Ingredients:
3lb of Max Payne
1 cup of Devil May Cry heavily diluted
pinch of Tony Hawk or Skate
3 1/2 pints of Quentin Tarantino
3 1/2 pints of Guy Ritchie
Method:
Shove in a bowl, mix it up a bit and leave in Bethesda’s hands for about a year or so and you get:
No I am not saying you will get a bucket of water tipped over your head. I am saying you will get new type of 3rd person game that focuses heavily on stylised gun combat, with a little sword play and lots of things to jump off of in slow motion.
When I first picked this demo up and played it through, I was not really that impressed. WET is definitely one of those games that stinks of cheese straight off the bat. As a friend of mine said, the game sits neatly between awful and wicked. Its not until you dive deep into the game play and level design you see its glory shine through.
The story starts with the classic, shifty deal between two gang bosses, then of course, one deceives the other, shoots him square between the eyes and runs off with the money and the merchandise. You are a girl called Rubi who look over the deal, sees it has gone wrong and starts causing a bit of a ruckus. You are then thrown straight into a small tutorial mode showing you the ropes of gunplay in the game.
Your probably thinking why the heck I mentioned Tony Hawk or Skate earlier? Well after a couple of play throughs I started experimenting with the Gun fighting. Every time Rubi either wall runs, jumps or slides on her knees you get a Max Payne bullet time-esque slow mo mode to shoot the living crap out of enemies. What I quickly learnt was that you can string these jumps, wall runs and slides for some pretty cool moves, which of course you get scored for, kinda like style points from Devil May Cry, but feels more like you are pulling off a some what disjointed nose grab with pistols instead of a skateboard. I can spend hours doing those slow mo moves, it’s what I am kind of hoping Max Payne 3 will be like bullet time wise.
With the gunplay you also get sword fighting, this game element to my mind is just an extra to what is mostly a 3rd person shooter. The enemies go down in one or two slashes from the sword, handy if your in a sticky situation and are stuck in a crowd of bad guys, but guns are the way forward here. Its a shame you cant use slow mo with sword play, maybe it will be unlocked as your progress through the full game but I don’t know.
As for platforming? Well there is some but not much, you have your wall running which can be combined with the slow mo, also you get to swing across bars Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider style, which you then can also link into some more slow mo gun shooting for fun, but don’t slow mo too quickly after jumping from the pole, as sometimes I found myself falling to my death…fail.
The style of the game as I say is very Quentin Tarantino meets Guy Ritchie, You have the graininess film style of Ritchie’s Rock ‘n’ Roller mixed within Tarantino’s Kill Bill sword fighting, but that’s not all. There is one element in the game where Rubi has what I call a ‘Rage Mode’. Let me explain, there is a mini cut scene where she shoots a guy in the face and blood splatters in her eyes. She then gets angry for some reason and the next thing you know the whole screen has gone red and all you see is black silhouettes of enemies with white shirts on. To me that style looked very Reservoir Dogs. Score one for Tarantino…again.
One element on the demo which I really enjoyed was a car chase element. Rubi is on top of a car which is speeding down a highway dodging traffic, as the camera violently moves from right to left you are trying to aim and gun down thugs shooting at you from other cars. Every now and the a quick time event kicks in and you have to press the buttons in order to jump to another car. Its very simple, but the attention to detail in this part of the game was fantastic, the way it was really hard to aim as the car was thrashing about. The quick time events were well timed too, and some of the time you didn’t know when to expect them.
So a game that has the style of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, with the Max Payne slow mo gun fights mixed in with some crazy style move combinations from the likes of Tony Hawk, infused with some heavily watered down sword fighting and a sprinkling of platforming. WET is a definite one to try out if your into this type of thing.
Even though to me Rubi seems like a bit of a tart.
Garv
