Wanted: Weapons of Fate

"Multiplayer, Wanted. Longer Story, Wanted."

Wanted: WOF Review

Awhile back, I saw the movie Wanted at a drive-in movie theatre. Although it was late, this movie was so great! It kept me awake wanting to see more. Now a little while ago, I found out that Wanted was being turned into a game. With my knowledge of movie games, knowing they have a bad rep, I shrugged and thought how great the movie was, and that this game was going to give it a bad name. Then the demo came out, and my brother tried it. He liked it, so when it was released I found it cheap and decided to pick it up.

When Wanted first loaded, it had a very dull menu. Different from other games, with boxes and big bold letters, but nothing flashy. I proceeded to hit New Game and start on Normal. Sadly, the hardest difficulty is not unlocked from the start. This was a turn-off for me, as I had heard this game was really easy.

After the first level, I came to the conclusion. This game is easy. The game will be short. Needless to say, I ran through the game in a few hours. Short game with little difficulty, and no multiplayer. This makes it bad, right? Not exactly. While Wanted is not a must play like other titles like GeOW or Halo, it was a decent pickup. Definitely a rental like game, but for the $30 I spent it was worth it to some extent. After you beat the game on Normal, you unlock Hard mode. Hard mode adds difficulty to the game, but does not make it that hard until the last two levels. Even then, it is pretty easy.

Wanted's overall mechanics and controls are pretty nice. Grin implemented bullet curving and explosive bullets quite well. They control easier then it may seem, and are quite useful. They also made it so you can't abuse these, adding adrenaline circles. These can get annoying if you do not have enough to curve a bullet, but are gained by killing enemies.

Graphically, I enjoyed Wanted. It may not be top notched liked some other games in this gen, but is definitely great. There are tons of different environments and enemies, and the cutscenes are brilliant. The developers really had a gem on their hands with this one, but could not pull off the game itself.

After the game, you can run through as some unlockable characters. Also, there are binary codes that you can enter to unlock two new modes, which add a cool aspect to the game as you go through it again. In these modes you have to complete a certain objective to pass beyond a point. For completionists, this could be a cool little mode to challenge yourself with.

While we are on the idea of unlockables, there are secrets/items to find in the game. They are not always obvious to find, and there are a lot of them. This is also something that may bring you back if you are into this, however I found them to be a pain and quite annoying.

In the end, Wanted is a solid game. Grin really messed up not taking advantage of what this could be, not adding multiplayer and having the singleplayer ridiculously short, however this is a solid rental. You will play this after you beat it, especially if you like to finish up all modes in your games, and you could go with much worse with what is out now.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/09

Game Release: Wanted: Weapons of Fate (US, 03/24/09)