It’s a third-person stop-and-pop shooter long on gimmicks but short on ideas. You’ll curve bullets to fire around corners, navigate cover using a combo system that lets you make smooth transitions from point to point, sometimes dropping into slow motion to blaze through enemies as you move. You’ll suppress enemies with blind fire and loop around behind while the screen’s still smeary to flank them. It’s all artifice – all ‘gamey’ devices and mechanics which turn the space into something little more than pure game.
There’s
no immersion here. You are in a game world using game mechanics to out-game the
gamey enemies who are trying to end your game. These spaces aren’t worlds or
architecture; they’re boxes placed in space for you to move around and fight
in, often copied and pasted several times in a row – work your way down one
corridor and the next is identical, right down to most of the enemy placement.
And
Grin’s engine is a disgraceful piece of tech that makes both Wanted and their
forthcoming Bionic Commando look worse than they already are with its frequent
forced loads. With no streaming in either Wanted or Bionic, you’re tossed to a
static load screen every four minutes. Like a cheeseburger straight from Burger
Thing, it’s poorly made, slightly limp, and a shameful treat. And like a
bargain-basement cheeseburger, it’s one you’ll enjoy every second of.
For
four hours, Wanted makes you God. Can’t quite hit the guy behind cover? Curve a
shot and you’ll get a slow-mo view tracking your bullet all the way to that
perfect headshot. Up against a small army? Dodge from cover to cover, then
bring time almost to a halt, blazing through half a dozen enemies in a single
cover-to-cover jump. Burned out your bullet-time? Stab someone to top it back
up.
Even
on the hardest settings, the game is a stab frenzy if you’re a would-be ripper.
The melee kills are brutal, instant, and easy. Jagged James McAvoy moves at
such speed and there’s such an abundance of cover, it’s easy to close the gap
and go for a dose of the old Corporal Stabbington on one of the ten million
cloned bad guys. Wanted will make you feel strong; for one afternoon, it’ll
turn you into an action hero like almost no other game – you look and sound
like a wimp, but you’re an unstoppable truck, rushing through stages leaving
stabbed faces and shattered kneecaps in your wake.
Those
mechanics, which are so clearly gimmicks, keep every firefight just about fresh
enough. Grin’s take on Quick Time Events – shooting bullets out of the air and
blasting enemies in between scripted sequences – occasionally pop up, and are
just enough that they never outstay their welcome. The boss fights are few
enough that Grin never run out of ideas. The mounted gun bits are so rare
you’ll barely remember them, four hundred bodies later.
There’s
obvious game-extending ‘ctrl+c, ctrl+v’ action in later missions, as if Grin
were desperate to get the game out the door, but any longer and Wanted would be
too much. A junk meal rather than a junk snack. Nobody wants a quadruple
cheeseburger with a quart of mayo, and nobody could bear more than nine levels
of Wanted, but for those nine levels you’ll feel satisfied, even with the
floppy lettuce baddies and processed cheese level design.
OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista , Windows 7, Windows 8Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 5200 +
RAM: 2 GB (Windows XP) / 2 GB (Windows Vista)
Video: compatible with Direct X 9.0c, 512 MB
Sound Card: compatible with DirectX ® 9.0c
Free space on hard disk: 5 GB
