Wet is dripping with style...
Wet is dripping with style, but doesn’t always have the gameplay to back it up. You play as Rubi Malone, a gun (and sword) for hire who gets caught up in a drug war that leaves you running around the globe.
Your entire experience emulates an old exploitation film, from the heavy film grain over everything from the game’s menu to the end credits, to the campy filler sequences ripped from old theater film stock. The core of Wet is the combat system. You are encouraged to stay in an acrobatic-induced slow-motion mode as long as possible; jumping, diving, and running along walls all while gunning and slashing at your enemies. This works great and is quite fun in larger arena style areas, but is flawed when you are in smaller rooms. It feels like in these smaller areas it would make sense for melee to be more effective but Rubi gets shot up so quickly when not in slow-motion that your only option is to awkwardly slide and try to target your enemies without breaking your flow too much that you lose all of your health. That being said, most of your encounters with large numbers of enemies are in arenas, so the primary style of combat is fleshed out, it’s just some of the fringe encounters that can be annoying.
Between fights, Rubi has to do some light platforming. It never gets too complicated, although most of the time you are holding down the trigger to activate Rubi Vision, which shows what areas Rubi can grasp. Without that, there are not very clear indicators as to what you will grip on to and what you will just fall right past, often to your death. There are a handful of other stages to keep the game from getting too repetitive, some much more polished than others. Rage mode is really not all that different from your normal combat, it just switches to a cel-shaded red/white/black world, similar in style to Killer 7. Then there are the car sequences where you plant yourself on top of a moving vehicle and take out the pursuing bad guys, occasionally jumping between cars as a quick time event. Last is what I found the be an utterly frustrating experience, a sequence where you are falling from a plane that just exploded in the sky. Free-falling removes all of your evasion making this one of the least fun parts of the game.
Rubi’s arsenal grows as you advance, but you always have your sword and your infinitely-loaded pistols. When you get a new weapon between stages, you get dropped out to a challenge stage. They have no bearing on the story, and they don’t teach you any techniques, just give you time to play around with your new piece. I wish there was a better way to do these stages whether it was to just skip them completely or integrate them more into the story because as they stand they break up the narrative which is probably the last thing a game going for such a cinematic approach should do.
The voice acting is provided by a handful of names that you should recognize including Eliza Dushku who voices Rubi. The writing these stars were given though, is all over the place. There are some really well placed quips, and a lot of forgettable dialogue or just outdated references that are probably lost on the audience, such as ”Say goodnight Gracie”. The rest of the time she is usually just cursing. The music is composed by Brian LeBarton (Beck’s keyboardist) and does a great job at making it feel like a movie and adding to the excitement and atmosphere.
When it works, Wet is an awesome, gritty, grind-house-styled shooter with a lot of ambition. Now that you can pick it up for under thirty dollars pretty much anywhere it is certainly worth a playthrough for everything that it does right.
