No Jolie, but Still Some Thrills
Cross posted with my site gammatesting.com
How do you make a video game based on a movie that every critic said was just like a video game? I'd assumed they'd just take the lazy, easy cash-in route and take the movie and render it in pixels and then add 10 more hours of Angelina Jolie's ass. Because somewhere there's a movie exec saying, “Come on, who wouldn't pay $60 for10 hours and 2 seconds of that?” Hopefully no one, and luckily cooler heads at developers Grin prevailed. Although it's a little sad that the star of such favorite films of mine (really) as Hackers and Cyborg 2's butt is nowhere to be seen in Wanted: Weapons of Fate. They don't even have an Angelina Jolie impersonator's butt! They do have someone doing a really solid Morgan Freeman impersonation though, and some hard to understand French accents. Oh yeah, and a pretty decent game.
Wanted: Weapons of Fate is actually a sequel to the movie (which is loosely based on the comic book), a trend I like in licensed video games. Going through and reliving the events of a movie seldom works for me – if I liked the movie, then the necessary changes to turn its scripted action into prolonged game play tends to screw with th story and pacing. Besides, you already know how it's going to end. And if the movie was bad, why would you be playing through it again in extended game form. And prequels are often kind of rough because you usually have to leave all the really cool character and plot development for the movie you're prequeling. No, licensed sequels are the way to go for games: take what works about the flick, game it up a bit, and cut loose. That's what Wanted: Weapons of Fate does.
This is pretty much you basic, post-Gears of War era cover mechanic third person shooter, with a few twists. Or should I say curves. Get it? Curves? Because of how Wesley learns to curve bullets in the movie and stuff? Actually, the bullet curving mechanics is one of the new additions to the standard cover-mechanic game play, and it works quite well. It's almost like a golf sim or something – you adjust the angle, release the trigger, and the bullet flies around a column and knocks a hole in some dude's head. Later, for no reason I could understand, when you curve 5 bullets from a sub-machine gun at once, they explode like a grenade. You are correct in assuming that this is awesome and fun. I'm pretty sure 50 Cent told the Guild of Assassins how to do that trick. The other fun addition is moving from cover to cover – you can slide or jump forward to new cover with just a flick of the analog stick and press of a button. You can (and later must if you wanna beat bosses) do this as a power move and everything goes slow-mo, all the better for you to shoot dudes (especially those bosses).
There's also a blind fire mechanic where you can shoot from cover and cause enemies to duck behind cover. Then you're supposed to scoot around to new cover and they lose track of you and flank you. I never used this, except on the first boss where they make you use it, and found it kind of frustrating. I also like the game's alternative to quick time events. At certain high tension points in the game (like when you're leaping down through the cabin of a jumbo jet that's lunging towards the ground) the game takes you from one slow-mo sequence to the next. You have a couple second to both shoot the enemy's bullets out of the air and kill them. Succeed and move onto the next sequence. Fail and die. I liked these a lot – a fun way to break up the game play, and unlike typical button pressing quick time events, it played on the basic skills you've picked up playing the game.
You may have noticed that I'm mostly talking about the game play and what the story's not. What the story is, is fine. Forgettable in many ways, but fine. A week after finishing it, the details will be gone. You play as Wesley, the movie's hero and narrator of the game. Sometimes you flash back and play his father (he of the exploding machine-gun bursts). You have to kill three people to get some numbers from their arms for some reason and it mostly takes place in Europe and there's someone who's bad called the Immortal, except, spoiler, he's not, because you totally kill him in the end of the game. The voice acting is fine. The cut scene animations are stiff. In general the game just looks OK, nothing to detract from game play, but no set pieces that are really stunning. Well, except that bit I mentioned earlier with the airplane. It's apparently the world's largest airplane since fighting through it goes on forever, but it's still memorable and cool.
In an industry built on pleasant, safely-exciting adventures, Wanted: Weapons of Fate hits most of its targets. To stretch the metaphor to its breaking point, the game doesn't try to curve any bullets and thus achieve any difficult shots. Paint by numbers (with blood and bullets) fun. Did I mention the exploding bullet bursts and slow-mo scenes? Yeah, that was cool. Also, the game is pretty short – maybe six hours on a basic play-through. There's some re-playability here, but not a ton. On the other hand, I've heard Amazon and others are already selling it for around $40 instead of the full $60, which seems just about right.
