Wanted: Dead

From the creators of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive comes Wanted: Dead — a throwback to the PS2-era of tough-as-nails melee-heavy single-player action games, but with a mixture of gunplay thrown in for good measure. The time has come to see if this hybrid of genres has done something fresh and exciting, or if it carries too much of that era’s faults to be worth your time and money.

Not your grandpa's Ninja Gaiden, for better or worse.

Wanted: Dead may not hit the mark in every area, but it still serrates the cut between hybrid slasher/shooter gameplay perfectly and I knew that it would be revisited by me for a long time to come even after the credits had rolled.

I just really, really did not like having to fight through a non-stop onslaught of glitchy jittery frame rate issues or other small and large performance issues. I want to give this game at least a 7.5, and if it is ever patched further we might be able to reexamine it, but I can’t overlook something so glaring as countable frames and frequent crashes. I hope that Soleil Ltd. is able to bounce bac...

It reminds me of old PlayStation action games, but not always in a good way.

Wanted: Dead has glimpses of greatness but is held back by mediocre systems and design choices that keep it from flourishing. Brief flashes of brilliance can’t help but be overshadowed by combat that feels repetitive, and voice actors that sound bored despite the surrounding chaos. Its difficulty, combat style, and visceral style will bring it some attention, but it more than likely won't be enoug...

Wanted: Dead may be delightfully weird, but its held back by extremely inconsistent combat, a nonsense story, and an all around lack of any direction.

Wanted: Dead has the briefest, briefest glimpses of good, but this third-person action game is a frustrating mess in almost every regard.

Hack-and-slash games have come a long way since the early days of gaming, with Devil May Cry serving as a good measuring stick for the genre. Wanted: Dead would've worked fifteen years ago, but even then, it would've been hard-pressed for this project to find a footing in that era as the demon-slaying saga served up a better product in every single way. Wanted: Dead tries to rekindle that flame of...

Wanted: Dead isn’t as bad as the worst games to come out recently but sloppy game design and story-telling has let down what could have been a decent game to play.

There’s an action game underneath all of Wanted: Dead’s problems that is not half bad, especially if you liked games like No More Heroes, Devil’s Third, and Wet. It’s ridiculous in its context and action. Unfortunately, for everything good I could say about this game, there was at least one or two things keeping me from enjoying it. Between cringe-worthy dialogue, game crashes, clashing moods, ran...

Wanted: Dead is an incredibly disappointing action effort that presents some decent ideas but fails to execute any of them properly. The idea of fusing hack and slash combat with shooter mechanics has lots of potential here, and the cyberpunk setting is initially intriguing. However, in practice it's all very clunky and janky and frustrating and beset by performance issues. There's a bunch of odd ...