All Wet

Perfectly Adequate


These two words are what I use to describe the new game, Wet, for the Xbox 360. It’s a game that makes enough attempts at being new and novel to be fun to play, but it’s not really a huge step up from other games of its style. The game mirrors a combination of the old Kung Fu movies and games like God of War. What I mean by that is that the fighting style and feel of the game are very much like the cheesy old movies, partly because it’s set up like a movie. At chapter breaks, they advertise for different concessions and movies. When you get to a point that breaks the flow (like a game over) the scene comes apart as if a reel of film was being destroyed or broken in some fashion.
The story of Wet revolves around Rubi, who is an Americanized version of a martial arts master mixed with a cowboy sense of purpose and dress. She’s met by a businessman who shows up on her Texas ‘home’ and asks her to retrieve his son from the underbelly of Hong Kong. It’s shallow enough to keep out of the way of the action, but vaguely intriguing enough to keep the player moving through each level to find out another small piece of the puzzle.
The action varies between novel and overly frustrating. Rubi’s expertise is in shooting while doing acrobatic maneuvers. If she leaps into the air, runs along a wall, or slides across the floor, a touch to the right trigger initiates a slow motion mode where her firing rate increases and the player can take partial control over her aiming. A circle on a given enemy reveals where her primary target is at and where one of her revolvers will be aimed, while the player has control of the secondary fire in order to help take out two enemies at once. The slow motion keeps the action flowing and gives the player a sense of something extraordinary as Rubi takes far less damage in this mode while dealing a great deal more.
The problem with the mode, though, is that your regular running and gunning attacks are pointless. Her rate of fire is horribly slow and difficult to aim while running, which means that most of your time will be spent making pointless leaps and slides just to gain the effect of actually damaging enemies. The only useful attack outside of the slow motion is the sword attack, which actually does more damage than the guns. Most early enemies fall with one or two swipes from the sword, where the guns can take five or six shots per enemy to drop them.
In addition, her jumping ability is as accurate as my ability to balance a check book – which means it’s basically a hit and miss attempt. No matter where she tries to jump, whether it’s up a six inch step or over a four foot gap, she makes a dramatic flailing leap of faith. Unfortunately, Rubi also lacks enough common sense to grab a ledge while the player is still focused on shooting. More than once, I attempted to leap across a gap and gun the men down before catching the ledge. Sad to say, she failed go grab hold of the ledge, and instead she did a nose dive into the ground. Normally this would be a little damage if she landed on her feet and she’d get right back up and keep going. If she lands face first while still shooting at the wall she failed to grab, she dies and you’re left to start the section over.
Another area where the game breaks a good flow of action is with quick time events. There’s little warning when a cut scene will suddenly prompt you to hit a button. If you miss the prompt because you thought that you could grab a quick drink, you get to start over. They’re not horribly difficult, but the fact that they forget to give you some warning, tends to throw off the flow of what you’re trying to accomplish.
Despite the problems, the game is still not horrible by any means. The graphics are nice enough but don’t quite meet what the machine is capable of. The shooting and action is functional in that enemies fall if you hit them and the more dramatic you make your motions, the more bonus points you get to power up Rubi and her weapons. The game is linear, usually herding the player through a series of alleys, underground pathways, and the occasional open room of sorts with most of the exits blocked off.
The other novel idea is what they call Wet mode, being the namesake of the game. While traveling through the story, Rubi will occasionally make an attack on an enemy and be covered in blood. The first time this happens, she shoots an oncoming enemy in the head at point blank range, splattering her face red. She gets a borderline insane grin on her face and as play resumes, the entire world is colored in black, white, and shades of red. Killed enemies leave a hanging cloud of blood material, jumping off points are colored in a bright pinkish color, directing the player where to go next. She gains significant speed and agility while in this mode, which makes killing enemies simple and interestingly fun.
Is this enough to make the game really worthwhile? Not entirely. It’s novel and fun, but it’s a rather standard run and gun, get from point A to point B game. There’s not really a lot of exploration to be had and the few hidden collectables aren’t really challenging to find. It is fun for a while to make leaps and slides to kill enemies while tumbling through the air. It feeds on our desires for the old west style cowboy justice, and the Asian martial arts style of fighting. As I said in the beginning, this game is perfectly adequate for what it was made for. However, for the attempts at doing new novel things with it, they aren’t always helpful improvements.
I would highly recommend people who enjoy these styles of games to rent it and try it for a while. It has its merits, and its unique points. The trouble is that the game feels very shallow and lacking if people are looking for more in the way of stronger storyline and cohesive fighting style.