Game #1268: Wanted Weapons of Fate

  I'd want more licensed games like this, sure.

 Wanted was a fairly interesting, albeit unnecessarily vulgar comic book that spawned a movie I never watched, which in turn, spawned this game, Wanted: Weapons of Fate. It's a third-person shooter that follows its own story, I guess judging from the fact that Angelina Jolie isn't in the game, but quite clearly takes after the way the movie reimagined the world of Wanted.

 The game is a fairly standard cover-based third person shooter, there are no puzzles to solve, only enemies to kill. At most a puzzle in this game might be figuring out how to get closer to an enemy... by pushing a box as you use it as cover. There are some turret and sniping sections to add some variety, but they are nothing to write home about. Oh! There are also some rather fun ideas on the QTE craze of the era, as instead of pressing buttons, the game goes through brief moments of slowdown in which you must shoot down enemies, projectiles or both. The first time this happened it caught me by surprise, as I didn't know these segments were in the game, but I wound up enjoying them.

 While it starts off fairly by-the-book, y'know, blind-fire, moving from cover to cover, as you go through the game you unlock the Adrenaline mechanic. Adrenaline makes everything fun! Slowly unlocked as you through the game as well, you can use adrenaline to use any of two abilities: Curving shots, which lets you shoot bullets that travel in an arc, as well as to use a quick-shift, which slows down time as you move from cover to cover, allowing you to land some free shots. These two abilities are a blast, particularly the curve shots, and they are very simple and satisfying to pull off. What's better, as long as you kill stuff, you regain the adrenaline that you spent, allowing you to chain your abilities! It feels great.

 That said... as fun as the gameplay is.... it's rather barebones. It's a very short game, clocking in at about 4 hours give or take, and you only get two different guns: A Pistol(Dual pistols in the flashback stages) and dual automatic pistols, and you only get to swap between both at will during the final stage. It's kind of lame. There's not much in the way of enemy variety either, in the latter third of the game some enemies that you must mash Circle fast, while holding down a direction on the Analog Stick are introduced, but aside from that, it's mostly enemies with guns. Grenades if you are unlucky.

 Wanted: Weapons of Fate is alright. It does a lot of things really well, but there simply isn't enough game here to keep you busy for long. After a while, every environment starts blending together, and while the plot isn't too bad, the dialogue is as cringy as it was in the original comic book.

6.5