After years of publisher troubles, WET is finally about to see its release on September 15. The stylishly blood laden game by A2M has released a demo and I had a chance to check out the work-in-progress.
Right from the title screen, WET boasts a heavy emphasis on style and presentation. The overall feel is a 70’s action movie flick complete with a film grain filter. Effectively, WET’s aesthetic execution remarks the game as eccentric and over the top. At its best, WET can compare to a Quentin Tarantino directed movie; its nature is reminiscent of Kill Bill.
The main protagonist, Rubi, is a wetwork assassin seeking to dispatch justice on her targets. She is deliciously masterful in her acrobatic style, allowing her to contort her body in various ways to eliminate her enemies. Complementing this arsenal of tricks, Rubi excels in running up walls, dropping down head first from ladders, and other impossible feats.
At the gameplay’s forefront, combat is a combination of shooter, melee, and platform elements interwoven into one seemingly fluid chain. The game is played in a third person perspective; however the actual shooter aspect places the player in a slow-motion bullet time sequence. From there on, you can pan the camera whilst firing at multiple enemies. The incentive of doing this is to gain a high number score through racking up combos and obtaining multipliers. There’s inherently a lot of wanton killing involved as explored with WET’s Rubi Vision. The screen turns into an eye glazed red and your objective is to cut through massive waves of enemies to progress to the end. It’s certainly a nice change of pace if you want to engage in simple and mindless decapitations.
WET is very linear and scripted in its pacing but that’s not necessarily bad. The story progresses as you move along each level. However, the game also switches into a free form sandbox mode and you will have to complete a certain objective within a confined playground. The game provides plenty of quicktime events during tense and climatic moments of the story such as a car chase sequence.
If anything, WET has its own brand of style and flavor. The cynic in me is wary of the controls and an uneasy lack of depth due its linear nature but the optimist in me is too blind sighted at the fact that a strangely attractive estrogen filled assassin can inflict a glorious amount of brutality on her victims.
By William Saw
