A basic idea that fails to spark and terrible writing undermine the otherwise captivating spirit of early-aughts double-A gaming.
The marketing materials for Wanted: Dead characterize the game as a “love letter to the sixth generation of consoles,” which includes the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. It’s the creation of veterans from that era; Takayuki Kikuchi, a former employee of Tecmo whose credentials include the original Ninja Gaiden, formed the development company Soleil. It’s ironic that intense and persistent distaste may often accompany a love affair, and I’m not a big fan of Wanted: Dead. I don’t enjoy storyline that is 70% playing about with cop movie clichés, wave-based confrontations that often butcher you just before a checkpoint, or abrupt, pseudo-Gearsy shooting. I dislike campaign design that appears to be mostly used for Easter eggs and one-off vignettes. These items don’t appeal to me at all. However, I do sort of adore them.
I suspect the reason I love them is that I belong to the target audience of Wanted: Dead, which is early middle-aged players who came of age during the golden age of the “double-A game” – in other words, games from the early days of broadband, before Naughty Dog and Ubisoft made every third-person rival learn parkour and court comparison with HBO, before Steam became ubiquitous and trade-ins became extinct, and before every game required a season pass and a loot treadmill. During this period, there were less established ideas about what a videogame should accomplish, thus mid-tier 3D action games in particular were allowed to be unpolished, raw, brutal, brazenly slammed together, and, very frequently, an entire pile of arse. The concept of “double-A” seems to have been invented by nutters who could never move on from Midway’s passing, so I’m not convinced it ever truly happened. But whether it’s a rose-colored illusion or not, it perfectly matches Wanted: Dead.
After an introductory news broadcast with Thatcher and Yeltsin—of which I can only remember the phrase “a failure of common sense”—Wanted puts you in the shoes of Hannah Stone, a cyborg in sneakers with a katana who leads the infamous “Zombie Squad” of former convicts turned enforcers in a near-future version of Hong Kong. Over the course of a week in-game, Stone and her roughneck allies will investigate an android conspiracy; nevertheless, the writing frequently prioritizes slice-of-life humor over story development, with whole sequences centered to the group’s eating of ramen.
Throughout the campaign, you’ll travel to parks, clubs, and warehouses that are made up of hallways and wide areas with far checkpoints. There, you’ll battle a monotonous group of grunts, ninjas, and mech men before finishing the campaign with an exhausting bossfight that follows a set pattern. As generic as it sounds, it’s a structure I haven’t quite seen since the PS2: in particular, the lack of a save-anywhere function trains you to be careful with the few healthpacks you carry about and highlights how much the game design relies on arbitrary pop-up reinforcements. The content in between missions, however, is more reminiscent of later action games, especially Platinum’s Astral Chain: you roam around a police station gathering case files for experience points, chit-chatting with anonymous officers (of whom half work carrying boxes), and engaging in one of the numerous, entertaining, but unnecessary minigames, which vary from rhythm-matching karaoke to arcade cabinet shmups.
I try to maintain better company than this, but I like the thought of cooling my feet with secondary characters, especially in a game as brutal as Wanted can be. Resurrected from the putrefying depths of Blockbuster Videos by a severely abused ChatGPT customer, the basic cast consists of an offensive foursome of friends from the 1980s. A comedic sexpest with go-faster hair and scars offers jokes that should make you cringe but are basically incomprehensible. A cutesy take on The Simpsons’ crazy cat woman is matched with him. Fans of bad casting may anticipate not just a permanently enraged Black chief of police, but also a silent Black squad member who goes on a mission with you to a bar named Deaf Panther. There are noticeable breaks in consistency between the main and background speech, and the prose is generally sour and inadequately localized. The voice acting is quite terrible; one of the funnier scenes in the game is a dance floor battle when a single, very worn-out-sounding VA has to play twelve bouncers at once. The icing on the cake is Stone herself, a scenery-chewing Tommy Wiseau-level character who constantly sounds like she’s just woken up.
Larger plot beats include some rather fluid—if not particularly mind-expanding—discussions about artificial sentience, during which the prose somewhat improves. In another heartwarming memory, Stone must console a little child whose mother has been killed. However, as soon as you venture back outside into the station, playground songs like “What are you searching for in the interrogation room? Torment?” I find the diversity of ethnicities in that station to be fascinating; I suppose this is a reflection of the idea of cyberpunk Hong Kong as a melting pot of cultures, but it probably has more to do with the conditions of production: some police officers speak like Ealing Comedy wannabes, while others sound like the high school kids who get smashed in the first twenty minutes of Spider-Man movies.
Generally speaking, the script’s more delicate moments have the effect of making the jokes elsewhere appear purposeful, which is a punchline I can totally get behind—but not when it’s stretched out over ten hours of intriguing but ultimately boring breach-and-clear. To start, there’s a certain flair to Wanted’s fighting. Stone uses her left hand to execute katana combos while alternating them with her right hand’s automatically targeted pistol blasts. The purpose of the pistol isn’t actually to cause damage; rather, it’s to deflect enemy strikes and weaken them with combinations that start with a gunshot and propel you into close quarters. This interaction may be fulfilling. Despite her shortcomings as a conversationalist, Stone has a nice appearance when speaking. Combining elements of Raiden and Solid Snake, she can move quickly through gunfire and retaliate with gunfire when enemies are having trouble moving, then destroy them with swipes that create beautiful gore loops in their wake.
The pistol’s demotion in the game to a supporting role is reminiscent of Bloodborne. Another feature in Echo of that game is a rally system that allows you to quickly execute a scripted ending animation on an opponent who is stunned in order to replenish part of your lost health. Finishers are unstoppable spells that shift Stone to the side of their target; they are frequently just as effective at preventing harm as they are at dealing it. The last layer of melee fighting is a focus gauge that fills up with each strike or parry and may be used to prepare a crowd of finishers with slow motion gun salvos.
The tutorials in the game do a terrible job of explaining the strategy behind this quite unique version of CQC; they essentially merely take you through button inputs before plunging you headfirst into duels with opponents who have the ability to kill you in a single combination. Specifically, it took me some time to figure out how to use the handgun. Additionally, there’s maybe not enough to unlock: With three skill trees—one for melee—Stone has access to a variety of abilities, most of which are standard fare like wider parry windows and one additional hit for your opening combination. since of this, the sword-and-pistol fighting never progresses above the first complex alchemy. The bossfights are the closest to this transcending of itself since they focus a lot on precise parrying and animation reading. The fairly enjoyable physical fighting in Wanted, however, is paired with a cover-based shooting system that is, at best, clumsy and broken. This is the game’s biggest flaw.
Aside from her handgun, Stone also carries a moderately customizable assault rifle and a number of collectible weapons, including SMGs and rocket launchers, which she manually aims from an over-the-shoulder vantage point. The game’s signature move is combining these fighting styles, but in reality, those Gears of War references are clumsily done and just serve to detract from the overall experience. Thankfully, Stone is considerably more resistant to bullets than she is to bats, hammers, and swords. The cover-locking is slick and spiteful, dumping you into the open like a neighbor’s unwanted cat when you turn the camera too abruptly. Every shooting layout in Wanted has to double as a hack-and-slash arena, where excessively “magnetic” surfaces would be an annoyance. This is why there’s no context-sensitive magic, no automatic cornering, and no switching between cover spots like there was in Gears.
Finding a good view position is not always easy, since throwing a grenade through a door will likely cause it to bounce off the wall you’re hiding behind. Your Zombie Squad friends, who scamper all around shooting constantly and yelling at you while inflicting negligible damage, are the grace notes holding this ridiculous symphony together. Sometimes they can aid you out by reviving an opponent or pinning them down, but generally they merely serve to make it difficult for you to figure out where the frontline is.
Most of the time, you can ignore the cover-shooting, but occasionally, it’s forced upon you in the form of boss encounters and chokepoints. It’s also difficult to avoid the thought that the sword-and-pistol combat would be far superior if Soleil had reallocated the development resources involved. Throughout, there is a clear lack of focus, with certain parts included just for fun. The “wrong number” meme is recreated throughout loading breaks, the narrative is presented in chic but shrug-inducing anime shorts, and there’s a ridiculous joke about censoring chainsaw executions in a game where every 1v1 ends in dismemberment. Although it creates a visually striking trailer montage, it doesn’t blend in with the rest of the film convincingly. It also worries me about the developers at the bottom of the hierarchy. As simple as it is to paint Wanted’s missteps as intriguing eccentricities, they also point to a senior creative who uses Twitter excessively and makes erratic demands on a staff that is overburdened.
Double-A games were appealing in part because, as I’ve come to understand them, they showed off their chaos. Third-person games from the sixth generation stand out to me in especially for its alternating displays of nervous and arrogant splicing. That era’s games are replete with “X+Y” elements, from Devil May Cry’s reinterpretation of weaponry to extend a combo to less popular but nevertheless adored oddities like Psi-Ops, the telekinetic blaster, or The Suffering, which is like Silent Hill meets Rune.
Once more, even at its ugliest moments, I can’t help but be fond of Wanted because it captures the lost, utterly chaotic spirit of the early 2000s. At a time when all games that cost more than a certain amount of money appear to have merged into one glossy, obscenely detailed, open-world action-RPG with service-game components, it’s unsettling to open a game that looks more like a box of broken toys at a car boot sale. Though there’s something in this wobbly vintage pastiche that begs to be understood, recognized, if not embraced, I can’t suggest the outcomes with a clear conscience.