Wanted: Dead
- Michael
- Jan 19, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 6
There is combat in this game
The combat system is very good and deep as it forces you to experiment and find your own style that works for you. You can mix katana strikes and block and parry and dodge with handgun counter and general handgun and other weapons shots. Finishing moves that you can perform are probably the best part of the combat because they look nice and feel satisfying. It is a very rich and interesting system that requires you to get better at it if you want to defeat more difficult enemies while not really requiring almost anything from you when you fight the general weak enemies. Like killing basic soldiers in stage 1 or android workers in stage 2 or bouncers in stage 3 is easy as all it takes is a few shots or few katana hits.
But killing ninja enemies that also have katanas or big exoskeleton enemies that carry heavy machine guns is much harder as you have to get really good at parring their attacks in order to win because they are fast moving bullet sponges that will do their best to dodge your shots and get close to you and it will be easier and faster to kill them with katana than it is with guns. But thankfully you can also cheese ninjas with fire grenades because if they will start to burn they won’t dodge any of the bullets making them easy to kill with guns or you can use fire grenades to separate one ninja from the other so you can fight 1 vs 1 making the fight easier. Because your handgun is the only weapon in the world that has unlimited ammo you can even cheese ninjas by just shooting them a few times and dodging away till they are dead. I also find it funny how the brown ninja will die from a propane tank explosion but it will take 2-3 grenade launcher shots to kill him.
Enemies wearing exoskeleton are the hardest enemies and the biggest problem in the game if you try to use things like guns or grenades against them. Thankfully they are not intelligent at all so despite having all that armor and heavy machine gun and infinite amount of grenades that they can use to destroy you from a distance they prefer to charge you and fight with you in melee trying to hit you with their heavy machine gun. Thanks to them being just stupid the best way to kill them is to parry their hits and do gun counters and slash them with a katana. The funny thing is I tested them and they will survive 3 whole magazines from your assault rifle or 12 shots from grenade launcher without problems but 12 combos from a katana will kill them. I guess they are just coded in a way to be a bullet sponge of the worst kind where katana deals more damage to them than anything else that exists in the game. Funny thing is that 12 shots from grenade launcher is enough to destroy stage 1 boss and that boss is a tank but they are not enough to kill a guy in exoskeleton. I guess the only reason tanks are produced in this world is because they actually use their weapons to shoot at enemies instead of trying to fight them in melee like the exoskeleton guys. Thankfully these exoskeleton guys can be killed with one hit from a chainsaw just like any enemy in the game.
Sadly your squad attacks mean nothing and deal almost no damage. I think their guns should fire paintballs at enemies for added realism of how useful they are. It feels like the teammates that are with you exist only to be a distraction so you won’t get swarmed than any real help in combat. I think the most important skill they have is screaming “grenade” when enemies throw one at you and that the Doc will heal you once when you are down. Thankfully there are skill trees and in that skill trees there are even skills to make your squad a little better but these will probably be the skills that you will pick last as after seeing your squad in action you will just focus on improving your own skills to kill faster and survive longer.
And then there is everything else...
Oh where to start… The voice acting of our main hero Hannah Stone is the worst. It shows no emotion and it sounds like someone did just read a script and after googling it out I was surprised that it was made by a real living person and not just a computer reading the text. But the voices of everyone else are not at all much better. And the whole way anyone speaks or moves or gestures in the cutscenes is just bad. Thankfully when we see Hannah Stone remembering her past life it is done as anime and these animations are much better. I think all cutscenes should be done by the same person that did these animations because they are the only good looking cutscenes in the whole game. Thankfully cooking videos that you can find in claw machine are also funny.
And the claw machines and the shooting range are the only good mini-games that this game has. Eating ramen is ok – I admit I’m bad at rhythm games but still I can see that this mini-game is just ok as it is about mashing 8 different buttons but at least you can find additional tracks to play in the claw machine. The karaoke mini-game is just bad. It is just the copy of ramen mini-game somehow made to be worse. Not only it has only one song and that song is 99 Luftballons but there are no other songs to collect anywhere in the game. I can’t imagine why they created this mini-game in the first place just for one song. The last mini-game is the side-scrolling shooter called Space Runaway and sadly it is bugged. I saw other people on youtube that were able to play it how it was intended but mine was set in a way that I saw only about 50% of the screen and my mech and enemies were huge.
And the bug with Space Runaway was not the only bug I had and I think it was connected with graphic settings bugs. Each time I did exit the game the graphic settings were resetting so I had to set them again to my liking changing from 60 to 144 fps and changing the blur to 0 and forcing the game to be launched in full screen mode and not just in a window. Sometimes grenades bounce back to me and the grenade launcher shots explodes in the front of my face because they are hitting some invisible wall in the air. The worst bug was with the unique weapon that you can win from shooting range – not only it is weaker than your own assault rifle – it is even hard to swap this weapon out for your normal assault rifle at checkpoints. When I was testing that weapon there were many times where I had to try 5 or more times to swap back to my normal assault rifle at checkpoints for the game to even recognize that I don’t want to use it anymore.
The worst part of the game is the story. Parts about Hannah Stone make sense but there are multiple holes in the rest of the story and many things that never get addressed. Why enemies in stage 1 did steal money if it can’t be used in this part of the world? How losing that money that can’t be used makes the most famous company go bankrupt over night? Why the police force that is famous for killing all suspects all the time would be send to stop a protest and why they would start by just killing protesters with a sniper rifle from a helicopter? And why a few days later after murdering more than 100+ of such protesters their leader would be ok with helping us? There are many holes in the story like that. Also many cut-scenes add additional informations that are never addressed again.
The whole game is just 5 stages connected by a story that makes little to no sense in the end. It looks like the story is only there to push the player from stage to stage. This game would be much better with no story at all – just fighting stages and nothing in between them.
Conclusion
Good combat and bad everything else combined with 40$ price.
Rating: 4/10