Wet - Xbox 360

By: Paul Semel

Months after the merger of Vivendi and Activision left it orphaned, the third-person acrobatic action game Wet from developer A2M has finally found a new home. At a press event in Britain last week Bethesda announced that they’ll release the game this fall on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, while also offering up other new details about the game during a live developer demo.
 
As was previously announced, Wet casts you as the rather nimble Ruby, who enjoys shooting bad guys as she flies through the air with the greatest of ease. But while earlier demos made her look like a Lara Croft wannabe, this more in-depth demo revealed that she’s actually closer to Max Payne, since her acrobatics — which includes wall-running, back flipping, and sliding on her knees like Springsteen at the Super Bowl — come with a slow-mo mechanic that lets you blow away multiple enemies in rapid succession.
 
Oh, and she also can smack people with a sword, but that didn’t look all that interesting. Or as stylish.

Style is actually a big thing with this game, and not just because it has a Pulp Fiction-y ’70s exploitation vibe in its music and presentation. While you can shoot more than one guy during a single slo-mo jump, if you pull off enough flippy kills you can then also target multiple enemies simultaneously, aiming one of your dual-fisted pistols manually while automatically targeting a second bad guy with another one. Stylish kills and stylishly chaining them together also gets you more points and point multipliers, which not only give the game a similar feel, it seems, as The Club or 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, but they also, from a more practical standpoint, can be used to upgrade your weapons.

The game doesn’t have you runnin’ and jumpin' from one gunfight to another, though. Well, not entirely. There are also more spacious area that have multiple bad guys streaming in from different doorways, and it’s up to you to close these entry points to stem the influx of enemies. There are also some car chase scenes where, like the agent in The Matrix Revolutions car chase scene, you have to hop from the top of one car to another while shooting up anyone who complains about you scratching up their roofs. 

 

And then there’s Ruby’s Rage mode, levels in which everything turns all red, white, and black in a very Sin City or MadWorld kind of way, and the increase in the number of enemies is only equaled by the speed and ferocity in which our hero moves. Together, these modes look like they might break up what seems to be an endless amount of gymnastics and gunplay.

We say “seems,” by the way, because we unfortunately didn’t get to play the game ourselves. A game like this demands tight controls, and we’re also concerned that in being able to leap around all willy-nilly, with no limit to how often you can do it, might make this a bit easy. Though given all the aforementioned elements, we’re at the very least rather intrigued.