Wanted: Dead

I went in expecting a slick hybrid brawler with Ninja Gaiden DNA, and I got something far stranger: a five-mission linear slasher-shooter set in a dystopian Hong Kong that freely pivots between corporate conspiracy thriller and a game where you eat ramen while watching a cooking show in a police break room. That tonal whiplash is not a bug the developers failed to patch. It is, as best as I can tell, the entire point. Wanted: Dead is a self-described love letter to sixth-generation console action games, and it delivers on that promise with uncomfortable fidelity, including all the rough edges those games had. Playing as Lt. Hannah Stone, a convict whose life sentence gets commuted in exchange for joining the elite Zombie Unit, you move through corridors fighting waves of mercenaries, gang members, and private military contractors by blending katana combos with pistol shots, an assault rifle, and whatever subweapons you can scavenge in the field: SMGs, shotguns, LMGs, and the occasional chainsaw. A Gunsmith drone acts as your between-fight checkpoint, letting you modify your guns with attachments and restock health and grenades. Stone also has a small skill tree that unlocks new moves and buffs tied to each Zombie Unit squad member, and the over-50 execution finishers give the combat its genuine highlight moments. Watching Stone sprint to a stunned enemy and dismember them in a new animation is the kind of grim spectacle the game earns every time it happens. Here is the honest problem: the combat system underneath those spectacles is thinner than it looks. Sword combos cycle through a short list of inputs, the cover-shooting feels like it was designed a generation ago, and enemies take punishment in ways that feel miscalibrated rather than intentionally punishing. Difficulty spikes land unevenly across the five chapters, and the checkpoint spacing in the later missions can send you back through 20 to 30 minutes of repeated fights after a single bad run. The AI rushes you regardless of what you are doing to it. Voice acting ranges from flat to accidentally funny. Level environments are sparse enough that multiple reviewers assumed, on first glance, that the game was a decade old. None of this is accidental incompetence so much as a commitment to a specific era of gaming that not everyone will share. What keeps Wanted: Dead from being a straightforward skip is the stuff that surrounds the action. Between missions, the police HQ is full of minigames: a karaoke booth, UFO catcher crane machines, ramen-eating events, and rhythm game segments that arrive with absolutely no warning and zero context. They are strange enough to be genuinely memorable in a Deadly Premonition or early Yakuza kind of way, even if they do not commit as fully as either of those comparisons. The squad characters have charm on the surface, even if the story never really develops them, and the cyberpunk aesthetic mixing retro-90s futurism with dystopian Hong Kong has a look that stands apart from the usual genre crowd. Post-launch patches addressed some of the worst bugs and added checkpoints, which helps. New Game Plus and a hard Japanese difficulty mode give the experience replay hooks for players who want to optimize Stone's combat. This is a game for a specific kind of player: someone who grew up on PS2-era action titles, tolerates jank as a feature, wants a short punishing campaign they can replay in an evening, and finds charm in deliberate weirdness. Casual action fans or anyone expecting a polished modern brawler will hit a wall inside the first level and walk away frustrated. At a reduced price, the value question gets a lot more interesting, because the core experience, when it clicks, has a trashy momentum that is hard to replicate.

Alex · Scout Team

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