Wanted: Dead Review

ign.com:

Ninja Gaiden Black is my favorite action game of all time, so if you describe something as “a hybrid slasher/shooter from the makers of Ninja Gaiden” like Wanted: Dead does on the back of its box, you’ve got my both attention and hopes up right out of the gate. But as quick as they rose, they fell even faster, because Wanted: Dead is a bad game even removed from any comparison to Ninja Gaiden. Its story is nonsense, the voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard in a modern game, its difficulty is all over the place, it frequently crashes, and even though its combat is the best part, it still feels sluggish and poorly balanced between your ranged and melee options. If you look super closely, you can see tiny bits of some of the ideas that went into the Ninja Gaiden games, from quick and satisfying executions to dismemberment that affects the behavior of enemy AI. But those small sparks aren’t enough to save what is otherwise a soulless throwback to the many mediocre action games of the mid to late 2000s.

Wanted: Dead’s story takes place in Hong Kong and follows the Zombie Squad, a Suicide Squad-esque police task force made up of former military that wound up in prison with a life sentence for one reason or another and joined the squad as a form of rehabilitation. Despite the fact that there is a weird abundance of scenes in between missions where Zombie Squad is together just hanging out (usually eating food), there is zero chemistry between these characters. I can’t even tell you much about them outside of the fact that Herzog is a creep, Doc is super awkward, Cortez only communicates with sign language, and the player character, Lieutenant Stone, has confusing anime flashbacks with no context. Finding personnel files