Make fate your b1tch.
When the final bullet was fired at the end of the Universal Pictures movie Wanted, were you thinking: "I wish I could continue the adventure on my own"? If yes, then Wanted: Weapons of Fate was made for you. Continuing the story of the film, Wanted follows Wesley as he tries to uncover the truth about her mother, a journey that allows players to take control of Wesley's father, Cross, in several flashback levels.
Is a video game based off a movie (which itself is based off a comic), the expectations for Wanted is pretty low. But Wanted's producer Pete Wanat, the man responsible for gaming's few good movies-to-game adaptations: The Chronicles of Riddick, Scarface and The Thing. Are Wanted up to these standards? No
Wanted: Weapons of Fate fails to recreate the look and sounds in the movie, although the 360 version has some poorly compressed before rendered cutscenes. Blending some of the artistic sensitivity of the comic with the established world and cinematic style of the film, developer Grin has created an interesting hybrid. You get the average Joe-portrait photograph of the film's star, James McAvoy, as Dons costume from the comic. It's the best of both worlds, a third element (you know, the whole gameplay thing) that fail to live up to both.
A third person shooter cover to cover, Wanted has a slick style worthy of the film, but lasts about as long. This is not Gears of War or a similar cover shooter, moving slowly from point to point. Wanted to move quickly with a cover that attaches to the chain from one piece of cover to the next with an interface that shows your available cover options. You can quickly slide behind a box, then jump over to a wall, so then dive for the safety of a second box. It just is very responsive, and no doubt it is one thing Wanted means that there really is excellent. The rest ... not so much.
Whether you play as Wesley and Cross, you want to run through the same motions across all linear level. The enemies change only superficial ways and your strategy remains essentially the same from start to finish. Get to cover, use your bullet-crumbs abilities to kill enemies, continue forward.
And yes, you have the gift to bend bullets like in the movie / comic. It is a neat system indeed. Keep a shoulder button and the arc of your bullet is projected on the screen. You can adjust this with the thumbstick, increasing and decreasing the angle, and change your firing position. That white line when the path is clear that the target red if there is an obstacle. At first, you'll probably spend half a minute to get a perfect shot, but when you get the hang of curved balls, you can create a straight line in a second or two.
Crumbs balls do not come cheap. You have an adrenaline meter (represented by bullets in the upper right corner of the screen). Kill an enemy, and you fill an adrenaline bullet. And it costs a bullet of adrenaline to curve a shot. If you have the ability to kill enemies in a single curved shot, your meter will constantly be refreshing. But often a bullet will not immediately kill and instead sends the enemies lags in the open (each time with the same animation). You will see that a few hundred times over Wanted.
Wanted is at its coolest when you get an instant kill with a curved and bullet camera chooses to follow his way into another's brain. You will hear sounds from the movie - you know, really authentic bullet-to-brain sound - which is a nice touch. Watching bullets fly in slow motion in the soft flesh bits thugs never becomes old. Even as the rest of Wanted become redundant (a true art piece for such a card game), slow-mo bullets in the brains remains fun throughout.
But Wanted never takes the idea of curved balls very far. You never go into interesting situations where you want to do something more than curve a bullet around a simple piece of cover to cap anyone. Even the boss battles have a uniformity to them. You will either need to curve a bullet to get them out of cover before blasting them in the open, or use slow-mo slide the cover to catch them in the open. Neither be particularly satisfactory.
In an attempt to spice things up, there are several shining moments in Wanted. In these particular sections, you can not control your character movements unless he targets. This allows for some cinematic flair. It is not bad, but it does little to keep it very short arms of Fate in getting old at the end. Oh, and there was another shake-things-up moment. Unfortunately, it stinks. Twice you have to man a turret and take out enemies in a courtyard. Neither time doing Wanted clue you in how to defend yourself (pro tip: lift up turret). And you can die in about five seconds without doing so. So the first few times I tried one of these sections, enemies stormed in and I was dead before I winked.
Wanted has some innovative ideas, but never really breaking through at any point. I had fun with it, but there was not a single moment that wowed me. Wanted real case is its length. It took me less than four hours to beat, and replay incentives are piss-poor.
You can try a few different modes, but none are as good as they sound. There is a Head Shot mode, for example. Sounds cool, right? We all love the head shots, after all. But give it a go and you will find it is just the normal game with the demand that you kill all the head shots. Bo-ring. You can also unlock new characters to play, but they share Wesley's animations and because Wanted uses pre-rendered cutscenes, new character models do not appear in the cinema tics.
Concluding remarks
I have nothing against short game, as long as there is proper incentive to play repeatedly. Wanted lacks such incentives. Something as simple as an arcade points or in depth stats interval could have been enough to make a second play through interesting. Although the first time through is fun (yes, it's fun at times!) There is a real shortage of content. It is best as a rental, since you can turn Wanted in a meeting.
© 2009-03-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
