Wanted: Dead is a game for hardcore players, and as such, the achievement list is incredibly taxing. Already it's shaping up to be one of the hardest completions of 2023. What's difficult about this game is that not only do you have to master the core gameplay of slashing and shooting, but you also have to master all the minigames.
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This includes near-impossible rhythm game challenges and hard-as-nails scrolling shooters that simply won't be very accessible to many people who are skilled with the core game. If try to get your money's worth and do three or more playthroughs, you will likely end up with most of the achievements, but you'll still be missing the minigame ones.
8 Slide By
This is one of those obscure achievements you simply won't get if you don't know about it beforehand. In many similar action games, you can slide fire, and it's helpful most of the time. However, in Wanted: Dead, the feature is quite weak and not all that apparent. You can play through this whole game and not even realize you can slide fire because it's not in the tutorial or the skill tree.
For the Slide By achievement, you need to kill ten enemies using slide fire, and that's tricky because of how short it lasts and the low damage. The easiest way to get this is at the club level with the shotgun. The enemies here have a very small amount of health, and one close-up shotgun blast should do the trick.
7 No Needles
Throughout developer Soleil's catalog of work, they traditionally encourage you to use items. Other stylish action games penalize item usage, but in Ninja Gaiden, for example, they give you them for a reason. Not using items is relegated to high-level play or when you wanna push yourself to get better. This achievement in Wanted: Dead will force you to do just that.
No Needles will require you to beat a whole level without healing supplies, although you can use Doc's revive. This is brutal in almost every possible scenario. Good luck if you're going to attempt this from a new game because starting with no skills makes this ten times harder. Unless you're very skilled at this title, you'll probably only be able to get this in new game plus or in the hidden easy mode.
6 True Collector
The True Collector achievement is for getting all the collectibles, and it's simple enough except for two nasty exceptions. Wanted: Dead is mostly linear, and you only need to get a collectible once for it to count. On your first run, you should get most of them, except for these outliers.
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In the Police Headquarters, a morgue area won't appear as a selection on the elevator menu initially. It's not until you play the Ramen minigame that the area gets unlocked, and there are several collectibles found inside. The second batch of easy-to-miss collectibles is all the records from the claw machine. This is tricky because you don't know when you've gotten them all since there's no clear indicator like the other collectibles.
5 Chanbara
Wanted: Dead features two achievements for killing 1,000 total enemies using only melee and gun attacks. Ninja Gaiden 2 features similar achievements, but the big difference is that NG2 had far more enemies and 14 total levels in the campaign. Wanted: Dead only has a small five levels. What this means is that you could play through all three difficulties and still not unlock either of these.
You're better off grinding this out, and the best way to do it is either the first or second checkpoint at the club level. Simply kill everyone with melee or gun attacks and reload your save before arriving at the checkpoint drone. You will actually get Gun Master before Chanbara, as finishers ending with a gun move will count toward it. Expect to spend a few hours here, though.
4 Emma Lauthner
For beating all three difficulties, which are Normal, Hard, and Japanese Hard, you'll get the Emma Lauthner achievement. Normal mode already offers a pretty challenging experience, but the higher difficulties go even further. Hard mode isn't all that big of a step up, but Japanese Hard certainly is. What makes this mode so difficult are two main factors.
One is that the damage you receive is much higher, and you'll probably have to heal after only one hit from a miniboss. The second is that you'll no longer get any health from performing finishers, although health pick-ups will still drop from minibosses. For this mode, you must minimize damage taken and also obtain the right skills early on. With the checkpoints being so spaced apart, this mode can feel incredibly unforgiving.
3 Ramen World Legend
If you're one of the few that actually has this achievement, you deserve the Ramen World Legend title. In order to obtain this achievement, you need to get a full combo in a Ramen song. This means you must press every note in time throughout the entire seven-minute track. You'll need to hit over 800 notes, and this will take a ton of practice and skill to do.
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Your nerves very well could be your enemy here as it can lead to mistiming a button press since you need to focus intensely for so long. Practicing and memorizing will also help with the specific patterns used. Even compared to some of the other hardest rhythm game achievements, this might even be harder than all of them.
2 Quarter Eater
Probably the most content-rich minigame is Space Runaway. An early 90s-style scrolling shooter, it has seven total levels of pure savagery. Not only do you have to deal with all the enemies coming from every direction, but the game also suffers from the Silver Surfer syndrome. Colliding with any other surface will result in death, and in addition, dying will send you back to a checkpoint.
Most other games in this style at least give you a limited amount of lives that you can blow through before being sent back, but not in this title. Hard mode is even more brutal, and even though you can unlock it earlier with a code, you still need to beat it twice, once for each difficulty. Unless you're amazing at these types of games, you'll probably give up here.
1 Severance Pays
The hardest achievement in Wanted: Dead is the one you can't even obtain yet. The Severance Pays achievement sounds simple enough. You just need to perform all finishing strikes in the game, but there are a few complications. One is that there are tons of finishers, and you can't check which ones you've already seen. You just have to remember or clip them on Xbox or PlayStation as an indicator.
Second is that some are very rare and can take an hour to do. Grinding on the two 1,000-kill achievements should help with this. Finally, the achievement is currently bugged, so even if you collect them all, you're out of luck. It's a huge bummer whenever there are glitched achievements, and unfortunately, Wanted: Dead has one.
NEXT: Wanted: Dead - Combat Tips
