Do you remember running around on Ninja Gaiden or even Dead or Alive, then you are in for a treat as the authors of these titles are back with another title called Wanted: Dead, which is a unique cyberpunk-inspired hybrid slasher/shooter title that kept me hooked from the start. Japanese-based development studio Soleil Ltd. and Switzerland-based publishing team 110 Industries have now brought this title to consoles with MKAU Gaming getting a copy for PlayStation 5 to review.

You join the ranks of the Zombie Unit which is an elite Hong Kong police squad but their ways of doing things are not exactly to the book. You step into the shoes of Lt. Hannah Stone who is an absolute badass. If you have played titles like Ninja Gaiden before you will slide straight into this title with the same idea: find baddies and kill baddies.

The gameplay is quite simplistic and the developers implemented a cool little upgrade system so you can upgrade along the way like your firearms or other things like move sets for your hacking and slashing. The XP in this title seemed to go up quite quickly which was great if you wanted to unlock all of the upgrade tree.

The controls are simplistic when it comes down to slashers, you have your basic movement mechanic which is your analog sticks and you press square to attack and triangle if you want to do a pistol shot which can be packaged nicely into a combo. You also can lunge and block if you need to, which is all broken down in the tutorial for you which as always I would recommend doing. I preferred using the katana over the pistol or other varied weapons as they felt a little weird.

Aiming the guns down sight while moving felt janky, whereas running around with the katana out felt badass and fluid. It would be cool if the developers could drop and update that works a little more on the guns to make the entire combat system feel polished.

I was disappointed with the audio in this title. There were these amazing-looking cutscenes and when the characters spoke it was quite clearly English dubbed, which did not sound like what the character would have sounded like, and sounded monotone and robotic. It didn’t even flow nicely with their mouths moving in the cutscenes which made a great cutscene into something that was not great.

Apart from the voice acting the audio was not bad but got repetitive over time, you can only hear the enemies grunting whilst you push a katana through their bodies so many times till it gets annoying, but in the same breath it’s awesome hearing that little blood splatter as you slice someone’s head or arm off so made up for the annoying part a little.

I loved the background music when things got heated, you got this amazing sound of heavy metal guitar and if anything it gets you more amped-up to spring into action and kill some enemies.

There is something about Japanese-themed titles where they can be cartoonish or futuristic but somehow they make them look and feel so alive and realistic. The cutscenes in this title looked amazing and it felt like I was watching something on TV, looking past their voices, the video side of things was stunning and then transitioning to the game was great.

The character models looked great apart from the enemies who looked like they were all Issac Clarke from Deadspace in his suit, and then you had some bosses who looked absolutely badass but I’m not going to spoil that for you as I was in amazement when I saw them. The environment and lighting looked great. I would have loved to see more variety in the missions, as some areas all meshed into one. I was impressed at the attention to detail in Stone’s tattoos, it was awesome.

Diving head first into Wanted: Dead made me want to go back and play the Ninja Gaiden games which I absolutely love and have spent plenty of time playing them. It’s a great game if you want to kill some time and either shoot or slash people to death in great fashion. I’m hoping the developers find some time to either put the original voice acting back in and run subtitles and scrap the monotone voices, or you might need to close your eyes in the cutscenes and imagine.

Written by: Hayden Nelson