Video games based on movie licenses tend to have a checkered past. For me, they fall into three categories: Obvious cash-ins rushed to meet the release of the movie, games that absolutely astound even if the movie doesn’t do as well in the box office (Call me what you want, I enjoyed The Chronicles of Riddick) and then there’s the quota of games that try to ascend movie tie-in status by aiming a little outside of the box. The Wanted game is squarely in that category, along with such other games like Stranglehold and The Bourne Conspiracy.
What I mean by this, is that rather than focus on the movie, they focus on the universe and try to innovate on the heroes in that canon. These games can, however, fall into a nasty trap. This trap is basically that the developers create a combat system that does capture what makes people play the game in the first place, but then make a half-ass effort to create a world that fully utilizes that, outside of the tutorial and a few set pieces.
Wanted: Weapons of Fate is like that. The bullet curving super assassin, of the movie and comic books that it is based on, is cleverly realized in this game and I give the developers credit for the combat system in this game. The style is stop and pop similar to Gears of War, but kills earn you adrenaline which allow you to do some cool killing moves, like bullet curving and using slow motion to move from cover to cover while popping insane amounts of rounds into enemies. It’s just too bad that the enemies are boring, stupid, predictable and towards the end of the game just downright irritating. And that might be the only reason you don’t finish this game in a single sitting, because of frustration. Yes, the game is criminally short for the amount of time and hype that this game has had.
Outside of that, the locales ranged from interesting set pieces from the movies and comic books, and the assassin suit with the glowing red eyes is pretty cool, but drab predictable level design is evident in too much of the game, as it has absolutely no puzzle solving element, even with the bosses. The graphics are similar too, especially the terribly rendered cut scenes in the Xbox 360 version.
While I so much wanted to love this game, I couldn’t recommend to anyone buying this, unless you happen to be a hardcore ‘Wanted’ fan, but like other similar games I do admire the effort they made in this game and recommend renting this, just to experience the good that exists here. And it’s a pretty easy way to get some achievement points. I just hope if they make a sequel, they learn from the mistakes made.
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