Wanted: Weapons of Fate (PlayStation 3)

Boom goes the dynamite

Weapons of fate looks good and like the film is slick with it. Using the muscle under the PlayStation 3’s hood it delivers some of the better looking graphics, details with shattered glass still showing reflections, shimmering light and so on, hair is still the main bugbear looking more static than many things. A reward camera also kicks in when you pull off a stunning curve to get an enemy, the bullet spinning in the air as it arcs through to the target, time slowing ever so slightly. Similarly in bullet time you get to view things in sharp detail and see how good they can look. It is also the one point where clarity of vision is lost as enemies can just blend into the background with no movement they can get lost in a sea of something. Other issues are that at times there is slowdown on screen and a lot of reused locations plus at times the lock on line can disappear in bright light.

The soundtrack is not so bad, it always feels right, maybe not unforgettable but it slams up your adrenaline and keeps you moving which is what it should do, with hints and snatches from the film sneaked in at times. The voice talent is also on the good level, with a chunk of the film cast picking up from where they left off and others fitting in so damn well, you have to check the credits to make sure that it wasn’t Morgan Freeman in there. Delivery is often spot on, with Wesley sounding just like an ex-schmuck who realises he has the biggest sandbox about. There are a few duff lines and deliveries but not enough to detract. Same goes for the over all audio experience, there is often a lot going on in each level but it doesn’t get too crowded.

The main area of issue is the AI, as mentioned there are three grades of difficulty and each is mostly consistent with enemies using cover, tactics and so on the give you grief. The learning curve though is variable. It can veer from silly easy to ‘wtf?’ pretty quickly, leaving you dead before you are sure what has happened. The up sides are that checkpoints are common and if you stay out of the firing line you recover health, rewarding a more cautions approach once in a while. Of course not all cover is equal. You can also change difficulty on the fly in the options menu a nice touch.

That said it is possible once you have the full bag of tricks to power through the sections and kamikaze to learn the vague patterns of attack (the bullet time sections vary locations of the bullets to shoot at slightly) go back to a checkpoint and try again, this does mean that it is possible to blitz through the game, it is possible to get two-thirds through in a single sitting, even with new enemies and tactics to learn, incidentally there are tutorial levels every so often that introduce new mechanics, it can seem a lot of non-effort. There is no sense of non-achievement in dying.

Incidentally you get an achievement for passing the first tutorial stage.

Just a Decoy

All told Wanted: Weapons of fate is pretty damn good it is more fun to play than not but with the short levels you get the feeling that there is something missing and that there should be more, still it is one hell of a ride, causing mayhem as it goes. You also wonder if there could have been more variety in the weapons you use or more differentiation between Wesley and in those levels you play him Cross, they feel too similar and devalue from the aspect of playing as father and son. Small things, but small things can ripple outwards.

Maybe for most a game to rent rather than buy.