WET - Review

Added October 7th, 2009 by Artie Augustyn

The video game industry has been cranking out products for over thirty years. During this time, thousands and thousands of new ideas and concepts have been concocted in order to please the enlarging audience. With such a long history of new ideas being sparked over all those years, some developers find it difficult to produce something entirely unique. With the release of WET from Artificial Mind and Movement (or if you’re classy: A2M) it appears this developer may be one of the stragglers due to the overwhelming amount of creativity that’s already been claimed. WET is a combination of influences from other games and movies such as Max Payne, Stranglehold and Grindhouse. The result is an average package that works fine as a filler between the bigger holiday season releases, but doesn’t do much beyond that.

WET stars pistol-wielding anti-heroine Rubi the mercenary. The game’s story follows her adventures around a particular job that she partakes in that ends up going sour leaving Rubi unpaid and shot. Given her ruthless and unforgiving attitude, this sets up a ten chapter long revenge plot for her to get her money back and kill those responsible. WET’s level of realism defines itself with its insane cast of characters which include a German cowboy, an ancient vampiress (female vampire lord), and a moustache twirling old man. The cast’s bizarre attributes make it evident that you’ll have a hard time finding a more ridiculous plot than WET’s.

However, despite the seemingly memorable collection of freak shows for characters, most of the personas in WET turn out to be quite forgettable. The characters all draw obvious inspiration from old 1960s B level action flicks. Everyone you meet has an obvious character trait or gag that they express almost immediately… and then Rubi kills them. There doesn’t seem to be any trace of development or plot progression for the entirety of the game and that’s pretty concurrent with the source material WET is drawing from. The lack of development and insane scenarios are an obvious stylistic choice that starts out endearing, but soon deteriorates into an annoying misplaced attempt at humor.

The one exception to the annoyance is Rubi herself. Rubi’s character is the only person in the entire story that appears to show any substance past one-dimensional personality traits. That being said, she’s still not a product of Tarantino’s mind and her character doesn’t stay interesting for the entire extent of the game’s single player so what little there is to salvage is wasted by a focus on action and shootouts instead of any attempt to create a memorable main star.

Most of WET’s set pieces draw from the same inspiration that the character design does (see: Grindhouse). Rubi will be thrown into a fair share of ridiculous scenarios that only Hollywood stunt professionals would be able to achieve. You’ll jump from car-to-car on the freeway, have a gunfight while falling from plane, and cut bullets in half while dueling against one of your adversaries. WET manages to keep these set pieces showing up pretty frequently so you’ll always be interested to see what next crazy contraption the developers think of next.

However, in between each memorable moment is a lot of filler. WET is your typical third-person-shooter with a focus on style points and slo-mo jumps as seen in Max Payne, or more recently, Stranglehold. Rubi has a handful of stunts she can pull off to spice up the action, but the action multiplier caps off at x4 so you never get the opportunity to trick out and perfect an insane 100-hit combo. The stunts and tricks are nice for keeping the second-to-second action interesting but there’s no room left over for professionals to show off their abilities to other fans of the game.

In addition to the lack of stellar stunts, the level design doesn’t inspire a lot of imagination. Most of the stages are full of poles to swing on and walls to run across, but those types of tricks are present from the beginning to the end of the game. It’s unfortunate that the developer never thought to expand on crazier and more satisfying ways to execute your foes, but what’s there works adequately enough till you hit the end credits. That being said, the action and gunplay that you fool around with near the beginning of the game provides a lot of entertainment and thrills. But when you’ve played the game for five hours straight already the old tricks start to get boring.

In fact, most of WET’s flaws are only revealed during long play-through sessions. This isn’t a game that you would want to beat in a weekend and be done with. The repetitive nature would reveal itself almost immediately and you’d quickly lose interest. If you decide to take WET’s single player at a leisurely pace and only complete a level or two over a few weeks, you’re bound to have a lot of fun with the intense action and set pieces that it provides.

Add in the crazy and memorable original music that WET’s composers thought up, and you can potentially have a lot of fun with WET despite all its flaws. WET gives off an astounding first impression that depending on your pace can either last for two levels, or till the end of the game.

It’s disappointing that this product didn’t achieve as much as it could’ve accomplished, but as a pure thrill-based action game, you could certainly do a lot worse. There’s a lot of fun to be had with WET’s gunplay and whacky storyline but the developer didn’t do such a swell job at making it easy to find those few hours of bliss. As a whole, it might start to fall apart near the end but that doesn’t mean the beginning isn’t worth checking out.