and exciting gameplay moments. Enemies that also need to be engaging to shoot at from across the room. It’s a fine line to be walking and I think Soleil just about pulls through in the end, but not without some severe compromises.
The enemies in Wanted: Dead belong to one of three factions, though the synthetics are exclusive to a single level, and the gangsters show up once more after their level concludes. The vast majority of the enemies belong to a mysterious private army or police force (?), they’re equipped with a wide range of guns, and generally have enough armour to take a few hits. The standard gunner enemies are surprisingly active: they move from cover to cover while attempting to flank, and if the player is close by they might charge in and have a kick. They’re solid at the very least, which also applies to the ninja enemies. These come in three colours and all of them have a lot of health. And the white ones have way too much health. Stone is also horrendously ill equipped to face off against another sword wielder and gets absolutely destroyed by a single mistake. Their inflated health pools also caused every battle that mixed gunners and ninjas to inevitably end with a handful of ninjas refusing to go down, which did get tiresome through the last few levels. There’s one section in a series of alleyways with like four white ninjas back to back that ends with a miniboss encounter against two black ninjas with no breaks or checkpoints at all. The runback to these final ninjas can take up to 10 full minutes because Stone refuses to open the door to their arena if any other enemy in the previous alleyway is still alive. The number of enemies in this alley doesn’t even change if the player chooses normal or “Japanese hard” difficulty, and “Japanese hard” difficulty isn’t even selectable until after the player finishes the game at least once. Putting aside the strange name, I couldn’t really figure out what about the game was altered by selecting this difficulty level. There’s still a black ninja in one of the earliest rooms in the first level, enemies with grenade launchers can still kill the player in a single hit, even the bosses seem to be around the same level of challenge. I hit a few troublesome areas on my first normal mode playthrough that I didn’t struggle with at all on the harder difficulty. Clearly I had learned how to play the game and understood how it wanted me to approach these challenges, but I went from spending minutes bashing my head against what seemed like a brick wall to breezing through effortlessly the second time around. The only real stopping point during my Japanese Hard playthrough was that ridiculous alleyway I mentioned before, and a couple of the boss fights.
There are five boss enemies in Wanted: Dead, with the spider tank making a repeat appearance toward the end of the game. The tank is the only boss that isn’t a melee only encounter so its reuse isn’t egregious or anything, and the rematch has a whole second tank skittering around. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest of a fairly disappointing showing of bosses overall. All the player really needs to do is kill the human enemies, take their explosives, and shoot them at the tank until it dies. They roam around the arena and shoot at the player almost lazily. The main cannon deals enough damage to kill Stone in one hit, and if the player happens to be standing in the tank’s path when it charges they can expect to die instantly too. So the fight is extremely easy but sometimes you get vaporised or flattened and have to start over. I like the tank’s visual design, though, and the battles against it are a cathartic flurry of audiovisual effects that manage to make the boss seem exciting in the moment. The rest of the fights are all against humanoids with a unique capability, almost exactly like Devil’s Third bosses. The first of these is the rebellious synthetic leader August, whose three phase encounter is gruelling when compared to the spider tanks. This fight takes place in an empty public swimming pool, which I think is a cool concept for a boss arena, and August’s first method of attack is to stand on a ledge above the pool and shoot a grenade launcher at the player while some regular synth enemies try to tie the player down. Killing most of the regular enemies or shooting August enough will cause the fight to transition into the second phase. I like that the fight is adaptable in this way since the player gets to decide whether they want to clear the synths out of the pool before August hops in himself. The second phase sees August switch to an assault rifle while patrolling the arena, which isn’t quite as interesting as the first phase, and his pinpoint accuracy is probably a bit much considering how long this fight can go on for. Eventually he puts the gun away and resorts to hand-to-hand attacks which would be trivial to overcome if the player had any bullets left. Things get weaker when it’s time to fight Kolchak. I’m a massive fan of invisible enemies that the player tracks via some environmental detail, so fighting this cloaking sniper on a rainy rooftop should’ve been awesome. Sadly, the fight is easily won by just waiting for Kolchak’s red warning trigger to appear and stunning her with the handgun. And she spends a lot of time cloaked looking for an opening to attack, but it’s possible to track her and land hits while she won’t fight back, pushing the fight to the second phase where the cloak starts to malfunction. Kolchak tries some new moves after this point but they aren’t any more effective than before. Then there’s the Mr. Holiday encounter. This guy has appeared a couple of times during the ending movies of some of the previous levels but I don’t really know him or get much of a sense of what he wants. He seems to be Richter’s second in command but what that means is difficult to discern. So it's a huge surprise that when the boss encounter begins there are two Mr. Holidays in the room. During the first phase both Holidays share a single health bar, and they play off of each other very well. One takes the melee role and the other hangs back and shoots. It’s a shockingly well-balanced encounter, but I have no idea what Holiday achieves by killing Stone. I do not understand what he’s talking about or why he “feels nothing”. The second phase is also a solid duel against an opponent with similar moves to the player. Holiday isn’t as flashy as the other bosses, but all in all I think this fight is pretty good. The final boss is Richter, who I guess is the main brain trying to take down Stone and her squad. He has a weird lightsaber and the power to summon a rainstorm, and he can heal too, but Richter isn’t an especially active boss. I found plenty of opportunities to slash at him a lot and he’d just sit there and take the hits. I also discovered that spamming the sword parry whenever he started his standard combo would give me a lot of successful parries which would drain Richter’s invisible posture bar. It isn’t an easy encounter and there wasn’t anything offensive going on or whatever, but the moment Richter fell into the darkness was hugely anticlimactic.
So that might have seemed like a spoiler but it definitely isn’t - the truly interesting part of Wanted: Dead’s narrative is trying to decipher what’s actually happening - which is why I’m going to talk about the game’s presentation first before we get stuck into the real meat here. Wanted: Dead looks counterintuitively cheap and expensive. The character models and textures are impressively detailed but the animation work doesn’t maintain the level of quality. The combat animations are great, and sometimes the movie animations are just as good, but other times the arm movements are strangely jerky and the faces seem overly wooden. I also think the lack of particles and screen effects cause a lot of the movies to look empty, like the characters are in some kind of vacuum. Fee Marie Zimmerman’s performance as Stone is mostly solid, but a lot of lines could’ve used another read. It’s tough to have so many different accents converge in a language that isn’t the writers’ first so some of the things Zimmerman has to say aren’t exactly friendly to her Swiss accent. The sound overall is genuinely really well done - there’s just these occasional hiccups in direction and implementation that stick out. Like, why are the gangster’s voice lines so strangely mixed? Why does the karaoke singing go on for the entirety of 99 Red Balloons? And the tonal whiplash I got from the karaoke segment had me in the ER. But then Herzog tells an awful joke in the elevator and the performance is perfect.
The game opens with blonde Hannah Stone in a tiny cell being recruited to the team by a mysterious red light. Things flash forward to the crew eating at a diner where the nearby TV reports on Dauer Synthetics’ stock price decline, as well as a report on Dauer’s violent response to protests in Baghdad. The footage on the TV during the protest report looks just like the Dauer building the crew are sent to at the end of the scene, so I initially thought the team were being sent to Baghdad, but they actually never leave Hong Kong. The whole opening scene is really strangely written. Lots of awkward lines back to back. The Dauer building the first level takes place in is being attacked by a mysterious force who are there to steal American bills. Why would they want this currency when they’re already equipped with unmarked guns and high end armour? And according to Doc, the soldiers sent in to steal the cash are untraceable. Who are these guys? What are they doing? It’s an intriguing premise - despite being kind of difficult to follow - but these questions are never answered. Instead, the crew are sent down to a park to deal with some troublesome Synthetics who are refusing to comply. This is where August is introduced, and instead of capturing or killing him, he manages to escape on a helicopter - with a little help from another Synthetic named October. The team takes October to be interrogated and learn a few things from her, and Doc makes his own discovery as well. October says her memories begin when she woke up in a bodybag, and the implants she has covering her body are primarily used as a means to punish insubordination. Stone had heard this “woke up in a bodybag” phrase before, and I think it’s probably the most pivotal part of the narrative overall. Dauer Synthetics’ business has been either reanimating corpses to be used as their “synthetic” workers, or they’ve been kidnapping and memory-wiping people instead. Stone seems to also be affected by whichever thing Dauer is doing which is shown in the 2D animated movies. These scenes don’t add much to the game for me; the artstyle shift is completely inconsequential and the stuff about Stone’s lost family doesn’t expand her motivation meaningfully - people don’t just do war crimes for no reason. If Dauer is reanimating dead people and selling them as “synthetic workers” secretly, then it would make sense to me that Richter and Mr. Holiday have been employed to stop Stone from figuring out what Dauer is doing, by force. The company is clearly powerful enough to do this - they run the police force that Stone and her crew of war criminal officers work for - but then how can the company’s stock price be in decline? If they are law enforcement, with a private army and private police forces and literal zombie slaves, wouldn’t they just subsume all other governments into the company and be the de facto authority? Why are they playing by the rules? And why would it matter if their police force discover the origins of Dauer’s synthetic workforce? This is like everybody’s dystopia. Nobody wins, not the company, not the public, not even the children.
When I decided what the thesis of this video was going to be, I did what I always do: I started writing and cutting and rewriting and recutting and hoping that eventually through persistence I’d be able to come to a satisfying conclusion. But this time I never had the epiphany that I was expecting to have. I created this document back in November, after first playing through the game in October. It’s now almost January as I finish writing this script and I have only just come to the realisation that I’ve been searching for. I had just finished editing out the stammering and poor line reads from the voiceover when I realised I had never read the About page on Soleil’s official website. Part way through the segment titled “Message”, below a picture of who I presume is Takayuki Kikuchi, there’s a smoking gun that answers all. “We… develop action games especially focused on the "good feeling when you press buttons" and the touch and feel sensation that is the primal appeal of computer games.” Wanted: Dead was designed to have good buttons. The player is primarily supposed to enjoy making their character do stuff, and the rest of the game is made to reinforce that philosophy. It’s so simple, and it’s so extremely obvious now. All the screen effects during combat that are totally absent during the movies, all the weird lines back to back, the narrative’s lack of coherence or a clear point, even the way some of the bosses are designed, it’s all secondary to ensuring that the player gets to enjoy doing cool stuff. And I’m here for it.
It’s nice to finally have an answer for why this game is the way it is, and while I enjoy the game for it’s quirkiness and fun gameplay, Wanted: Dead still has problems. The rhythm game sections are much longer than I think anyone would care for, that one alleyway is way more demanding than the rest of the game, and the narrative makes next to no sense at all. But it’s honest. And I’m happy to see that the Steam reviews have recognised the honesty. Soleil just likes PS2 games, and so do I. I like them so much, I’m going to be playing a real one for the next video.
Wanted: Dead is an anomaly within the modern video game market. The game wasn’t created to dazzle people with a phenomenal presentation, it isn’t some avant-garde break from typical action gameplay, and the narrative doesn’t go anywhere a video game hasn’t dared to go before. Instead, what makes Wanted: Dead stand out is Soleil’s unique game development philosophy. Similar to games like Axiom Verge, Dusk, and Disco Elysium, Soleil made a game in a style that is no longer catching the attention of the money-men who control the big studios. Wanted: Dead adheres closely to Soleil’s signature style: it is an over-the-top action game with elements that would be right at home on the Playstation 2. I can imagine that description alone can be enough to convince some players to go out and give the game a shot, but I can also understand the concerns this could raise in others. “Looks like a PS2 game” is a frequently used pejorative term nowadays so it’d take something really special to convince those people not to immediately write Wanted: Dead off. Soleil has used many modern game development techniques to deliver an experience that wouldn’t have been possible on that old hardware, while still holding true to a lot of the conventions from the time - which I think is a good way to summarise this game. The player uses swords and guns and grenades and chainsaws, they roll around and parry enemy attacks - which makes it a soulslike - there are boss fights, long, linear levels, tons of stylish kill animations, 80s music, minigames, weird character designs, and a lot of funny cutscenes. It might share many of these features with other games, but the combination is distinctly Soleil’s own. Wanted: Dead is basically an Extermination redux which is exactly what the world needs right now. But, since this game wouldn’t be filled with purchasable cosmetics or offer the publisher some means of selling the players’ personal information, Wanted: Dead’s budget was remarkably small, and that lack of funding is very apparent throughout the game. There are a slew of technical issues that are detrimental to the experience, then there are a few gameplay segments that would probably have been left out had the studio been playtesting more thoroughly, and then the game’s difficulty balancing could have benefitted from some extra time for refinement. With all that said, however, I don’t think this is a bad game, and the air of negativity surrounding it is completely unearned.
A while back I played Devil’s Third, the infamous WiiU game that was brutalised by professional reviewers at the time. I liked it quite a lot - the cutscenes made me laugh, the gameplay is solid, and Ivan is a character who deserved the trilogy that the developers had been dreaming of, but it was far from flawless. The developers’ inability to secure a publisher and target hardware put a big dent in Devil’s Third that I’m happy to overlook. I definitely attributed far more of Devil’s Third to Valhalla Game Studios than to Soleil which has ultimately proven to be incorrect. Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead are very similar games but Valhalla had no hand in the latter. And now I’m questioning what Itagaki and co even did. Both games feature similar third person hack-n-slash elements, cover-shooting, party mechanics, a war criminal main character, and ambiguous world-ending stakes that are kind of trans-humany. In one game there’s synthetic humanoids, in the other there’s Joe Rogan clones. I think the mechanical differences favour Wanted: Dead overall, but I laughed a lot less. Whether this was due to having played Devil’s Third first and thus I was ready for the kind of wacky nonsense Wanted: Dead contained, or if the humour just doesn’t quite land as well is something I can’t really pin down. But at least the parry-counter system is cool.
As the player makes their way through Wanted: Dead’s linear levels they’ll frequently be presented with a new batch of enemies to fight. Pretty much all of these enemies are some form of humanoid, but the variety of guns and armour values they have force the player to interact with different enemy types in different ways. When entering the first level the player is shown the two guns Stone has been issued; not so subtly prompting them to try both out during the upcoming battle, which demonstrates to the player how the rifle and the handgun will be used. The rifle facilitates a cover-shooter gameplay style where the player can post up behind chest-high walls and play whack-a-mole with the enemies that are also hiding in cover. It’s the same cover-shooting we’ve all seen before but I was more than content to click on dudes throughout both playthroughs. If you wanna get spicy there is a range of other guns to grab from defeated enemies that include things like grenade launchers, shotguns, and LMGs. The selection isn’t gigantic, but I think every forageable weapon fulfilled a unique role, which is great. The handgun is more a component of the hack-n-slash gameplay. It’s mostly used as a parry: whenever an enemy’s attack shines a red danger indicator, pressing the handgun button interrupts the attack and stuns the enemy for a short period. There’s also a super the player can use to stun a bunch of enemies simultaneously and then watch as Stone dashes around to each stunned enemy, performing a brutal kill animation each time. The super is charged by landing melee swings with the sword, which was the primary weapon I used throughout the game. Stone only ever learned 2 combos when she was taught how to swing that sword, resulting in a melee combat system that is extremely simple. The sword has its own parry too, though, activating the parry can be done by simply mashing the block button until the parry triggers; no additional complexity or skill requirement is added. I don’t think the melee combat being simple is necessarily bad, but it means relying a lot on the enemies to offer interesting and exciting gameplay moments. Enemies that also need to be engaging to shoot at from across the room. It’s a fine line to be walking and I think Soleil just about pulls through in the end, but not without some severe compromises.
The enemies in Wanted: Dead belong to one of three factions, though the synthetics are exclusive to a single level, and the gangsters show up once more after their level concludes. The vast majority of the enemies belong to a mysterious private army or police force (?), they’re equipped with a wide range of guns, and generally have enough armour to take a few hits. The standard gunner enemies are surprisingly active: they move from cover to cover while attempting to flank, and if the player is close by they might charge in and have a kick. They’re solid at the very least, which also applies to the ninja enemies. These come in three colours and all of them have a lot of health. And the white ones have way too much health. Stone is also horrendously ill equipped to face off against another sword wielder and gets absolutely destroyed by a single mistake. Their inflated health pools also caused every battle that mixed gunners and ninjas to inevitably end with a handful of ninjas refusing to go down, which did get tiresome through the last few levels. There’s one section in a series of alleyways with like four white ninjas back to back that ends with a miniboss encounter against two black ninjas with no breaks or checkpoints at all. The runback to these final ninjas can take up to 10 full minutes because Stone refuses to open the door to their arena if any other enemy in the previous alleyway is still alive. The number of enemies in this alley doesn’t even change if the player chooses normal or “Japanese hard” difficulty, and “Japanese hard” difficulty isn’t even selectable until after the player finishes the game at least once. Putting aside the strange name, I couldn’t really figure out what about the game was altered by selecting this difficulty level. There’s still a black ninja in one of the earliest rooms in the first level, enemies with grenade launchers can still kill the player in a single hit, even the bosses seem to be around the same level of challenge. I hit a few troublesome areas on my first normal mode playthrough that I didn’t struggle with at all on the harder difficulty. Clearly I had learned how to play the game and understood how it wanted me to approach these challenges, but I went from spending minutes bashing my head against what seemed like a brick wall to breezing through effortlessly the second time around. The only real stopping point during my Japanese Hard playthrough was that ridiculous alleyway I mentioned before, and a couple of the boss fights.
There are five boss enemies in Wanted: Dead, with the spider tank making a repeat appearance toward the end of the game. The tank is the only boss that isn’t a melee only encounter so its reuse isn’t egregious or anything, and the rematch has a whole second tank skittering around. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest of a fairly disappointing showing of bosses overall. All the player really needs to do is kill the human enemies, take their explosives, and shoot them at the tank until it dies. They roam around the arena and shoot at the player almost lazily. The main cannon deals enough damage to kill Stone in one hit, and if the player happens to be standing in the tank’s path when it charges they can expect to die instantly too. So the fight is extremely easy but sometimes you get vaporised or flattened and have to start over. I like the tank’s visual design, though, and the battles against it are a cathartic flurry of audiovisual effects that manage to make the boss seem exciting in the moment. The rest of the fights are all against humanoids with a unique capability, almost exactly like Devil’s Third bosses. The first of these is the rebellious synthetic leader August, whose three phase encounter is gruelling when compared to the spider tanks. This fight takes place in an empty public swimming pool, which I think is a cool concept for a boss arena, and August’s first method of attack is to stand on a ledge above the pool and shoot a grenade launcher at the player while some regular synth enemies try to tie the player down. Killing most of the regular enemies or shooting August enough will cause the fight to transition into the second phase. I like that the fight is adaptable in this way since the player gets to decide whether they want to clear the synths out of the pool before August hops in himself. The second phase sees August switch to an assault rifle while patrolling the arena, which isn’t quite as interesting as the first phase, and his pinpoint accuracy is probably a bit much considering how long this fight can go on for. Eventually he puts the gun away and resorts to hand-to-hand attacks which would be trivial to overcome if the player had any bullets left. Things get weaker when it’s time to fight Kolchak. I’m a massive fan of invisible enemies that the player tracks via some environmental detail, so fighting this cloaking sniper on a rainy rooftop should’ve been awesome. Sadly, the fight is easily won by just waiting for Kolchak’s red warning trigger to appear and stunning her with the handgun. And she spends a lot of time cloaked looking for an opening to attack, but it’s possible to track her and land hits while she won’t fight back, pushing the fight to the second phase where the cloak starts to malfunction. Kolchak tries some new moves after this point but they aren’t any more effective than before. Then there’s the Mr. Holiday encounter. This guy has appeared a couple of times during the ending movies of some of the previous levels but I don’t really know him or get much of a sense of what he wants. He seems to be Richter’s second in command but what that means is difficult to discern. So it's a huge surprise that when the boss encounter begins there are two Mr. Holidays in the room. During the first phase both Holidays share a single health bar, and they play off of each other very well. One takes the melee role and the other hangs back and shoots. It’s a shockingly well-balanced encounter, but I have no idea what Holiday achieves by killing Stone. I do not understand what he’s talking about or why he “feels nothing”. The second phase is also a solid duel against an opponent with similar moves to the player. Holiday isn’t as flashy as the other bosses, but all in all I think this fight is pretty good. The final boss is Richter, who I guess is the main brain trying to take down Stone and her squad. He has a weird lightsaber and the power to summon a rainstorm, and he can heal too, but Richter isn’t an especially active boss. I found plenty of opportunities to slash at him a lot and he’d just sit there and take the hits. I also discovered that spamming the sword parry whenever he started his standard combo would give me a lot of successful parries which would drain Richter’s invisible posture bar. It isn’t an easy encounter and there wasn’t anything offensive going on or whatever, but the moment Richter fell into the darkness was hugely anticlimactic.
So that might have seemed like a spoiler but it definitely isn’t - the truly interesting part of Wanted: Dead’s narrative is trying to decipher what’s actually happening - which is why I’m going to talk about the game’s presentation first before we get stuck into the real meat here. Wanted: Dead looks counterintuitively cheap and expensive. The character models and textures are impressively detailed but the animation work doesn’t maintain the level of quality. The combat animations are great, and sometimes the movie animations are just as good, but other times the arm movements are strangely jerky and the faces seem overly wooden. I also think the lack of particles and screen effects cause a lot of the movies to look empty, like the characters are in some kind of vacuum. Fee Marie Zimmerman’s performance as Stone is mostly solid, but a lot of lines could’ve used another read. It’s tough to have so many different accents converge in a language that isn’t the writers’ first so some of the things Zimmerman has to say aren’t exactly friendly to her Swiss accent. The sound overall is genuinely really well done - there’s just these occasional hiccups in direction and implementation that stick out. Like, why are the gangster’s voice lines so strangely mixed? Why does the karaoke singing go on for the entirety of 99 Red Balloons? And the tonal whiplash I got from the karaoke segment had me in the ER. But then Herzog tells an awful joke in the elevator and the performance is perfect.
The game opens with blonde Hannah Stone in a tiny cell being recruited to the team by a mysterious red light. Things flash forward to the crew eating at a diner where the nearby TV reports on Dauer Synthetics’ stock price decline, as well as a report on Dauer’s violent response to protests in Baghdad. The footage on the TV during the protest report looks just like the Dauer building the crew are sent to at the end of the scene, so I initially thought the team were being sent to Baghdad, but they actually never leave Hong Kong. The whole opening scene is really strangely written. Lots of awkward lines back to back. The Dauer building the first level takes place in is being attacked by a mysterious force who are there to steal American bills. Why would they want this currency when they’re already equipped with unmarked guns and high end armour? And according to Doc, the soldiers sent in to steal the cash are untraceable. Who are these guys? What are they doing? It’s an intriguing premise - despite being kind of difficult to follow - but these questions are never answered. Instead, the crew are sent down to a park to deal with some troublesome Synthetics who are refusing to comply. This is where August is introduced, and instead of capturing or killing him, he manages to escape on a helicopter - with a little help from another Synthetic named October. The team takes October to be interrogated and learn a few things from her, and Doc makes his own discovery as well. October says her memories begin when she woke up in a bodybag, and the implants she has covering her body are primarily used as a means to punish insubordination. Stone had heard this “woke up in a bodybag” phrase before, and I think it’s probably the most pivotal part of the narrative overall. Dauer Synthetics’ business has been either reanimating corpses to be used as their “synthetic” workers, or they’ve been kidnapping and memory-wiping people instead. Stone seems to also be affected by whichever thing Dauer is doing which is shown in the 2D animated movies. These scenes don’t add much to the game for me; the artstyle shift is completely inconsequential and the stuff about Stone’s lost family doesn’t expand her motivation meaningfully - people don’t just do war crimes for no reason. If Dauer is reanimating dead people and selling them as “synthetic workers” secretly, then it would make sense to me that Richter and Mr. Holiday have been employed to stop Stone from figuring out what Dauer is doing, by force. The company is clearly powerful enough to do this - they run the police force that Stone and her crew of war criminal officers work for - but then how can the company’s stock price be in decline? If they are law enforcement, with a private army and private police forces and literal zombie slaves, wouldn’t they just subsume all other governments into the company and be the de facto authority? Why are they playing by the rules? And why would it matter if their police force discover the origins of Dauer’s synthetic workforce? This is like everybody’s dystopia. Nobody wins, not the company, not the public, not even the children.
When I decided what the thesis of this video was going to be, I did what I always do: I started writing and cutting and rewriting and recutting and hoping that eventually through persistence I’d be able to come to a satisfying conclusion. But this time I never had the epiphany that I was expecting to have. I created this document back in November, after first playing through the game in October. It’s now almost January as I finish writing this script and I have only just come to the realisation that I’ve been searching for. I had just finished editing out the stammering and poor line reads from the voiceover when I realised I had never read the About page on Soleil’s official website. Part way through the segment titled “Message”, below a picture of who I presume is Takayuki Kikuchi, there’s a smoking gun that answers all. “We… develop action games especially focused on the "good feeling when you press buttons" and the touch and feel sensation that is the primal appeal of computer games.” Wanted: Dead was designed to have good buttons. The player is primarily supposed to enjoy making their character do stuff, and the rest of the game is made to reinforce that philosophy. It’s so simple, and it’s so extremely obvious now. All the screen effects during combat that are totally absent during the movies, all the weird lines back to back, the narrative’s lack of coherence or a clear point, even the way some of the bosses are designed, it’s all secondary to ensuring that the player gets to enjoy doing cool stuff. And I’m here for it.
It’s nice to finally have an answer for why this game is the way it is, and while I enjoy the game for it’s quirkiness and fun gameplay, Wanted: Dead still has problems. The rhythm game sections are much longer than I think anyone would care for, that one alleyway is way more demanding than the rest of the game, and the narrative makes next to no sense at all. But it’s honest. And I’m happy to see that the Steam reviews have recognised the honesty. Soleil just likes PS2 games, and so do I. I like them so much, I’m going to be playing a real one for the next video.
Goofy B game where they got the ratio's wrong for story and combat. Also stefanie joosten is here but she is a cop. Combat doesn't have much self-expression, story doesn't really go anywhere, and characters don't get enough time to be have their own moments.
I really miss games like this, so i enjoyed it tho.
I really miss games like this, so i enjoyed it tho.
Esse jogo quer ser muita coisa, as inspirações estão claramente visíveis em todos os lugares, é ao mesmo tempo Metal Gear, Max Payne, Ninja Gaiden, Sekiro, Esquadrão Suicida, Cover Shooters, jogos de arcade... e no fim, é apenas Wanted: Dead. No meio dessa bagunça de ideias, existe uma unidade fascinante por si só que vai muito além de apenas uma experiência derivativa de outras obras, e quando você olha para esse jogo se desprendendo das pré-concepções que essas inspirações podem ter criado, tudo fica bem mais interessante e divertido. Em questão de mecânicas é argumentável que, apesar de problemas de polimento, são genuinamente funcionais, mas quando vai para outros aspectos e o jogo inteiro é colocado em evidência... eu não sei, eu realmente não sei o que eu acho, eu terminei o jogo e ainda não entendi o que me atrai tanto aqui, eu ainda não entendi nada do que aconteceu na história, o que posso falar é que é definitivamente interessante.