Last year, Universal Pictures released a very loose adaptation of the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones comic Wanted to a fairly positive critical reception and sizeable box office take (around $US375 million). With a relatively short irregular run and a release through Top Cow Productions, the source material wasn’t well known, so the success of the film caught everyone off guard, including video game producers. Given how well the film lent itself to the medium of the video game, it was only a matter of time until a publisher jumped on the rights. Warner Bros. Interactive snagged the cheese and handed it over to Grin. While an admirable effort, Wanted: Weapons of Fate’s heavy cussing, slow motion, bullet-curving action is overshadowed by its extremely brief campaign.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate assumes you saw last year’s film. If you didn’t, the gist of the story is that Wesley Gibson was once a useless cubicle monkey who found out his father was a member of a secret society of assassins called the Fraternity, who could do all sorts of fancy stuff like bend bullets. The Fraternity serves a large piece of textile called the Loom of Fate, which selects targets for assassination, based on the fact that they are allegedly destined to cause tragedy in the future. The proverbial hits the fan when Wesley finds out that the Fraternity got to him to eliminate his father, and that the leader, Sloan, had been fabricating targets to protect the other members of the society which had come up on the Loom.

Five hours after the events of the film, Wesley continues his transformation from regular Joe to kickarse assassin. After a (apparently recurring) nightmare involving his mother’s murder, Wesley begins to track down the other chapters of the Fraternity in order to learn the truth about his family. Only about half the game is spent playing as Wesley; the remainder is spent playing as Cross (his father) as you relive various moments from his career with the Fraternity, as well as the lead up to Allyse’s death.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate follows the current basic third person shooter mould made popular by recent hits such as Gears of War. You’ve got all of the now-standard third person shooter tools at your disposal; over the shoulder aiming, destructible cover system, suppressing blind-fire, and regenerating health – all of which must be used to your advantage if you want to get Wesley through alive. The first few portions of the game are relatively straightforward – levels consist mostly of corridors and contain few enemies. After trudging through these relatively ominous sections, the game starts treating you to the good stuff.

Cross and Wesley’s abilities don’t just stop at being able to duck behind a wall or sweat out bullets by standing still. The assassins have various special abilities that are related to high levels of adrenaline; they can move faster than others, dodge bullets and even curve bullets around walls, pillars and through multiple people’s skulls. These special moves are unlocked at predetermined points in the story, introduced by a brief tutorial that gives you the skinny on exactly what needs to be done to execute each move. Special moves are fuelled by adrenaline, which is earned by killing guys through regular means. Extra adrenaline is awarded for close combat kills, given the higher level of risk involved.

Once you’ve got a few of the assassin abilities at your disposal, you’re essentially an unstoppable killing machine. Players rarely run out of adrenaline due to a constant flow of enemies, but Wesley and Cross’s standard pistols and automatics are more than enough match for any foe irrespective of their more advanced abilities. One’s armoury is limited by the original character design – the assassins only ever seem to use pistols, sub machine guns or sniper rifles, so don’t expect to be bending rockets any time soon. Not being able to use improvised weaponry, like explosive rats does seem like a wasted opportunity.

The standard third person action in Wanted is broken up with the occasional sniping and turret sections, which play out as you’d expect though the turret does require you to duck back down behind the weapon’s shield for protection. Wanted seems like a game which is crying out for some quick-time events, but it doesn’t actually have any; instead it has some on rails scenes where Wesley or Cross need to deflect incoming bullets with shots of their own and take out any enemies in the way within about five seconds. Given the crazy action in the movie, one would have thought Grin could have mixed it up a bit more – Wanted is seriously lacking in variety. This lack of variety spreads out to the game’s level design too, which is very repetitious and corridor heavy. Most levels take place in bland city and factory environments, though the airplane level (featured in the demo) and cathedral are pretty cool, even if they suffer from that same cut and paste feeling.

Wanted’s biggest issue, however, is its length. We played through the game in its entirety in a single play session which lasted about three and a half hours. The levels are short and flush with checkpoints – it’s a fair estimate to say that the end credits sequence runs longer than a third of the game’s levels (it’s actually pretty amazing how many names they squeeze into the credits). The enemies don’t even represent a threat until halfway through the game, when Fraternity troops that can dodge bullets come into the picture, and they’re still pretty easily beaten. Boss fights are not even remotely challenging and their patterns are blatantly obvious. At the same time, Wanted feels like it would become complete stale if it were any longer – there doesn’t seem to be enough content to sustain it beyond the three hour mark. There’s also very little replay incentive beyond collecting a few trinkets to unlock more playable characters, though they’re merely skins, or playing through on the headshots only or close combat modes. At $90 on the PC and $110 on the consoles, that’s just a little too much to ask for.

Previous Grin games have shown the studio to be fairly talented when it comes to both technical and artistic aspects of visual design, but only slithers of the studio’s talent shines through in Wanted, possibly owing to the fact that it has been developed by one of the studio’s B teams. Characters have a sufficient level of detail, as does the environment (which also is somewhat destructible), but it just looks a tad rough. The most questionable aspect of the visual presentation of the game is the cut-scenes – they don’t look any better than the in-game content, yet they’ve been pre-rendered and heavily compressed, looking woeful as a result. Of all of the actors in the film, only Thomas Kretschmann (Cross) and Terrence Stamp (Pekwarsky) reprise their roles, with sound-a-likes employed for the other roles.

Wanted seemed like perfect video game fodder, and Weapons of Fate has many great moments and ideas. The problem is that the game is just far too short and easy, yet if it were any longer, it’d feel completely stale. It’s certainly not worth the price of entry at this point in time – there’s some fun to be had here, but there are so many shooters on both the PC and the consoles that provide a more compelling gameplay experience and better value for money.