For those of you who only glance at the beginning of a review and
then quickly skip to the bottom to see the final grade, I want to
start with this caveat so there is no misinterpreting the final score:
I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU PURCHASE THIS GAME! There
are three exceptions to this caveat:

1) If you or some member
of your family is exceptionally talented at shooter games.

2) If The Adventure
Company or Revistronic comes out with a patch or cheat which
allows you to skip the action/shooting sequences. Or at least
makes them
possible
for the typical adventure gamer to complete.

3) If you truly don’t mind paying for a game that you can only play 2/3
of the way through and then uninstalling it because it is impossible to finish.

There are actually three
shooting sequences. One is fairly easy, one is damned difficult,
and one is stone-cold impossible for the typical adventure gamer
who dabbles minimally (if at all) into the action/FPS realm. Unfortunately,
the “impossible” sequence
is the one that you encounter first, at about two-thirds to three-quarters of
the way through the game; most players will never get to see the two easier sequences.

The real shame here is
that these action/arcade sequences totally destroyed my enjoyment
of what was otherwise a pretty good game. Wanted is a throwback
to
the comic third-person-perspective adventures of the “Golden Age” of
LucasArts, with a whole new 3-D graphic style that is interesting and refreshing.
It is also a tongue-in-cheek take on perhaps the most classic and iconic form
of American entertainment: the Western movie.

The basic setup of Wanted could have come out of any John Ford (or Sergio Leone) script.
A handsome stranger wanders into town. He soon discovers
that the rich
cattle baron who runs the town is using violence and intimidation to
drive off the local farmers and seize their land. The handsome
stranger agrees
to help
the poor farmers defend themselves from the rich cattle baron. It turns
out that the cattle baron has a beautiful, independent-minded niece who
is the
real heir
to the family fortune….

Sound familiar?

The writers/developers
at Revistronic started with these classic icons and themes and
then gave them a twist. While Wanted’s “hero”,
Fenimore Fillmore, may wear a white hat and a blue U.S. Cavalry
blouse and
shoot like an ace marksman, he only ends up jumping to the defense
of the farmers because
he picks an inopportune time to back into a cactus. He isn’t
above sneakily stealing every dollar bill in town that isn’t
nailed down, or even swindling a few bucks out of the President—all
in the name of his “heroic” cause.
In almost every scene and setting of the game, it is made clear that
the creators have a deep fondness for and familiarity with the archetypes
of the American
Western, while poking their tongue out at those very archetypes.
This is all the more remarkable when you know that Wanted was
written and developed in Spain!

You shore are
a purty l’il thang

The
first thing you notice about Wanted is
the look. Try to imagine a cross between the stylistic exaggerations
of Grim
Fandango, the
3-D realism
of
Toy Story, and
the outré beauty of Little
Big Adventure. Now throw in some of the comic
camera work of the Coen Brothers. This will give you some idea
of the originality and visual appeal of Wanted.
The characters are presented in “real time” 3-D,
all jutting polygons and angles. However, the theme of the game
and its cartoon presentation combine to make these polygons seem… well… natural.
Of course Fenimore’s torso is a triangle from broad shoulders
to skinny waist; isn’t every Western hero’s? The
backgrounds are predominantly pre-rendered 2-D, but the camera
angle changes frequently enough to give the
player a faux 3-D feel as he navigates around the screen.

Presented in familiar
3rd-person perspective, Wanted manages to succeed in exactly that
area where so many other 3-D adventure
games have
failed: an
easy point-and-click
interface. Revistronic has developed a technique for letting
the
camera work with the player, instead of against him, thus facilitating
the
mouse control.
Moving the mouse moves the camera. When you are at the edge
of what the camera will allow you to see from your current position,
there
is an “elastic” wavering
of the view, letting you know that you can probably see more if you walk Fenimore
farther that direction. I was seldom in doubt as to whether I could continue
to walk in a given direction and never once found myself in a “pixel hunting” situation.
It was a sheer joy to play a 3-D game where the camera was my ally instead of
my foe, and an eye-opener to see how well 3-D can be accomplished with a point-and-click
interface.

We got us a barn to raise

Aside from the aforementioned
shooting sequences, gameplay in Wanted is
classic and straightforward inventory puzzling
and
conversation.
This is
where many
adventurers will delight; there is not a mechanical/manipulation
puzzle or a maze in sight.
The puzzling is (with a couple of exceptions) fairly logical
and of easy-to-middling difficulty. There is a lot of inventory
to
collect and over a dozen characters to
talk to. While the over-exaggerated voice acting meant
that I kept conversation to a minimum,
there is lots of extraneous chat available to add depth
to the story. There was also one “laundry list” puzzle,
in which you must run around and collect a series of specified
objects to accomplish a particular end. I have
no problem with these, but I know some people dislike them.

There were a couple of
instances in which I could no longer progress with my current objective “logically.” That is, I went to the one location
where I needed an object and could not get it there. This left me with nothing
to do but wander around and attempt “illogical” acts that had nothing
to do with my goal simply because I could until I stumbled across another task.
This has become one of my pet peeves in adventure games (although not quite rivaling
the poke-the-key-onto-the-newspaper puzzle). However, as one fellow critic put
it to me, “It happens in almost every adventure game anymore. What are
you going to do?” At least the game area of Wanted is fairly small and
confined, meaning that I never had to go too far to find a new objective when
I had stalled out on my current one.

I have to mention another
annoyance. Travel between locations is done by “using” Fenimore’s
horse, Reyo. Reyo has to be continually fed, as each trip uses up his energy.
This means constantly buying or growing carrots to feed him. Since your funds
are quite limited at the beginning of the game (you have to steal every dollar
you get from the townsfolk), you mostly rely on growing the carrots at one of
the two local farms. This entails a tedious repetition of the same few actions
over and over countless times in order to make sure you have enough carrots to
do the required traveling.

One last note about gameplay:
much of the criticism of the original European version of this
game (Fenimore
Fillmore: The Westerner)
was due to its
numerous bugs. I didn’t encounter any bugs at all in the first three-quarters of
TAC’s new version of the game. It installed and ran like a dream. I did
encounter a few bugs and one crash in the last stages of the game. However, by
then I was using saved game files I had gotten elsewhere (as this was the only
way I could get through the shooting gallery sequence) and these problems may
have been attributable to differences in OS or configuration.

Smile when you say that,
pardner

One of the areas on which
I anticipate a great difference of opinion about Wanted is its
humor. This is partly
because humor
is so entirely
subjective.
What one
man finds hilarious makes the next man groan.
Now add to that the problems of translating humor cross-culturally
and cross-linguistically
(Spanish-to-English
in this case) and of tickling the funny bones
of
a
wide range of
ages. Finally consider that many consumers in
the younger part of the market
haven’t
even seen any of the films which serve as Wanted’s foundation and which
it parodies. Taking all this into consideration, Revistronic had two strikes
against them in their attempt to make a comedy game. I’m scoring them with
a solid single.

In any comedy, there
are three ways that humor can be conveyed: visually, verbally and
situationally.
Wanted makes no real
attempt at “situational” humor
unless you consider a parody funny simply by virtue of the fact that it is a
parody. The verbal humor mostly left me cold. I found most of the dialogue that
was supposed to be funny simply wasn’t. This can be partly chalked up to
the difficulties in translating humor to a different language or culture. It
is also partly due to the exaggerated-yet-deadpan voice acting of most of the
characters. I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but think Little Rascals and
you may have some idea of what I mean. Every character exaggerates their enunciation
while maintaining an almost emotionless delivery. This manages to leech away
whatever laughs were in the script.

However, in the visual
humor department, Wanted knocks the ball
out of the park. I earlier compared Wanted to
the Coen Brothers.
What
laughs
there
are in the
game come during the cut-scenes, which are
directed with real cinematic flair. Interesting
and creative
camera
angles, great
animation
of facial expressions
and little unexpected touches all combined
to make some of the cut-scenes laugh-out-loud
hilarious.
Look particularly
for the
homage to The
Matrix in the introductory
scene and the Pixar-inspired “outtakes” before
the final credits.

Unfortunately, these
weren’t the only two bits of “homage” in
the game. A third one takes up a chunk of the actual gameplay and was, after
the impossible action/arcade sequence, the single worst thing in the game: insult
root beer drinking duels. That’s right, there are four progressive sequences
in which you must come up with rhyming insults while downing shots of root beer
(Well, spicy sarsaparilla, anyway). For some, this bit will be sacrilege simply
by virtue of being a direct rip-off of their beloved Monkey
Island games. For
me, the whole thing was a fiasco primarily because the “insults” simply
weren’t funny! The lack of humor in the actual exchanges turned them into
sheer mind-numbing tedium.

Into the sunset

I find myself in real
turmoil about summing up my overall impression of Wanted. Half
of the
humor worked… half of it didn’t. Wonderful original graphics
but some lackadaisical voice acting. Great and fun inventory puzzling, but offensively
difficult arcade/shooting sequences which will prevent most players from finishing
the game. Great parody storyline combined with the most blatant and gratuitous
rip-off of another game I have ever encountered.

With
a few changes, Wanted could
have been a really good game—one of the
best of the year—despite some
of its flaws. But the twitch requirements
and the insult sword — errrr… sarsaparilla
duels, combined to cast a deathly
pallor over the entire experience.
If Revistronic had left out the insult
dueling and provided a workaround
to the shooting scenarios, I’d
be giving Wanted an
A-. As the game exists now, I have
to give it a much lower grade as
well as providing my opening caveat
that I don’t recommend purchasing
it to the vast majority of adventure
gamers.

Final Grade: C
(find
out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

• Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP
• 850 MHz Pentium® III
  (or Equivalent)
• 128 MB RAM (256 MB Recommended)
• 24x CD-ROM Drive (or PC DVD Drive)
• 64 MB Graphics Card
• Direct®X 8.1 Compatible
  Sound Card
• Mouse, Keyboard and Speakers