Wanted: Dead’s marketing materials describe it as a “love letter to the sixth generation of consoles”, aka PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. It’s the work of veterans from that period – developer Soleil was founded by Tecmo alumnus Takayuki Kikuchi, whose credits include the first Ninja Gaiden. The funny thing about loving something is that it can go hand-in-hand with extensive and lingering dislike, and I do not like a lot of Wanted: Dead. I do not like bolted-on pseudo-Gearsy shooting, wave-based encounters that routinely slaughter you just before a checkpoint, or storytelling that is 70 percent goofing around with regurgitated cop movie stereotypes. I do not like campaign design that seems to exist mostly in the service of one-off vignettes and Easter eggs. I do not like these things at all. But I do kind of love them.
I love them, I suspect, simply because I’m a member of Wanted: Dead’s target audience of early middle-aged players who cut their teeth in the heyday of the “double-A game” – basically, games from the dawn of the broadband era, before Naughty Dog and Ubisoft forced every third-person rival to learn parkour and court comparison with HBO, before the ubiquity of Steam and the death of trade-ins, before every game had to involve a loot treadmill and a season pass. This was a time when mid-tier 3D action experiences in particular were free to be raw, brutish, unpolished, shamelessly smashed-together and, very often, an absolute bunch of arse, because there were fewer settled notions about what any videogame should do. I’m not sure this idea of “double-A” ever really existed – it feels like something dreamt up by cranks who never got over the death of Midway. But whether a rose-tinted delusion or not, it fits Wanted: Dead to a tee.
Following an introductory news broadcast featuring Thatcher and Yeltsin, from which I can recall only the phrase “a failure of common sense”, Wanted drops you into the shoes of Hannah Stone – a katana-wielding cyborg in sneakers who leads near-future Hong Kong’s infamous ‘Zombie Squad’ of convicts turned enforcers. In the course of a week in-game, Stone and her roughneck associates will chase down a conspiracy involving androids, though the script is often more interested in slice-of-life comedy than developing the plot, with entire cutscenes devoted to the spectacle of the gang eating ramen.
