Wanted: Dead (2023)

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.

Some nice new changes in the April update. I particularly like that sliding into a shield enemy knocks the shield out of their hands.

They rebalanced quite a bit, and they also retooled the skill tree. And they fixed a bunch of bugs, including the one that prevents you from picking up stimpacks. I'm kind of tempted to check it out and see how drastic the changes feel.

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.

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. 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? This world is really cool, I love the characters and I’m really hoping for a sequel.

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.

New bug, I can’t pick up stim packs anymore. The game just won’t let me. I can see them. They are there with the icon that indicates to click R3 to pick them up, but no dice.

I’m going to try to verify the integrity of the installed files and if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll reinstall. But if I can’t pick items up anymore I might have to concede that the game is too broken to finish.

The checkpoint/save point placement/pacing in this game is ridiculous.

Example 1: Save point > one heavy, three grunts, one white ninja > save point

Example 2: > twenty grunts, five brown ninjas, five white ninjas > two simultaneous black ninjas > maybe a save point?

Did anyone think these through? They couldn’t give me a checkpoint before the two black ninjas so that I don’t have to do all the tedious work of taking out the waves of enemies all over again.

Wanted Dead is designed the way people often erroneously think Dark Souls and other From games are designed.

A while ago @BMO shared this article that chronicles the absolute disaster that was the Skull & Bones development. Decades of mismanagement without any clear vision that delivered what, from the consensus, is a perfectly playable piece of soulless mediocrity. Wanted: Dead feels like the opposite: A labour of love from a dedicated ore group of developers without any oversight that was crafted in a weekend and published with minimal playtesting and QA. And the result is a strange, compelling but barely playable game.

It's hard to pin down what makes this game something special. It's not one thing; you cannot talk about each part of the game and understand what makes it so charming. It's the whole package, it's the vibes, the style, how it moves. Its nonsensical plot, it's attempt at over-the-top action, its weird non-sequiturs that go absolutely nowhere, its completely broken dialogue that goes over the place and makes no sense even though its technically correct English.

There's not a moment that doesn't leave you in disbelief at what you're seeing. Be it a Australian voice-over reading a paragraph about the history of ramen that is never to be heard again, a cringe-worthy karaoke rendition of 99 Luftballons, or the nonsensical checkpoint placement and the one-hit kill attacks during boss fights.

The truth is that, on paper, Wanted: Dead doesn't work. It shouldn't work. Combining stylish melee combat with cover-based shooting was a brave attempt, but it ends up failing both systems. The camera is too close to have good situational awareness to avoid enemies stabbing you from behind and grenades will blow you up without warning. Cover, on the other hand, is as unreliable as the predicted path of grenades and grenade launchers. Character moment is also stiff, without graceful transitions between attacks and with long recovery animations that can get you stun-locked to death. The finisher system, which lets you kill multiple enemies close to death is cool when it works, but is not balanced right and most of the time enemies just die from normal attacks. I could never use it reliably.

Those are foundational problems that are hard to solve for any game attempting to bridge the gap between close combat and long range shooting, but then there are the baffling microfailures. Like the aforementioned checkpoint system that prevents learning the patterns of new tough enemies by forcing you to dredge through 5 minutes of combat before each attempt. Or how both enemies and teammates are dresses in black and brown and are not only impossible to distinguish ta a glance, but very hard to see over the dark background of the first level. There is a incredible long list of design fuckups that makes you feel that no one actually playtested this game.

Enjoyment of this game is a fierce fight between the awful moment to moment experience of unfair difficulty and finicky controls, and the gestalt of a game that leaves you confused and bewildered at every turn. For me, the style and the weirdness won and in balance I'm glad I played this game. I have to admit that I loved it.

Wanted: Dead is another game unfairly thrown under the bus or ignored by main stream videogame reviewers/Youtubers/streamers. Things have been like this for a long time now but it’s still sad to see and getting worse. Mainstream videogame reviews are hurting games, the gaming industry and gamers. The importance placed on game review scores and the metacritic number is not a good thing as it causes developers to create safe games that appeal to the mainstream game reviewers. And we all know how good the big game reviewers opinions are – weak, ignorant, shallow first impressions, pushed out quickly to get clicks, written by people that didn’t pay for it, didn’t have enough time to learn to play it properly, or didn’t care and are in a position where they can’t be too critical as it may affect their access to the industry, advertising spending and connections with their peers. So then along comes a game like Wanted: Dead that they can ‘safely’ s**t on or ignore or do a really bad job reviewing and most people won’t care but it hurts the game, the developers, the industry and gamers. (Obviously this is a generalisation and gamers aren’t much better. I hope no offense is taken as my problems with reviews are more systemic than individual).

Wanted: Dead is not a 4 out of 10 or worse. Wanted: Dead is lower budget and rough around the edges but it is a really solid action game with plenty of personality. I honestly think it is an enjoyable, charismatic game made by developers earnestly trying to make something fun and challenging in their own style.

First let’s get the bad out of the way. The two big negatives I see in reviews are low production values/ lack of polish and difficulty. There is plenty of truth to the first point. The graphics are not the best and the frame rate does drop at times. Objects and environments are not super detailed and the character models look dated. The enemies pass though surfaces they shouldn’t occasionally and the camera doesn’t always do a perfect job. During my second play through I had multiple crashes and I think one of the trophies may not be unlocking. However none of this is bad enough to make me stop playing or dislike the game but of course it does lower my opinion and I wish the experience was smoother and better looking. The difficulty on the other hand is a deliberate part of the game. If you don’t want to learn how to play and you don’t give yourself some time to get decent at it then you’re in for a frustrating time. Once you get the hang of things and unlock some skills the game becomes pretty great. Don’t get me wrong the game still throws some really hard sections your way, especially in the final stage, but the only part of the game that feels bulls**t hard is those damn minigames, which are generally optional.

The story and characters of Wanted: Dead was something I didn’t think I was going to care for at first but overtime I got more into it. Especially the quirky cast of characters, they grew on me so much and by the end I was left wanting more. What helps a lot is that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously and has you regularly changing from one thing to another. One minute you’re watching a cutscene, then some ultra violent gameplay, then to the crane game, then an anime cutscene, then karaoke, then live action cooking lessons, etc. It’s a fun, wild time but the humour and style won’t be for everyone. Wanted: Dead may not have a ‘good’ story or ‘deep’ characters but that isn’t a problem. It is totally fine to make something that is just kind of cool and fun.

Visually as I already said Wanted: Dead is not very technically impressive. I still like the look of it though because of the style, direction and character designs. The soundtrack was pretty cool and l liked the voice acting. It suited the characters and tone of the game.

Now we’re at the meat of the game, the excellent hack n slash/third person shooter hybrid combat. The problem with this is you don’t get the depth of a hack n slash or a TPS but you do gain the fun, interesting gameplay of mixing the two. Your main gun, second gun, grenades and cover work like a TPS. Your pistol is for counters, light hits and interrupting enemies. Your sword is for heavier hits, basic combos and charge attacks. You also have a block, parry, counter hit, side step, dodge roll, sprint, slide and sometimes a chainsaw. On top of that you have executions, slow mo and slow mo handgun attack all earned by playing well. You gain health back by hurting enemies too so it’s the type of game that rewards good play and encourages aggressive play. These elements mix so well together and once you get good and are in the zone it is a blast that looks so freaking cool. There is depth here or you can just get good enough to enjoy and finish it. Yeah it’s hard but worth it.

Wanted: Dead’s flaws are not enough to drag down the fun too much. I was swearing and laughing throughout and it will be a cult classic, if it’s not already. If it were slightly longer, had higher production values and was more highly polished it would be a game of the year contender for me. It is really important to support games like this. If people didn’t buy and appreciate King’s field, Lost kingdoms and Demon’s souls we wouldn’t have Elden Ring and Bloodborne. I would strongly recommend Wanted: Dead to anyone that enjoys Japanese action games.

7.4/10