Wet

There haven't been that many games that have truly scored a bulls-eye when it comes to finding the right music to match the on-screen action. Full Throttle did it, Max Payne did it, and I'll add Wet to the list.

 

Wet has a drive-in theatre "grindhouse" sensibility throughout, right down to the intermittent ads for snacking pickles and trips to the snack bar; and a filter of some kind that makes the game look like deteriorating film stock. Then there are bizarre tangents from the regular shooting to a rage mode which turns the world into

starkly contrasting black, white and red with little change to the overall objective: kill everyone. Riding on top of all that is a soundtrack both instrumental and licensed that fits together so well with the action that the old axiom that "audio is half the experience" can actually be applied here.

 

The other half of the experience is the shooting and impossible

acrobatics.

 

Besides a quick death, there's nothing stopping protagonist Rubi Malone from running through the game at full speed and trying to shoot the bad guys before they shoot you. Survival relies on sliding, jumping, and twirling in slow motion to get a proper fix on enemies so they can be gunned down. And suddenly what might have been a three hour game doubles to six simply because Rubi spends so much time in acrobatic slow-mo.  In games like Max Payne or Stranglehold slow motion dives from cover were definitely a highlight, but Wet keeps that slow-mo the central mechanic to the entire game. I found it odd that I grew a little tired of the story mode if I played for more than an hour at a time, but when it came to the extra challenges -- where Rubi runs around her desert base shooting targets -- I could spend a couple hours trying to shave off time and hit one or two more targets to get my time even lower on a single "race."

 

        

Rubi falling out of a plane and still shooting dudes that are more interested in shooting Rubi than proper "free falling" gear, like a parachute (left); backflip off a wall and shooting thugs in the face can mean only one thing: massive chiropractor bills (right)
 

Getting the gunplay together is rewarded with more style points being awarded so that Rubi can upgrade her moves and weapons. It's not enough to be accurate though; kills need to be chained together for bigger combo bonuses, which can be augmented further by nabbing multiplier icons. Each "kill room" -- because that's about what each area boils down to -- presents itself as a puzzle. How can Rubi traverse the area to rack up huge scores? Shoot this guy here, slide there, wall run here to hit the multiplier, kill that guy with a sword slash, and so on. Executed properly, clearing an area can be an awesome show of skill.

Developer Artificial Mind and Movement also fit some environmental puzzles into Wet, which brings to light some really annoying instant death setups. There never seemed to be alternate routes to take; there's one way to go and that's it.  Approaching the final battleground there's a really annoying minefield that killed me at least a dozen times before I just turned the game off. After sleeping on it and trying again, I still died a dozen more times in rapid succession. That wasn't enough to completely squash the over-the-top goofiness of the game, which appealed to me, but these instances of awkwardness did cause some frustration.

- Aaron Simmer

(October 2, 2009)