Those of us who were born before the Millennium Bug have all been there at some point in our lives. Long before digital sales beat out the staffed game stores. When gaming titles weren’t just a click of a button and a registered credit card away. Back in the day, when we walked into our favorite store with a few hundred bucks in our pockets and dug deep into the sales aisles in search of something surprising at a reasonable price. We knew that the games on the shelves would not fit within the budget. Above all, the titles that sold the best. The so-called top 10 list was as unattainable as the works of art in the Louvre. And in first place it stood, high up on a pedestal, with a golden shimmer resting on it, the game store’s Mona Lisa, the best selling game in the country but she wasn’t for us. Instead, we had to make do with the second-hand sorting and sometimes we went home with the big win, sometimes we had to learn the hard way that the most expensive is, after all, the best. There was a time when we couldn’t stand with one hand in the sales counter and the other on the mobile phone, frantically Googling for ratings on the range in front of us. No, we had to buy the pig in the sack and not infrequently the choice fell on the titles with the coolest covers, obscure games we had never heard of but could boast a cyber ninja on the cover.
But that is history now. Now we can choose, exactly how we want, both format and discretion. Now the games from the sale back are often relegated to the boulevard of memories and instead it is lavish huge projects with million dollar budgets that apply. Games that are not infrequently technically impressive but at the same time empty of emotion. A huge cold game world that exists solely to generate profit margin. Instead, it is the indie developers who are responsible for the innovation, but from time to time it still happens. That something falls down and shakes my world. A major studio actually taking a step back, refusing to follow in everyone else’s footsteps and instead hitting the nostalgia strings hard. You don’t reinvent the wheel, but take an existing concept and make something of it your own. As Hi-Fi Rush recently did. Back then, the developer was called Tango Gameworks. On the CV were Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Now comes Wanted: Dead, from the Team Ninja founder’s new studio, Soleil Ltd and it really is a blast from the past, from start to finish. It’s like being back in the sales hill and not only that, I’ve also won the jackpot.
This is an ad:
Many of those bargain bin games were hack ‘n slash, and it’s a genre that lives and thrives to this day, with everything from Metroidvania-like titles like Dead Cells, all the way to FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. And that’s the way it is with that type of game, that today we expect silky smooth control and perfect precision, something that was a luxury few were afforded in the past but imagine if we could have both. Imagine if it would be a pure favor to be able to rush through hordes of enemies and cut them down with hair-raising accuracy, while everything else smelled of the early 2000s. A single feature-length B-movie. With some of the worst cutscenes we’ve seen in modern times, embarrassingly cheesy dialogue and a storyline that could have been taken straight from the American Ninja franchise. Wanted: Dead is exactly all that and then some. I’m a katana-wielding police officer named Hannah Stone and I’m part of the Zombie Unit, an elite force about to uncover a massive conspiracy. To help me I have a number of more or less competent colleagues and together we must clean up Hong Kong, which has turned into a nest for criminal elements. The first thing that happens, after going through a painstaking training segment, is that I die. Immediately. It’s the first time, but certainly not the last. My coming days will consist of constantly staring death in the eye and falling to little more times than I care to admit to myself.
Wanted: Dead is, as I said, developed by former Team Ninja employees and anyone who has played Ninja Gaiden knows of course what brutal challenges await immediately when you start the game. It was my first assignment and I felt more than ready. I was filled with joy, energy and confidence after the captivating introduction but was quickly brought down to Earth again. I was no hero, just a defenseless little mouse among starving cats. I barely made it through the entrance before I was immediately surrounded by unscrupulous thugs who mowed me down in a fountain of blood and I realized that this will be a trip I won’t soon forget. Wanted: Dead is old-school in many ways, but above all it is the high level of difficulty that stands out and brings dormant memories to life. After almost embarrassingly many attempts, I finally succeeded, but it always looked the same. I stabbed, I shot, I died. Until, with my heart in my throat, I finally managed to stand there as a winner. A feeling that cannot be described in simple text but simply has to be experienced. Even with a squad of up to three police colleagues accompanying me, the odds were lousy, usually at least a dozen to one. Also, a nice mix of enemies firing at me from a distance while their companions went at me with their melee weapons, in a ruthless attempt to put me down for good. As I was slowly but surely able to upgrade my weapons and characteristics, where above all parrying and dodge roll became vital for my continued survival, I still started to feel more and more safe and probably it became easier but even with two skill trees in principle fully upgraded, it was certainly still no easy walk in the park. Wanted: Dead is a brutal experience, one of the hardest I’ve played in a very long time, where every encounter feels delightfully chaotic but that’s also exactly what makes the game so insanely good.
This is an ad:
It would have been incredibly easy to tire of the concept, duck, attack, run, die in a hail of bullets. Rinse and repeat. But since no two battles are the same, it’s pure fun to take on a seemingly endless number of enemies and watch them die before my eyes. Wanted: Dead excels here with over 50 different death animations, where limbs fly and skulls are crushed. It is violent and daring. It is graphic and not least creative. Hannah takes help from her immediate environment when it comes to various innovative ways to end a life, which means that you don’t get stuck in one of the most common traps when it comes to hack ‘n slash. Lack of variety, where every battle and death ultimately feels exactly the same. And speaking of death, in my opinion one of the most annoying moments in a game where you die often is having to start over, run the same course again, kill the same enemies over and over again but thanks to the magnificent battles, Wanted succeeds : Dead to escape even here with honor intact. Not being able to start over where I died is also based on the retro feeling, where autosave was only a utopia, a naive dream of the future. But even if the battles are the core of the game, its bread and butter, there must still be something that interrupts. A breather and time to rest the sore trigger finger and there is certainly no shortage of opportunities here. 16-bit mini-games, karaoke, ramen, cooking TV and cats. Everything is there as a distraction between the bloody showdowns.
Everything in Wanted: Dead is over-the-top. It’s clichéd, it’s deliberately pretentious and a clear nod to a bygone era. A many times frustrating experience that constantly requires full focus and due to the brutal difficulty level it won’t suit everyone but for those of us who have long dreamed of a resurrected Ryu Hayabusa it’s a godsend.
