When you first take it in, Wet looks like some sort of cross between Tomb Raider, Max Payne, and Devil May Cry. But there's more to it than that. Rubi, the protagonist in Wet, has a handful of moves designed to make shooting her enemies easier. She can slide on her knees, run along walls, execute dives, and so on. While it might be tempting to simply forget about all the flipping around and just shoot at your enemies head-on, there are gameplay benefits to playing with style. When you dive, slide, or do any other move, the action slows down automatically, giving you more time to aim. Also, while flipping out, Rubi draws a second weapon and auto-targets another enemy, essentially letting you fire at two people at once. If the environment is set up properly, you can combo your moves together, chaining dives into slides into wall runs, and so on. Rubi also has a sword for use when up-close. All of this shooting, cutting, and flipping plays into a multiplier that increases the amount of in-game currency you earn for your kills, which is spent on various upgrades.
The game will progress in a linear fashion, occasionally trapping you in an arena-like area where you must disable all of the enemy generators (or, in essence, close the doors they're using to come into the room) to proceed. Rubi has an on-screen health meter that uses segmented blocks that will auto-recover up to the nearest block, like Chronicles of Riddick. In addition to these more-standard sequences, some sections of the game will be played in what's termed "rage mode." These sections go overboard on style, painting the entire environment red, showing Rubi as a black silhouette, and having the enemies' blood paint the walls white.
The whole game has that sort of stylish slant to it, and it really feels like the developers have watched the Tarantino collection more than a few times. The whole game has a '70s-by-Quentin motif to it, including film grain and a full-motion video intermission that showed an old drive-in theater concession stand ad. Similarly, Rubi is portrayed as a tough chick with a mysterious past who regains her health by drinking whiskey, tossing the bottle up in the air, and shooting it. This seems like one of those stylistic choices that people will either love or hate, depending on how tired they are of seeing the "dude, we made it look like an old movie" thing pop up across all forms of entertainment.
The last bit of gameplay we were shown was something like a boss fight, but rather than directly taking on a boss, it all happens during a bit of what A2M is calling "exotice gameplay." The sequence had Rubi perched on top of a speeding car that was making its way up the freeway. Occasionally Rubi would need to dive to another car, occasionally she'd need to do some shooting. It's a mix of Quick Time Events and rail shooting that eventually ended with Rubi getting back the briefcase she was after and leaving a man for dead in the process.
Some movie actors and actresses will be lending voices to Wet. Eliza Dushku will voice Rubi, while Malcolm McDowell and Alan Cumming will each voice a villain. Wet is scheduled to release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 later this year.
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