Wet (2009)

I think for Wet I just want to write a short, messy, quick review. It seems fitting for a short, messy, quick game. Wet is so damn cool and fun except all the times when it’s not.

I love some of the stuff they are doing here. Trying to create an acrobatic, arcadey, third person shooter, with a sword too, is such a good idea. Wet is like some mix of Tomb Raider, parkour, Stranglehold and a grindhouse film. You have to jump, slide, swing and wall run around while shooting and slashing bad guys to rack up score. You need to link things up and keep things going to get a multiplier up too. The score multiplier impacts health regeneration and the score you earn is your currency for unlocking upgrades. It rewards aggression and good, consistent play and the side challenges in the bone yard push you to learn this. Movement is key to not taking too much damage as well. You are dual wielding guns and while shooting, one arm is auto aim, and the other is controlled by you so that you can be hitting two targets at a time. Hitting enemies interrupts them as they react to being hit, so putting a few bullets here and there can control the crowd while you get to work on keeping up the flow of killing. Every time you start blasting during an acrobatic moment slow mo activates, so you are constantly leading one move into another, constantly engaging slow mo until everyone’s dead and kills in that time are more points of course, tied to the rating as well. It’s built for multiple play throughs, has a score mode and more difficulties. There’s a golden bullets mode that has the enemies dying in one shot but Rubi also dies much quicker, creating very fast and fun encounters.

Such great ideas but the execution and how it feels, damn I wish this would get a remake that polishes what is here to the level it needs to be. Wet feels so awkward and stiff, not free flowing and fast. The jank, the missed jumps, wall climbing instead of wall running, the times I got stuck floating, the enemy AI, the camera and the aim that just never feels right. The awesome looking and feeling flow slamming to a halt by the uncomfortable roughness of Wet kept knocking that smile off my face. Why does this have climbing and platforming sections, I get they want to reinforce what can be used during combat but I always want to be flipping and blasting. The set pieces and other moments to break things up are so hit and miss. They really should have just focused more on the combat.

Many of the upgrades should have been normal moves available at the start. I get games want to give a sense of progression and new toys throughout the run time but progression should most often come from the players skills and understanding improving. Seriously the dodge is one of the last moves you can unlock though. I want to play Wet over and over until I remember how much is in it that irks me. You can hang upside down and slide down a ladder with your legs while your hands are free to dual wield shotguns in fucking slow mo but I still hesitated to start playing this sometimes. I played through it twice though and messed around in the challenges, so fun is beating frustration here but not by that much. I wanted to go for the Platinum Trophy as well but there was too much I didn’t want to put up with.

Rubi is cool, voiced by Eliza Dushku, and it is always great to have another kick ass female character. A bit like Revy from Black Lagoon, okay not as cool as Revy or as interesting and Wet certainly isn’t as cool as Black Lagoon, but you get what I mean. How good would a Black Lagoon game that takes inspiration from what Wet was for going be though. That kind of sums up Wet; cool but not cool enough.

It does the grindhouse aesthetic well with the film grain, flicker, colours, worn out look and the intermissions. I wish the characters, dialogue and scenes were better and that it felt more complete. The game is a bit ugly but it kind of works with the grindhouse style. There are some cool shots and many over the top moments and holy crap Rubi’s rage activating is awesome. The entire game goes red, black and white and the music kicks in as you go on a killing spree. It does mess with visibility a bit and that reminds me that level design could have been better. Also why does her rage mode happen at scripted moments, couldn’t it have been player activated as a reward for doing well and to further your combo and score. That’s Wet though as rough as it is great.

Frustrating and fun, ugly and stylish, awesome to play but feels rough and awkward, over the top but often not enough is some ways, don’t come for the story or its characters but there are moments and there’s Rubi – Wet is a mess but its good. I love it but I said fuck this game multiple times while playing. At least the developers of Wet were trying to do interesting and really cool things though. They took risks and no amount of issues this game has can ruin things completely but damn it could have been so much more and it sucks that the sequel was cancelled. Wet is not the best game ever but it’s one I would recommend playing.

6.8/10

Wet is a great time, not a great game.

It's a silly, fast-paced third-person shooter, heavy on bullet-time combos and parkour acrobatics. Aesthetically it takes its cues from 70s exploitation cinema, but it is pretty clear its only reference point is the grindhouse revival conducted by Tarantino and Rodriguez. It even uses the same cruddy film grain filter, and is far more Planet Terror than Death Proof, although its painfully dull exposition-heavy cutscenes do recall the 70s films DP successfully paid homage to.

Eliza Dushku plays Rubi (an Eliza Dushku type), who is Kill Bill's the Bride, minus anything that made that character interesting. This is the games biggest issue: despite all the badass posturing the dialogue and characters are not very interesting or memorable. It's mostly just cursing and forgettable one-liners. At one point Dushku yells, "You fight like old people fuck..." but the second half of her line is drowned out by music. It also features Malcolm McDowell playing the Macolm McDowell character, and a criminally underused Alan Cumming. It could have learned a lot regarding personality from fellow grindhouse buddy House of the Dead: Overkill, or from MadWorld's memorable boss fights.

All that shit aside, the game is fun. You dual wield pistols as your primary weapon, one auto-aiming during bullet time allowing you to target multiple enemies at once. You flip, knee-slide and wallrun your way through levels slicing goons with your sword. Linear levels give way to open arenas where you need to use your acrobatics to destroy spawn points and kill the remaining enemies. There are a handful of QTE based set-pieces that are a lot of fun to watch.

Occasionally Rubi will shoot an enemy at such close range that blood will splatter her face. This launches you into heavily stylised levels of red, black and white that are part comic book and part opening credits sequence. The music grows louder, and the resulting adrenaline has you slicing through enemies like an unstoppable badass.

There are also some timer-based challenge levels between missions that take place in the Texan scrapyard where Rubi lives. These would be pointless filler if they weren't so much fun. You run and jump through rings while shooting targets and are rewarded with a new weapon.

There are some other nice touches. When you die the screen burns up like film in a projector. Also, some loading screens have been replaced with advertisements from a drive-in cinema. There is a lengthy one about Dill pickles that I am quite fond of.

Admittedly the game is very anticlimatic. The final chapter is two QTE boss fights and then it is straight to end credits.

I wrote far more about Wet than I was expecting, but I guess I really enjoyed getting thoroughly damp with this game.