Wet Review Microsoft Xbox360

Wet is a third-person action-shooter that mixes a judicious amount of bullet time with some light platforming and acrobatic elements and wraps it all up in a richly stylised homage to 70s cinema. Players take on the role of Rubi, ostensibly a gun for hire, who, throughout various locations around the world, racks up a significant body count in her quest for both cash and revenge. There’s a heavy emphasis on going for stylish kills with an unlimited amount of slow-motion time available to you that’s triggered whenever you start firing midway through a jump, slide or wall-run.

The developers have modelled Wet on the old, low-budget exploitainment flicks that used to populate numerous low-rent cinemas across America in years gone by. Once it boots up, you are treated to some beautiful artwork in the menus, with full-blown montages of concept art, distressed and faded like the promotional posters of some ancient, forgotten movie. During the game, a variety of filters and effects are used to carry this style on into the visuals, with flickering light levels and black and white distortions and scratch marks wavering up and down the screen.

Movie-style elements are found throughout, with the frames at the end of each level flying off the screen like a film reel on a dying projector, and Rubi‘s death overlaid with burn marks searing through the screen. Throw in some little mid-game vignettes featuring adverts for hot dogs and trailers for fictitious, low-budget horror flicks and you’ve got yourself a rather inventive tribute to the era. This all adds a great ambience and immersion to the proceedings, additions that are all too necessary as, underneath this all, Wet isn’t much of a looker. Backgrounds are awfully plain, with very little going on in terms of lighting or detail, and the colour palette rarely ventures beyond muted greys and browns. This isn’t a huge issue, as while it may not be the prettiest game out there, the aged movie aesthetics do manage to keep things visually appealing for the initial duration.

The game‘s soundtrack, though, is of a much higher calibre than its lacklustre graphics engine, encompassing a wealth of punk and rockabilly tunes. There’s licensed tracks from twenty artists here with The Arkhams, Three Bad Jacks and The Hypnophonics providing some stand out tunes. They’re loud, raucous and have much of the roughness and energy you get from seeing a band live. Pirouetting through the air, blasting thugs with a pistol in each hand while some long-haired Texan screeches at the top of his voice, guitars twanging away loudly, is initially just as much fun as it sounds.

A particularly nice feature is the split targeting, which kicks in during Rubi’s acrobatic moves. One gun will auto-target the nearest enemy whilst the other is handled independently by the player. It‘s an impressively sophisticated approach to dealing with dual-wielded weapons and gives a greater range of freedom to the gunplay. Rubi can perform all kinds of moves, including slides, wall-runs, gymnast-style pole-swinging manoeuvres and can also utilise enemies themselves to launch herself up into the air. Smoothly transitioning between each of these and chaining a sequence together will increase the base score any kills net you, which is then fed into a score multiplier that increases with every kill scored and decreases with each passing second.

This is all standard enough, but unfortunately the scoring mechanics for Wet are let down thanks to some contention between these two systems. Slides can’t chain into wall runs for the purposes of scoring, which significantly limits the length of potential chains. As a result of this much of the time you‘ll really just be linking two moves together before switching to another separate sequence. This exposes a big problem in the scoring, in that you can get the top scores in the game using nothing more than the easy jump and slide combination. This is achievable because, although you’ll only be getting the chain bonus for pulling off two moves in succession, you’ll actually be scoring the kills a lot faster and thereby keeping that all-important multiplier higher. This unfortunately takes a lot of the finesse out of this element of the game and is further compounded by the fact that there aren’t any online leader boards. In addition, the offline score targets are far too low, really hurting Wet’s replayability.

Each of the levels consists of several arena fights, which are connected by a series of corridor run-and-gun segments, interspersed with some rigid, generic platforming sections. The arena battles really are Wet’s lifeblood – dumping you in the middle of an open area with enemies entering via a number of doorways that you must close. They will continue to stream from each of these in waves until either that entrance has exhausted its supply or the player destroys it. At the end of the round you receive a bonus based on the completion time, percentage of acrobatic kills you scored and the average multiplier value over the course of the round. This is again poorly implemented as you’ll score much higher overall if you actually allow the time to tick on, racking up the points by fully exhausting each entrance‘s supply of bad guys, even though this actually results in a lower bonus and rating for the arena.

The joy of these arenas is that in the enlarged spaces you can make full use of Rubi’s talents. Once the music kicks in full belt, you’re left to plough through dozens of assailants in quick succession, pulling off some slick manoeuvres as you decimate those around you. Each area is a little different, with some featuring environmental hazards and others positioning their multiplier booster pickups in such a way as to encourage different styles of play. That said, while these parts of the game are certainly the most vibrant and exciting, at times even they can still feel a little too enclosed and you can’t help but wish for the designers to have been a little more ambitious on occasion.

The connecting sequences that take Rubi from one arena to the next are generally fairly weak. The music disappears and you’re left wandering down a series of narrow corridors with rarely more than two or three enemies to deal with at a time. Predominantly these moments feel flat, empty and are little more than filler material. It’s often only the promise of the next arena battle that keeps you ploughing on.

Wet does have one more trick up its sleeve in the form of its Rage Mode sequences. During these sections all of the environment textures are replaced with flat shades of red and the character models transform into simple, black silhouettes with white detailing. It‘s an incredibly slick, stylised look that suits the hectic pace in these sections well, as players are no longer rewarded for over the top fatalities, but must instead kill as many people as possible, as fast as possible. It’s a refreshing change of pace, mowing down huge groups of enemies as if they were made of cardboard, their bodies gradually unravelling into the air as you charge your way through and it never fails to leave you wanting more.

Wet has a great story with some excellent voice acting from the main players – the people behind Pelham, Ackers and Rubi all manage to carry off that dark, menacing vibe without straying into comic book territory. It’s just that the game lacks any real staying power – the scoring mechanic isn’t strong enough and the inconsistent pacing will fail to draw many players back after the initial playthrough. And, thanks to the unlimited bullet time afforded to the player, it never really gets all that challenging. Also, whoever thought it would be a bright idea to have all the boss fights play out as tedious Simon Says–style quick-time sequences was very, very wrong, making for one of the most anti-climactic final-boss battles in years. That said, it does have its moments in the aforementioned arena and Rage Mode sequences, it’s just that you’ll have to play through everything in between to get to them.