Well, of course I didn’t dance myself. Hannah Stone was the Hong Kong police officer and sword-wielding protagonist of Wanted: Dead. To be more precise, she belongs to the so-called zombie unit: former prisoners who are given a second chance as a tough special squad. And crack down, that’s what you do here when you cut dozens of bad guys in half or from life, often with an assault rifle or shotgun, but mostly with a sharp blade.
The developers call their retro cyberpunk hit a love letter to the era of PS2, Xbox, GameCube and Dreamcast – developers who earned their spurs with Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive and later became independent as Valhalla Game Studios (Devil’s Third). , only to be merged into Soleil (Valkyrie Elysium) two years ago. So if Wanted: Dead looks like an antique B-movie, then the system has. It deliberately digs up everything old from the eighties and nineties as well as a kind of action that was known at the turn of the millennium.
And my goodness, is that fun! Because when Hannah isn’t on a mission, she roams through the police headquarters, where colleagues threw phrases like: “It’s not easy working at reception!” and the classically choleric boss loudly read the riot act. On the jukebox you can choose from covers of various songs by KISS or Donna Summer, sung by Quiet actress Stefani Joosten, while you practice eating noodles in a rhythm game, play a disguised R-Type on the slot machine and fish for stuffed animals on the gripping machine. When I kicked him several times (because it’s possible), one of the figures even fell into the display by itself. What more do you want?
Wanted: Dead exudes an anachronistic flair that I find incredibly charming. I’m not sure yet if the monotonously recited lyrics of all the characters including Hannah herself were recited on purpose or just by accident. In any case, the film scenes contain this old-fashioned awkwardness in which the characters never feel as if they react directly to one another, but always sound as if they are reciting their lines in separate rooms.
At the same time, the whole thing never looks really old. After all, all of the characters, including the stereotypes engraved on their foreheads and, above all, Hannah’s emphatically Swiss dialect and her cool attitude, are far too well targeted for me to accuse the developers of fundamentally missing the mark. After a few hours, Ms. Stone in particular even grew on me because I really like her undercooled reserve…
… and because, of course, it also has a lot up its sleeve when it’s in action. I don’t want to kid you: In many respects, Wanted: Dead is a very manageable action game with levels that aren’t even that long, in which you always have to grapple along the same walls and always take down the same opponents. At least there are just two or three enemy types in each location that are spawned in groups of different sizes. At the end a boss is waiting, then it’s back to the police station.
Sometimes the zombie unit also meets in their favorite diner “Atomic Hearts” (!) or for rhythm karaoke with 99 balloons – how did I celebrate that. You can also see Hannah (fortunately without the voyeurically staring camera) showering regularly and chatting with her lively cat friend from the shooting range. Thanks to a good knack for such small things, Soleil manages surprisingly well that you get to know the people a little and are therefore interested in their story and Hannah’s flashbacks told in anime sequences.
But I digress. The point is: Hannah packs a punch with both a lead spreader and a sharp blade. The older ones among you can imagine that Bungie or Rockstar (who actually holds the rights?) would have treated Oni to a sequel after all. That’s what it feels like here. Seamlessly throw grenades from cover and dish out headshots to counter a charging enemy with a timely off-balance block. The cover shooter is never perfect, the transition to close combat is fluid and shooting is more of a supplement as a central element anyway.
In the end, Hannah usually throws herself into the fray, combining sword strikes with pistol shots at close range, because the latter are not part of normal shooting, but are triggered via a separate button – a cool idea for including the handgun in the combos, especially since they are also special with it counters dangerous attacks that you would otherwise not be able to fend off. Also great that you can throw grenades right in front of Hannah’s feet. Doesn’t that sound unusual? Is correct. But because you don’t throw the explosives normally, but drop them via a separate action, it feels like a casual, deliberately triggered “Eat this!” before you sprint to safety to examine the explosion from a safe distance.
Available for PC and all current Sony and Microsoft consoles Wanted: Dead is sold in the following stores, among others:
Heads roll, bodies are split in two, blood spurts copiously, and if you find a chainsaw, there’s a goofy “censored” written over the mechanical cutting process. And then there are the finishers, where Hannah not only puts a bullet in the villains, but also kneels on their chests before pulling the trigger. Or she holds her impaled on the sword before positioning herself for the final headshot.
You can even prepare the opponents, or more precisely, fight several of them one after the other so far that when you trigger a finisher, you send not only the current, but all prepared villains to the afterlife fully automatically. I’m telling you, it’s outrageously satisfying when Hannah sends five, six or more of them to the afterlife like this!
Now, fighting can be frustrating at times – not because of the pleasantly crisp difficulty level, or because you should plan ahead rather than mindlessly abuse any attack button, but because some particularly stubborn foes and bosses only appear after you’ve defeated a larger wave of enemies. In other words, the checkpoints are often quite far in front of the actual challenge. While that didn’t take away from the fun, I wish some of the save points had been set with a little more forbearance.
Finally, I find it annoying that the Steam version doesn’t support cloud saves, because you either have to copy saves manually or you can’t easily switch between PC and handheld. That’s all the more unfortunate given that the game runs very decently at 40 frames per second on the lowest settings.
Wanted: Dead in the test – conclusion
All in all, apart from the sometimes annoying difficulty peaks and the extremely monotonous level design, I don’t find anything to complain about here. Of course, Wanted: Dead will not burn itself into the collective memory either for its storytelling art or for the combat system. Still, it does the thing with the action damn well. In any case, I had fun with it until the end and couldn’t get enough of the cinematic finishes, while the entertaining mini-games sweetened my time at headquarters. In short: If you’re not at loggerheads with the fact that Wanted: Dead deliberately and sometimes unintentionally seems to have fallen out of time, then I can only recommend Hannah Stone’s blood-smeared face to you.
Wanted: Dead – Rating: 8/10
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Seamless coming together of melee and ranged combat
- Requires quick, deliberate action and penalizes button mashing
- Cool finishers – if you can pull it off, on multiple enemies at once
- A handful of mini-games, also available from the main menu
- Odd but likeable main character
Cons:
- Neither level nor enemy design wins an award, to say the least
- Some very difficult enemies with checkpoints set relatively far in front
- Small bugs like music sometimes overlapping in HQ
Developer: Soleil – Publishers: 110 Industries – Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 – release: 02/14/2023 – Genre: Hack & Slash, Shooters – Price (RRP): just under 48 euros (Epic), just under 55 euros (PlayStation Store), just under 59 euros (Steam), just under 60 euros (Microsoft Store)
