Firearms, Swords, And Booze, It'll Be A Wild Trip

Probably the last video game review for a few weeks. I'm not close on anything else.

Wet benefits from my rotating game approach. If I focused solely on playing it until I beat it, it would have gotten old. Play it once a week, or once every two weeks, that problem's avoided. The game boils down to: Enter room. Kill every person in the room who isn't you with firearms and various acrobatic moves. Use acrobatics to reach next room. Repeat.

There is some variation. Sometimes you get a sequence where you shoot while riding on top of a moving car, and have to hit buttons at certain moments to leap successfully to a different car. There's also some of that timed button-hitting for killing mini-bosses (who are usually toting mini-guns)*. There's a level where Rubi's falling from the wreckage of a plane, and you have to maneuver her freefall through the wreckage and catch up with a section that has parachutes (I died a lot on that one).

And there's Rage Mode. The gameplay for Rage Mode isn't any different from the standard play, but the presentation is. The screen is practically all red (see above), except for the enemies, who are black-and-white outlines. When you kill them, they disintegrate, or fall to pieces. Rubi calms down eventually - after you've killed enough people. All in all, the controls are smooth and easy. The game is all about killing people in flashy ways, so they tried to encourage it. There are always tables to leap off, bars to swing from, wide open floor space to slide across, it's very accommodating.

The story isn't much. Rubi takes a job to find and return a young man to his father, only to be double-crossed on completion. Then it turns out her employer wasn't who she thought he was (honestly, he was voiced by Malcolm McDowell, how could you trust him?), and it turns into a revenge thing. The ending was a bit of an anticlimax. I was expecting him to have more security, but I guess he figured he only needed his really pale, possibly supernatural bodyguard lady. I would like to know what happened to Ze Kollektor. Bastard stabbed me in the gut, and I never got a rematch.

The game is presented as a sort of grindhouse flick, I guess. When Rubi's low on health, the screen starts to get these black splotches, and when she dies the film the game is on tears or reaches the end of its spool. There are these promos movie theaters would use interspersed through the game. You know, go to the lobby and get snacks, one about the magic of VistaVision, stuff like that. I wasn't aware that was a feature of the game, and I don't have any particular history with grindhouse films, so it's just something I have to sit through.

I'd imagine Wet isn't a bad representation, though. There's lots of violence, much of it bloody. A lot of the action is ridiculous, from the plane wreckage level, to all the 'jumping about and monkey guns' as the bad guy put it. Lots of profanity - Rubi can hardly go a sentence without at least one curse - and some classic "hard person" dialogue. I was fond of her 'You're just a sad, pathetic little man, and I should pity you. But I don't.' Then she leaves that guy to die crippled in a fire.

Most of the characters are pretty thin. Not much in the way of character or motivation. Rubi's a little better. She curses, she likes swords and guns, she likes to drink, she'll take most any job, but she doesn't appreciate clients not being honest with her. She lives in an old boneyard, a dumping ground for old planes and such, even though she hates planes. Or maybe because she hates planes, and these can't get off the ground any longer. It's strange to say, since much of the movie is Rubi on the vengeance trail, but she's very businesslike.  Outside of drinking, I can't say what her interests are outside work. She's singularly focused on what she's paid to do, and she lets her guns, swords, and fists do the talking there. She doesn't banter, doesn't use sex appeal to make guys act like drooling idiots. She makes demands, and they either comply, or they die. Straightforward.

I don't expect Wet to make it into my top 5 for he 360, but it ought to be pretty cheap by now, so if you're in the mood for a little mindless violence, it wouldn't be a bad pickup.

* The button-pressing in Wet is more forgiving than in Resident Evil 4, at least at Normal difficulty. Even so, these kinds of things annoy me because I have to focus on the part of the screen where the next command is gonna appear. Otherwise, I get distracted. I do want to watch the cool fight scene that I'm nominally helping along.