Time to go to work

The third person shooter is an odd little genre, there are some truly great games and then there are games that should be great, but fall short of the mark due to some frustrations and certain issues. WET is a game that has a great start but kind of falls foul of some traditional developer thinking, not to say that it’s a bad game, it’s just one that doesn’t fully shine.

Story

Enter a new sensibly clothed heroine, Rubi Malone, voiced by actress Eliza Duhsku (Faith from Buffy) and backed up by a quality voice cast. Rubi does odd jobs and is a Wetworks Assassin, killing for money and her own personal code of honour. She’s tough and no-nonsense and her story is told in a Grindhouse manner (look up Grindhouse on google) complete with cinema-style intermission pauses and grainy film filter. Rubi does a job one day and the inevitable repercussions come back to bite her pretty hard one year later. So Rubi packs her guns and goes globe-trotting in search of answers and people to shoot.

Gameplay

WET has a fairly solid control system and you can level up your character, getting better weapon damage and other cool additional skills like shooting from swinging poles or zip-lines. It’s nothing new and it has been done before, however, WET brings a sense of cinematic grandeur to the proceedings that were only really seen in John Woo’s movies and games like Stranglehold or Max Payne. If you’re familiar with either of those then you’re probably going to like WET quite a lot. The typical run/gun shooter controls are supplemented by the idea that Rubi can wall run, get airborne and shoot dual-wield pistols/guns as she flies through the air.

To help you, the game goes into slow-mo every time you jump forwards, backwards, evade and pull off a cool acrobatic move. This is the key to victory in WET since Rubi’s health can often regenerate when she’s got a high combo multiplier and the more combos she has performed and linked, the better XP she gets for upgrading her weapons/skills/life bar and so on. You can go from a wall run, into a dive, bring the sword she carries crashing down onto one foe, and then go into a ground slide with both guns blazing to finish with a human wall run and some more gunplay. Once you get the hang of it, it works really quite well and is suitably stylish too.

Gunplay, sword-slashing and violent dismemberment aside, WET breaks up the gameplay by offering some interesting additional elements: such as acrobatic level navigation, ala, Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and other games of the type. Arena levels where you have to close a set number of respawn gates and so on before you can kill the remaining enemies, freeway style chase sequences with some minimal quick-time events and even challenging boss battles that require brains over brawn most of the time. There’s also a strange Rage section where Rubi gets blood in her eyes and the screen becomes red and white, with everything taking on a look akin to the Crazy 88 scene in Kill Bill.

On paper it works nicely, in the game it can be a little jarring at first to learn all the intricacies of the combat system and due to certain save-point/check-point frequency, you’ll find yourself re-treading old ground due to a failed pixel-perfect jump in some of the levels where you’re not quite sure where to go or how far you should jump. We found the lack of a short jump or even a simple single jump frustrating and it led to player death on many an occasion when we leapt off the side of a building when trying to acrobatically kill someone in a very tortuous rooftop chase.

There were no real glitches though and control system problems aside, a few camera issues now and then, it’s still solid fun and fairly hard even on the easier difficulty. One issue we did have that annoyed all of us, the Boneyard. You’re forced to complete challenges in the Boneyard to progress in the story, these are against a timer and well, if anyone knows me by now there are two things in games I loathe – timers and protect missions.