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If you wanted to sum up the experience of playing Wet in a single word it would be ‘tragic’. Not the weepy, pitying kind of tragic, but the bitter kind where you can clearly see a great game saddled to a bunch of problems. The game has so many great ideas and concepts in there but at its core, under all the kick ass music and crazy character designs, is a game that doesn’t feel quite finished. The result makes more sense if you’re aware that Wet is one of many troubled children of the 2009 game release calendar. Cast out by the Activision Blizzard merger, Wet suffered a disjointed development time line. All together Wet feels like a potentially great game that hasn’t been play tested enough. Style can get you far and with as much style as Wet has it would only need a good game under the hood to be an A class title. Unfortunately the game underneath the style is scrapingly average and no matter how much I want to love Wet it doesn't feel like the game it could have been. As I said, tragic.
Rubi wants you... to stay the cluck away from her
Despite the pouting hot/tough girl on the cover and the double entendre title Wet is surprisingly light on the sexualisation. Compared to Lara Croft or Bayonetta, your protagonist Rubi Malone (great name) is played as a straight up, tough as nails, mercenary type. There’s no lingering buttock shots or exposed cleavage to win salivating young mens dollars. Rubi is a steel toed ass kicker in every respect, the type of cool character you can see leading a full life away from the game world in comics, films and toy lines. The title Wet is short for wetwork, a military term for close combat killing that usually results in getting sprayed with blood, hence the term. The plot, like most of the games style, is grindhouse exploitation cinema with stolen hearts (as in the organ), chinese drug dealers, false pretenses and double crosses carried out by the cast of cruel characters. But mostly, as with exploitation cinema, its just an excuse to kill loads of people.
Rubi Malone herself is the games best feature; every inch of her character is interesting. The dog tags that dangle around her neck, the odd belt buckle, the custom revolvers she holsters backwards, her sword that looks Indian or maybe Tibetan. She lives in an airplane graveyard in the desert and doesn’t really like anyone, including her friends. This is a woman you want to know more about. I have to mention that the developers should have saved themselves some money and used an unknown actress instead of Eliza Dushku, whose dull monotone line delivery doesn’t have the gritty edge you’d expect Rubi to have. Think about the quality voice acting from the ladies in Uncharted 2, Dushku’s line readings for Wet don’t compare well.
Skin head henchmen and the laws of physics are no match for Rubi Malone
The developers, Artificial Mind and Movement, spent a fair bit of cash on their audio with Malcolm McDowell providing the bad guys voice and Alan Cumming voicing one of his henchmen. Like Rubi the bad guy characters are similarly over the top. Cumming’s character Ze Kollektor, is a sword spinning German in a safari suit with blades strapped all over him and the other bodyguard Tarantula is, get this, an albino, blind mute girl who dresses like a Nightmare Before Christmas cosplayer.
What sets Wet apart from other games is the score. Usually game scores don’t get a big mention unless its something like the metal anthems of Brutal Legend, but Wet deserves a big mention for a soundtrack I’d happily slap down money to buy. The original soundtrack was put together by a guy named Brian LeBarton who more often works as the keyboardist and musical director for Beck. The music mixes alternative rock and roll styles with, motown and twangy blues guitar. It’s a heady, intoxicating mix of sounds and fits the exploitation cinema style of gameplay perfectly. The music will stay in your head long after you’ve forgotten the gameplay.
Time to leap to the car driven by the identical triplets
Unfortunately it seems like the team ran out of money after paying for the soundtrack, voice acting and character concept sketches because a lot of the rest of the game is depressingly average. Case in point the unlockables. Skill points gained for scoring huge multipliers and stringing together combos can be spent during the level at an upgrade shop. That’s good. The types of moves you can unlock in the shop include shooting while swinging on a bar, which you do a lot, and shooting while hanging from a ledge. That’s bad. When I unlock a new move I want it to be worth the points, not something that every other three dimensional video game character with a gun can do right from the get go. Bar a few moves with the sword you never unlock anything really cool. Just a bunch of moves that feel like you should have had them from the beginning. The gameplay overall plays very similar to Stranglehold, the John Woo produced shooter from a few years ago; lots of slow motion diving and sliding while shooting armies of bad guys to pieces. Unfortunately Rubi’s moves are about a quarter of those Detective Tequila had and while Stranglehold’s score multiplier unlocked special attacks that felt worth the effort, in Wet its just all points to go towards moves that don’t seem worth earning. Several times during gameplay I accidentally clicked through to the next section without accessing the upgrade shop, the depressing thing is that this rarely bothered me. The game is a little on the short side as well with the single player campaign beatable between six to eight hours on easy. The harder difficulties pad the time out with some tougher bad guys and make Rubi a softer target which extends the time commitment.
You wear a white suit and shoes and run around on rusty tin slum buildings? Not a smart drug mob enforcer
Visually the game looks a few years behind the times as well. The character models are blocky and poorly textured and there’s no dynamic lighting to speak off. One level embarrassingly features an audience of bad guys who all have the same head, hair style and even hair colour. Most of the visual shortcomings are covered up by the deliberate application of a film grain filter complete with shuddering frames every few moments and the occasional smear of dust or grime. In a nice touch when you die the film comes of the spool and melts. This is novel at first and adds a lot to the style of the game, deliberately cheapening the look to fit a genre, but after a while it becomes annoying, particularly the occasional shuddering of the picture, and puts strain on the eyes. Loading screens are occasionally replaced with a 50’s cinema advertisement about hot dogs or going to church. These are a bit surreal and weird at first but like the grainy film become plain annoying after a while.
The levels are all split into sections that are repeated in each scenario. There’s the chase part where you’re pursuing someone or running away from somethin, leaping and sliding around the place, the brawl sections where you have to take out waves of bad guys while blocking each of their spawn points and the rage sections. The rage section begins with Rubi getting her face splashed with blood from a recently shot bad guy, at which point the world turns red and the people turn into black silhouettes to be blasted and chopped up. The goal is to gain as insanely high a multiplier as possible to keep your rage going as long as possible. Unfortunately it can be pretty damn hard to see where the hell you’re supposed to go when the floor, ceiling and walls are all the same colour with a few odd black bits to give it some shape. The rage moments are scripted to certain sections so they don’t occur randomly and are really just an opportunity to rack up a lot of points for the unlockable shop, but rather than an adrenaline fuelled blast the rage mode is an ugly mess and I was glad to have those sections behind me. The brawl sections were by far the most rewarding with the areas designed to give you as much opportunity to mix up your acrobatic skills to increase your combo meter.
Invisible staircase L0L
To split up the sections the levels are bookmarked with either a quick time event boss fight, which aren’t as bad as they sound, or some on rails shooting levels with vehicles. The vehicle sections are one of the most enjoyable parts of the game, particularly when Rubi is blasting at enemies from the roof of a car before leaping onto another enemies car to slice of a trigger happy bad guys arm. On top of the single player mode there’s a challenge section that allows you to replay the five between mission challenges to improve your times and score higher medals and points. Completing levels and challenges also unlocks concept artwork that can be viewed from the main menu.
It’s clear that a lot of love went into Wet. So many elements of the design and style of the game, particularly the cash spent on the Hollywood voice talent and brilliant soundtrack, feel like they were meant for a better game engine than the one they were wrapped around. So many little features like the crazy characters, the monkey motif that appears in so much of the game but is never explained and the whole 70's exploitation theme of the game speaks to a goal that wasn't quite achieved. If Wet manages enough sales to warrant a sequel a lot of the problems could be solved with some solid development time now that the design foundation is there. Personally I'd love to see more of Rubi Malone shooting the crap out of people, especially if it means she learns some new moves. As it is Wet is an enjoyable but shallow romp with oodles of style but not so much substance. At the end of the day If you're a B movie fan or loved Kill Bill, which the game draws a lot of inspiration from, you'll be able to see past all the problems Wet has to enjoy a fun third person shooter with a sweet soundtrack.
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