A game developed and published by what's left of Tomonobu Itagaki's staff. Wanted: Dead puts players in the shoes of Lieutenant Hannah Stone, who leads the Zombie Unit of the Hong Kong Police, unofficially composed of disavowed war criminals who are sent out to take on difficult assignments.
Plot
Who fucking knows? Really what the fuck is this game about? Is it about a war criminal? A teen mom? Replicants? Police brutality? What it means to be human? It is everything, and nothing.
The Zombie Unit tries to follow orders to defuse the situation they are thrown into while your Captain yells at you to stop being such a loose cannon and destroying everything in your path, but dammit, you get results. You grab a bag full of cash at the end of the first level and it seems like everyone, including the scenario writers, forgot about it. You then put down a riot of synthetic humanoids but the leader escapes. Then you drive off to shoot a drug dealer for some reason. After that it seems everyone in the Hong Kong police wants you dead, so you decide to spring the synthetic leader's friend, who was apparently human, or was she? Who knows, because after you fight through a ton of evil riot cops, ninjas, probably-android twins, and a British dandy with a katana and samurai armor for some reason, just to help your team and the synthetics escape, the game just kinda ends after Hannah makes one last phone call to a boy in an orphanage.
Maybe Hannah was a synthetic herself. Maybe she was a human who got mind-warped into thinking she was someone else while fragments of her past life resurfaced in anime cutscenes. Maybe the entire plot was written by a LLM and this editor is putting more thought into it than the devs ever did.
Gameplay
As Hannah Stone, you make use of guns, a katana, and grenades to barrel your way through the action levels. As you kill enemies and complete objectives, you gain Skill Points which you can use to upgrade your skills at any point in the game. Hannah will be equipped by default with her own sword, as well as a pistol with unlimited ammo and a rifle that you can customize. The pistol is mostly used for close-range combat in tandem with katana attacks to stagger enemies, and the rifle is used for longer-range engagements but has limited ammo. The game has cover shooting mechanics as well, allowing players to avoid taking damage from enemy gunfire. Hannah can pick up some other heavy weapons from dead enemies on the battlefield, like a grenade launcher, LMG, or even a chainsaw, but ammo for those are limited.
Outside of combat, Wanted: Dead has multiple minigames, such as a shooting range to hone your skills with any weapon of your choice, a claw machine to grab collectibles, a ramen-eating minigame and a karaoke singing game (both largely function the same).
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