Wanted: Weapons of Fate Demo - Impressions

It has been a while (from what I can remember at least) since a video game from a movie came significantly after the movie itself was released. In fact that last time that it happened was with Goldeneye. And I think few people remember that Goldeneye the movie was released in 1995, but the video game came in 1997.

While I won't write up a review of the Wanted movie itself, I will say that it was entertaining to say the least. And the quirky, in your face dialog made it a little more amusing and a little less mediocre.

This has been carried over into this game with statements such as telling you to stop 'getting fat playing video games' and asking 'what have you done with your life lately?'

First I will say that the tutorial (divided up into three parts) is actually quite extensive for a demo, as most demos will just show you a picture of a controller telling you what buttons do what.

So what about the game itself? Well the mechanics are largely Gears of War based; duck, shoot and dive to another cover spot. While I personally am not a huge fan of this system, from what I can tell this game does vary things a little more. As sometimes you have to sneak around bad guys or you can rush head on if you want to (and bad guys don't take a whole clip of ammo to die like in GoW).

But there is a unique mechanic in this game, as most of you probably already know or have guessed, it's the "curved bullet' action. You can't use it all the time of course (need to kill people normally first, to get those red dots [above] which are your adrenalin) but once you do you can kill people around obstacles like crates and walls. You simply press a button to target a player, then use the analog stick to change the arc and radius, then it fires for you. While it is hard to get used to at first, eventually I got better at doing it. I should also say that in the tutorial it will show you a bullet view of your shot when you curve it, but in the single player it wasn't doing that. Maybe in the full game it will show this everywhere. And you can also use adrenalin to slow down time when moving from one piece of cover to the next, so that you can take out several guys at once, which was fun to do.

A quick note about the rest of the game. The graphics seemed a little dated to me, the textures look fairly low rez and some of the animations leave something to be desired (like fluid movements, but still not as bad as Fallout 3). Otherwise things are still decent; good lighting and particle effects. And the sound is also good, especially the dialog in the tutorials.

So overall this isn't a game that I would buy (at least not at full price, which as discussed earlier on here, is around 198.00$ these days), but I still felt like writing something about it.

Since I am a fan of innovation (rarely found on the xbox), I give it: