Wet With Sewage!

It's not often that I give a game its own blog entry. (Yes, I know I gave God of War 3 its own last week.) As I am fairly selective in the games I play, I generally have mostly good things to say with some minor complaints, which is informative but not all that fun to read. However, sometimes I do come across a game that I think will be good, and turns out so bad that at the end I have enough animosity towards on it to create an unrelentingly scathing review that's not only fun to read, but cathartic to write. This week's victim is Wet. Enjoy.


My Wet Stats

• Platform: PS3
  
• Playthroughs: 1 @ 8-9 hours
• Trophies: 22/41
  
• I compare it to: Enter The Matrix meets Kill Bill, except not any fun
  
• Play it again?: I will cut you if you make me.
• Urgency: Don't Waste Your Time.

As frequent readers of my blog know, I am a sucker for story. A good, or even halfway decent story will keep me chugging along through an otherwise bad game (See Matt Hazard). This aspect of myself was sorely tested today as I played Wet, a game I queued up based on the demo I played last year, based itself on Bethesda's excellent track record. Aesthetically, Wet rips off Quentin Tarantino's movies (most notably Kill Bill and Grindhouse) so hard I'm surprised he hasn't sued. Then again, it also rips off all of the old exploitation flicks he ripped off, so I guess that would be a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black. So, instead of saying "rip off," I'm going to use the phrase "pays homage to," which is the same thing when the rip-ee either approves or doesn't care, and Tarantino doesn't even play games, let alone one as infuriatingly inconsistent as Wet, so I'm pretty sure he doesn't give a damn. Anyway.

The worn-out film print look is complete with deep runs and heavy grain (a great joke for a different, current title out there at the moment), and, at least for the first two hours, complements the ultraviolence nicely. The story was definitely written as an homage to QT, just read and tell me if you disagree. Rubi Malone, a fixer for hire, undertakes a routine job to deliver a person back to her employer, who frames her for murder and leaves her for dead. After recovering, she sets out to perforate and dismember her betrayer and all of his allies. I knew you'd think so too.

Not that it does it badly. The look and feel of Wet (along with its fun psycho-billy soundtrack) is actually pretty unique for the game world. Which is why it's such a shame that the gameplay is so bad. The first game I thought of when I first played the Wet demo was, of course, Enter the Matrix (some will say Max Payne, but as I haven't played those, EtM is my frame of reference), with its slo-mo diving and shooting, superhuman feats of agility, etc. The problem with this is that it takes a lot of polish to get right. EtM's wasn't perfect by any means, but it was more polished than Wet. It is just downright tough to line up a shot while Ruby is pulling off these acrobatic stunts, and not once during the course of the game did I feel like a badass, like I'm sure the devs hoped I would. While it's an interesting idea to have one manual target reticule and an auto-target, the enemies just soak too many bullets for this to feel as cool as it should.

It really seems like the mark developer A2M missed here was that feeling of empowerment for the player. The one aspect of combat I did enjoy was using the sword, as it was pretty well engineered, powerful, and I usually hit the guy I wanted to hit. However, you actually get LESS style points at the end of the level for using your sword as opposed to "acrobatic kills" during which you can only use guns. So, not only did the gunplay actually make me feel more vulnerable than melee, as a player, I am actually DOCKED for using the sole aspect of combat that I thought really worked well!
 
I expect to die a few times during my first playthrough of a game. I expect a few combat deaths, and one or two "testing the waters" platforming deaths. I died more often just by accidentally falling off of ledges than I have in any other game in years. If the gunplay in Wet lacks a certain element of polish, the platforming didn't even bother with it. I cannot tell how many times I made a seemingly simple jump to the obviously correct spot and fell to my death, frequently necessitating a restart much earlier in the level. This also happened while I was climbing, fighting (rolled off a ledge at least 4 times), and, inexplicably, climbing up a ladder. This, more than any other single factor, was the source of my frustration with Wet.

In my Matt Hazard review, I lamented that such an awful game surrounded a story I thought any gamer would appreciate. Here, there is no such conflict. The story, while fun and decently written (with great voice acting by Eliza Dushku, Malcolm McDowell, and Alan Cumming), is not worth suffering through the subpar gameplay for. Watch a Tarantino flick instead. Very rarely do I slap a game back in the GameFly envelope as soon as (or before) the credits roll, but Wet is definitely an exception. The most telling review I can give of this game: I got a headache ten minutes in, and it didn't stop until I was done.

-B. Hunt