This could have been a great game. It's just... everything is just so fucking bad. The characters are weirdly written and unlikeable (or absolute dead-horse beaten clichés like the police captain). The main cast are supposed to be terrorist war criminals but act like goofy sitcom characters. The cutscenes are actually made with some effort and care, they're just horribly written and acted. Sometimes it's managing to veer into B-movie "so bad it's entertaining" territory but... most of the time it's actually just bad.

And part of it is that the voice acting may be the absolute worst I've ever heard, and must have been recorded without direction too (and is poorly mixed, to boot). Like, I know I'm ranting here but it's genuinely unbelievable that this voice acting shipped in a game that is sold for actual dollars. This isn't just worse than AI voices, at times it's so bad fucking Microsoft Sam would be an improvement. The protagonist is swiss for some reason, and her "actress" is constantly stumbling through the lines with all the grace of a 12-year-old reading their English exam off the page. And she's one of the better acted characters! The other team members are even worse!

So, then, the gameplay? Well ultimately it's kind of a worse version of Ninja Gaiden 2 but with cover based shooting injected into it like invasive plastic surgery. Was it really needed? Matter of taste, I suppose. The general flow is very similar: it's about crowd control against hordes of enemies. Your main tool is melee and you can perform finishing blows on wounded enemies that give you generous amounts of iframes, only here you are way less mobile but instead you have guns. You don't actually have enough ammo to dispatch all your enemies with them, though. They're meant to be used selectively to take out key threats, while melee is the primary focus. So really, you just trade the mobility in NG2 for cover based shooting to achieve the same end result. Which is more fun? I prefer NG2 by a million country miles, but I suppose there is conceivably someone out there who just loves cover based shooting.

Another big issue is the skill tree and the difficulty curve. Way too many core abilities are gated behind unlocks, which makes the first level punishingly difficult. Especially since there is also a very old school "what is a checkpoint?" design philosophy here in terms of how rarely you get to save. Also, the bosses have been quite bad, which should come as no surprise to Ninja Gaiden fans. The first level boss especially was extremely frustrating and unpleasant to fight. Difficult yes, but not at all in a fun way.

So, is anything actually somewhat good? Well, the core combat - despite everything - is kind of alright once you unlock some skills. The gun-and-katana finishing moves themselves do look cool and are actually extremely varied - it's just a shame that they're really shoddily integrated into the movement and you "snap/slide" into them in a very jarring fashion. And you feel laggy and unresponsive coming out of them afterwards. Some of them also take way too long, which further adds to the weird feel of losing control of your character for several seconds. Meanwhile, NG2 finishing moves feel absolutely seamless. Overall that's the case for all of the combat in Wanted: Dead - it's clunky, it's rigid, it's not fluid. The moveset is also way less varied here, so you'll be using the same combos over and over.

Then there are the minigames which... I don't know man. There is a claw game you have to grind for skill points and there are two versions of the same rhythm game - one for karaoke and one for eating ramen (???). Maybe there will be more down the line. They're okay if you love rhythm games, I suppose. I will tell you it's fucking weird when your terrorist war criminals sing 99 Luftballons on karaoke as part of the main story, though. And not abbreviated either - the whole fucking thing.