I decided to check out the Wanted: Weapons of Fate demo today even though I really did not like the movie. The idea of being able to curve the bullets I shoot was just too much for me to pass up. I played through the tutorials and the actual playable level in about 10 minutes. It was not very hard but it was only playable on the easiest difficulty setting. Overall, I was disappointed because there are some glaring issues here. The curving of bullets is gimmicky and way to easy to pull off. You just hold down the right bumper and it puts a line of the bullet trajectory on the screen. Move it around until it goes from red to white and then release the bumper and it shoots the bullet. As long as the trajectory line is white then the bullet hits. They do limit how often you can curve bullets by making you build up an “adrenaline” meter. Still, it is kind of fun to curve bullets to hit people behind cover and then seem them come staggering out.

If the bullet curving being just a little gimmicky was the only issue I might still think this was pretty decent, but there are other issues too. They have a lot of needless swearing. It is one thing to have your character or AI characters swear when they get shot or almost get killed, but there is no need to have characters swearing mid-conversation for no reason. The tutorials alone have a lot of swearing even when you are just shooting at targets.

In addition to the gun fighting if enemies get close you can hit the ‘B’ button and you perform a one hit kill with a knife or knee attack. It is cool to see your character perform these moves, but when you do it splashes blood all over the screen locking your view for a couple seconds. I found this really annoying for a couple reasons. First, this is the only time I came across when blood splatters across the screen, and it does it every time you use a melee attack. Second, after you do a melee attack you cannot see to do anything else for a couple seconds so you are wide open to getting shot from other enemies.

The one thing I really did like was the cover system. You hit ‘A’ to go into cover. Once you are in cover you can lean out shoot or hit ‘A’ again and it moves you quickly to the next cover. You can string together the move from cover to cover and as you do so you move faster and faster. If you have adrenaline stored up you can also hit ‘Y’ to move to the next area of cover. When you do, instead of moving quickly everything goes into a slow motion, bullet time where you can shoot a lot of shots off at enemies as you slide across the gap between pieces of cover. It seemed like you can go into cover behind pretty much everything, and if the object you are taking cover behind is movable you can hold down ‘A’ and push it forward to move your cover with you.

Like the movie, the demo for Wanted has a lot of potential, but it is very poorly executed. Hopefully they clean up some of these issues in the full game because the cover system has a lot of potential, but the gimmicky one hit kill melee attacks and pointless cursing are a huge let down.