Wanted: Weapons of Fate review

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is like a cheeseburger. Okay. Bear with us. There’s nothing clever about it; no technical genius; and certainly nothing especially well-crafted. It’s a game you’ll blaze through in under four hours, with no multiplayer modes to bring you back for more. It’s a game filled with crummy art and design, looping music, terminally cretinous AI, heavy-handed visual effects, and polygons with edges so jagged you could use them to saw through a tree.

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.