We don’t have a thread for this yet?
Was wondering about this one - I came across this review yesterday and it was the first I was hearing about it. It’s obviously nuts, but is it nuts in a good way or a bad way?
First thought when watching the trailer: what’s up with the voice acting? Sometimes she nails it, sometimes she’s inappropriately unconcerned or lethargic.
Errr…ummmmmm. I’m confused…what rules are being broken exactly? Looks like a bog standard vigilante shooter with crap dialogue and voice acting.
I love that they picked that thumbnail for their trailer. Yeah, it’s a game about a lady and her cat…
This cat knows some things.
I particularly enjoyed the opening and closing of the review:
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.
Again, I do have a sneaking affection for Wanted even at its worst, inasmuch as it channels that long-forgotten, early-noughties spirit of abject chaos. At a time when all games above a certain budget threshold seem to have congealed into a single, insufferably complete and glossy open world action-RPG with service-game elements, it’s bracing to dip into one that’s more like a box of malfunctioning toys at a car boot sale. I can’t in good conscience recommend the results, but there’s something at the heart of this rickety period pastiche that craves to be understood and acknowledged, if not celebrated.
I like how she’s doing MGS2 style CQC, only with a katana instead of a knife.
Valkyrie Elysium was fun, so I could definitely see myself enjoying this.
I get weird “Dead to Rights” vibes, which now that I think of it had an awful message… just the gameplay here.
This is in latest humble bundle and so I picked it up, since it kinda reminded me of Binary Domain which I liked
I am some 4 hours in (and apparently it only lasts about 6 hours?) but aside from some really annoying technical issues, I like it.
Story is kinda weird/lame/bizzare/yet fun, voice acting is equally bizzare, there are some leftfield narrative elements (you walk around a police station and suddenly you are watching anime for no reason), soundtrack is awesome, but most importantly the combat is really fun, with that mix and match of katana slicing and dicing of limbs and heads and shooting various guns. Definitely more fun game than latest Saints Row.
The annoying technical issues are that on three separate occasions, the game did not start a script properly after killing all enemies to let me progress, so I had to restart checkpoint and kill them again, which is annoying (but the combat is fun so not too annoying).
And also, when I shut down the game, the exe file keeps running in the background and steam tracks my playtime as if I was still playing. These japanese devs do not know how to terminate exe. Sad and amusing.
All in all, I like it and will finish it tomorrow.
I was interested by the descriptions I read of its rewarding combat mechanics that I think are a bit like Sekiro in that they don’t flow the way a person is likely to expect from similar-looking games. Glad you’re enjoying it! I hope to get to it this year, on console where I really want the technical issues never to exist at all.
The sound design is just terrible. The sound script of the computer partners throwing grenades every two seconds and cutting out all other sound with the same line was baffling, and I hear itstill hasn’t been fixed in over a year of patching. The people working on this didn’t care and it really shows.