WET

Review from Matt and Matt - Friday, 16 October 2009 @ 10:18am

The name of WET (here capitalised for the last time) is supposedly a reference to "wetwork", a euphemistic term for hired killing. The lead character is Rubi, a hired gun doing some of the aforementioned wetwork. Of course, when the main character is a hot chick the term "wet" takes on new layers of meaning that are just compounded by... say... your introductory videos showing the lead character in the bath.

Promotion and presentation for Wet has been typical for games that feature a strong female lead - a long process of undermining her strength and replacing it with exploitation.

Course, that being said, the characterization isn't exactly deep either. Rubi is paper-thin. To quote Jay and Silent Bob, she's a walkin', talkin' bad girl cliché. Like many iffy characterisations, personal inner strength is substituted by just being a selfish and stupid jerk. Rubi is thankless, humourless, cruel and utterly unlikeable. There's nothing wrong with that when it's actually the goal (Kratos, for example) but in this case it just rings like sloppy shortcut for "tough independant chick".

Rubi is not beholden to the laws of physics. Or not-murdering.

The story gets occasionally confusing, but in general is your standard revenge story. Think Kill Bill 2 and you're getting close. Note that I said Kill Bill 2, not 1. Wet feels a bit like you've come into the story part way through. There are some suggestions of past events and connections that you're either assumed to know or that apparently don't matter. I can't decide if this is a clever way to shorthand the stock characters used, or just sloppy design. It does, however, contribute to the cardboard cut-out nature of the dubious heroine. When all of her friends and enemies are copypastas it's hard for the woman to really grow as a person.

This isn't a movie review, but might as well be. Wet draws heavily on a legacy of pulp action films, popularised by films like Planet Terror/Deathproof and games like House of the Dead: Overkill. That game was a loving parody of the excess of the genre, and laid on humour with a heavy hand. Wet plays it straight. It's going for cool rather than the lulz, and to large degree succeeds in that. The emphasis in Wet is on sylised gunfight sequences, slow motion wall-running dual-wielding ground sliding gunnery in all of it's physics ignoring glory.

Getting a bit Tomb Raidery with it now

The main way this is done is through a series of acrobatic moves. Rubi is no Prince of Persia, a fact that becomes painfully obvious when she tries to be, but she's competent at running along the walls, sliding on the ground and diving through the air. Shooting while doing any of the above triggers a slow motion effect, letting you pound your enemies with white hot lead. During these slow-mo bits a secong reticle appears. This is your left hand gun, and due to Rubi's severe case of Alien Hand Syndrome is not in your control. Luckily the left hand is just as much a homicidal bitch as the rest of Rubi, so it keeps pace in the all important task of murder.

Wet is a textbook example of style over substance. There have been some inexplicable gameplay decisions, almost always in some quest for style at the expense of gameplay and fun. Cut scenes are often unskippable, leaving long videos in front of challenging sections, which becomes quickly maddening if you die a few times. There are set-piece battles that are oh so trite. Manning a turret against oncoming waves of baddies, for example. Does every game need that or something? Is there a rule?

Taking out guys in erraticly moving cars being killed by quicktime events. Sounds fun? Isn't.

There's another sequence involving you falling out of a plane and having to fight through waves of baddies while unable to move, then avoid debris by sheer rote memorization of the position of it all. The question of why pieces of an exploded plane are directly below someone who just jumped out of said plane is one that was apparently only asked in my head. The laws of physics went out to get a haircut round about the time of "press start", having long ago been told that they weren't going to be needed for a while. In any case, I got stuck on this bit and checked on the electric internets to find out if anyone else had this issue. My god, weren't there some angry people. And rightly so. The sequence sucked. It was frustrating, repetitive and boring. And worst of all it ends with a single button QuickTime Event.

Yes, Quick Time Events. I hate these things, as do all gamers, and I don't know why developers keep putting them in. If you want put on awesome action cutscenes then just do it. Making it so that we can potentially fail the cutscenes doesn't make it gameplay. It just means we can't watch it. The game's final boss is a quick time event. Before you complain that I spoiled it for you, they spoiled it for me first, so it's fair. There are a lot of scenes that could have been awesome cutscenes, but instead turned into idiotic QTEs.

Shooting at people while sliding backwards down a ladder gripped with your legs. As you do.

Not all are style over gameplay, some are just annoying. Every now and then Wet hauls you out of the actual narrative to make you run an obstacle course with a new weapon you just unlocked. Why? Another gameplay element that kinda shat me was the arena system. Every now and then you enter a section that wants you to kill everyone as well as disable a series of spawn point doors. These bits are introduced with a dramatic flythrough of the area. If you die you get the same goddamn dramatic flythrough every time, and sometimes you can't skip it. You WILL die. Sone of them get pretty challenging. They can be mildly fun in a "kill everybody" sort of way, but they're overused and introduce a progression block.

That being said, a lot of the "style" was pretty stylish. Every now and then a level is started by someone running at Rubi and her shooting him at close range, spraying her with blood. She goes into a rage (coz she just washed her hair and now it has brain in it) and the next level is made of red. It all goes a bit MadWorld but with red instead of black and white. Enemies die easier and instead of falling down they freeze and shatter apart slowly. It kind of reminds me of some sort of VR training mission, but it works really well as a style and adds a bit of variety to the previous levels of running and gunning.

This guy is proper fucked. Seriously.

Some of the cutscenes are excellent. Normally I wouldn't be too accepting of major amounts of the positives of a game coming from a cutscene, but with the style of Wet coming largely from cinema it sort of works. Speaking of cinema, while the characterisation is iffy the actual voice acting is solid, especially from Eliza Dushku, voicing Rubi. Not hurt by the fact that I love her and want to marry her and then we'll have babies and live happily forever.

The other highly stylised element is the combat, as described above, and in fairness it's here that Wet really shines. Combat is varied, and the now-standard RPG style unlocking of new moves and powerups is out in force here, letting you slowly add moves to your reportoire. Like games like Max Payne before it Wet's use of slow motion diving and dual wielding gives it an epic cinema feel. it's a lot of fun and creates fantastic moments of emergent gameplay, sliding under objects between two guys, while taking out both with your pistols, then running along a wall to take out a third with your sword, etc. The combat itself is definitely Wet's strong point, and it's such a key part of the game (what with being... you know... the game) that getting that right is about two thirds of the battle.

Oh. And before I forget (and I did for some time) the soundtrack is fantastic. I'm not talking "yeah, that's pretty good background music". I'm talking about ballkicking awesomeness from some great psychobilly and rockabilly bands. I highly recommend typing "WET soundtrack" into youtube and having a bit of a look-see.

Some people won't get as stuck as I did, won't get as frustrated as I did, and will enjoy the combat and gameplay on its own merits untainted by the flaws of game design and presentation that marred it for me.

Pros

Style is definitely there. Combat is well executed. Gameplay is broken up by a degree of variety. Rage Mode missions are a highlight. Some really good cut scenes. Psychobilly soundtrack is exceptional.

Cons

Reuses enemies to an insulting degree. Some odd gameplay decisions. Frustration and "getting stuck" is commonplace. Story and characters are paper thin stereotypes, even more than usual for the genre.