What happens when you take game play elements from Tomb Raider, Max Payne, and Uncharted? You get WET! Combining 70’s cinema-tinged presentation and Stranglehold-like slow-motion combat mechanics make this a slick looking game. While presentation and style are pretty good, it’s not enough to make you overlook its weakness in game play.

In Wet you follow the adventures of Rubi Malone, a leather clad, raven-haired vixen with a vendetta against a former boss. But don’t let the title and leading lady emblazoned on the cover fool you. This isn’t another over sexualized game to fuel fan boy fantasies. Wronged and angry, you’re thrown into a world of murderers, double-crossers, drug runners, and impossible action scenarios. While you may find that Rubi’s basic abilities will be your mainstay throughout the game, you can choose to upgrade her combat abilities. At any time throughout the game you can initiate a jump or slide, combine it with gunfire, and extend it into a slow-motion sequence. There’s no limit to the amount of bullet-time effects you can use in the game as long as you are jumping or running on walls, or sliding across the floor and firing at any number of targets.

While her weapons aren’t the best ones out there, they still get the job done. Rubi always has two weapons ready- Either pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, or crossbows- none of which ever need reloading. If you are close enough to an enemy you can also bust out the katana for a quick and accurate kill. Controlling your aim is a little tricky, even if you are a master at FPS, so don’t expect to go in and take everyone out with head shots. Keep shooting and chaining kills together and you build up a multiplier, accumulating points and enhancing your sense of reward for fluid play. The multiplier will help your health regenerate so the higher you get your multiplier, the faster you get your health back. If you happen to see a whiskey bottle sitting around, you can take a swig of that to immediately regain your health. Just remember to shoot the bottle afterwards, or it won’t work! As you battle your way through single-player campaign you can unlock weapon damage, fire rates and new acrobatic moves. However, none of these will make a significant difference in the combat; they just add that little extra umph.

Wet is a combat-heavy game with a significant amount of jumping around environments where a big fall means instant death. There is no way to cancel out of a mid-dive to avoid dying so you just have to suck it up and start over. While you can grab onto different edges, they are very context-sensitive and have to be approached from just the right angle. It would be perfect if Rubi was “sticky” especially when jumping from platform to platform, since being even slightly off means you are going to slide right down the side of the wall. The arenas are clumsy plat-forming setups that will remind you of Prince of Persia, but without any real flow. While sometimes it is fun to combine wall-running with Rubi’s gun it usually ends up being more trouble than it’s worth.

The out of combat sequences aren’t really enjoyable and seem to be there only for the purpose of killing time. Throughout each stage there are monkeys you can to collect in order to unlock bonus content and other goodies like music, artwork, and bios. A wide range of speed-run and shooting challenges are also offered outside of the story mode where you dart and dive through rings and try to shoot targets to reduce your overall time. The enemies in Wet are definitely inferior to Rubi, providing a challenge mostly due to their numbers with only the occasional character that can equally match Rubi in combat. You will have to fight these enemies in quick-time events, if at all. The bosses in the game air fairly simple. I enjoyed that fact that it uses all the game play elements but in the end, they’re a little lackluster so don’t go in thinking you will have anything close to an epic battle to the death. Most enemies are dispatched by a series of four or five button presses.

Things get a little too Quentin Tarantino-ish on occasions, with all the blood splattering dramatically across Rubi’s face and the swaths of black and red and white. There is also a Matrix-like car chase where you have to jump across the tops of different vehicles while shooting at the enemies. Conveniently, you always end up on the same black car, and the enemies all look the same and seem to be jammed into clown cars.

It’s a good game, but it doesn’t offer enough variety. The only place where Wet doesn’t falter is in its style and presentation. Details like heavy film grain and scratches, along with random ‘footage’ that appears as if it were spliced into the reel, makes the player feel like they are watching an old film. The game is paired up with a pretty decent soundtrack and limited voice acting. While A2M gets the style right and provides plenty of dark and dirty battlegrounds to splatter with blood, the visuals and animations aren’t particularly sharp and are pretty rough-edged and sloppy. I imagine they came up with this game by jotting down different things they liked about various other games and decided to jam them all into one. The game play is lacking, to say the least. Blood, bullets, crude language, seedy characters and piles of dead bodies make up this overly repetitive game that leaves you unsatisfied. I have to say though that I was surprised by this game because overall it isn’t horrible. It’s a fun game to play just so long as you don’t expect to get too much out of it.

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