WET

WET is one strange game. It is stylish and borrows lots of cool elements from other popular games. For example bullet time from Max Payne, parkour style running from Mirrors Edge and vehicular battle in moving car ala Pursuit Force. Plus tons of more. Not the most original game and I can live with that. Had this only been a fun game. The strange thing here is game manages absolutely on every form make a mess. That itself is achievement I suppose.

Gameplay is on the action shooter category. This is viewed from a third person perspective that comes handy (or not so) in the platforming sequences. It is this combination of shooting and acrobat action that sets the game apart. Or should set.

Rubi, the main character has been equipped with strange set of weapons. Killing the countless enemies will take a very long time or lots of bullets. This is when she is not performing acrobatic movement. Sliding, diving, running on the walls and so on. These slow down the time and kills the enemies much faster. If you ever played Tony Hawk and tried doing an endless trick. This is the same and frankly quite strange in a shooting game. This could be forgiven had all the moves been unlocked to begin with. She can not hang from a ledge and shoot anyone before this has been unlocked by game progress and bought with ingame currency. See the flaw here? You are supposed to make massive combos by using the environment. But you can not do this before these moves are unlocked. The acrobatic action borrows from named freerunning game in form of slides and highlighted colours in the environment which shows the direction. Occasionally this goes to Uncharted epic climbing like sequences. Unfortunately the camera is always not as good it should be. Making at times really hard to see where to time the jumps.

Level design. Normally I wouldn't dwell into this but WET has some really dubious decisions. Felt like that the person who did this has never played videogame before. Even with a such kick-ass repertoire that Rubi has, the game still somehow manages to get very tiresome experience. It is clear that Bethesda wanted to break down game with adding different elements but these tend to get very repetitive. Add here some QTE and action sequences, usually involving a sudden fire.

Story and the characters manage to fail short as well. The main character Rubi is a ruthless killer but almost nothing is told about her story. Dialogue is not helping either. This is mostly too short. Had the character been charismatic or likeable. She ends coming off as a mindless zombie. The flat voice work from: does not help. Plot itself is decent taking Rubi to various locations and settings. Only saviour here are the two main antagonist. If you can both them that. Both William Morgan Sheppard and Malcolm McDowell do a solid job.

Music has been said to be one the better parts of the game. And while it is refreshing psychobilly suiting the games crazy image it seems to repeat itself way too much. One track dedicated to one level more or less. The cool track is not so cool after hearing it for the 10th time.

Graphics are blurry and characters not very detailed. Game trying to relay a 70's action movie feel that Tarantino/Rodrigues have successfully done on the cinema front. While the game is not right downward ugly this is not games main features. Only distinguished levels are done in rage mode. This is a red/black/white level where enemies dying more easily and combo piling up faster with high tempo music naturally. Visually not too different to Madworld.

I wouldn't call WET a bad game. It had some cool sequences but as mentioned there seems to be something wrong on every aspect of the game. Had this not been a Bethesda game it would have been different. Granted this might not be Bethesda's usual genre, but one would have expected bit more from such big name developer.