The other big game showing at the Bethesda booth, that I actually managed ot get my hands on, was
WET. To sum it up as succinctly as possible: It’s like playing a grindhouse movie. Or at least that’s the intention.
A lot of energy has been put into making the game feel like a real grindhouse film. Besides the cheesey characters and iffy dialog the whole thing has very grindhouse look. There’s a constant film grain effect that, thankfully, isn’t over-powering. Cleverly enough this becomes more and more noticeable the closer you are to death. When you are nearly dead, the tracks of the film starts to creep in on the sides and the frame stutters a bit. When you do eventually bite one to many bullets, the film freezes and melts out. Other little touches like the clicking sound of the projector in the background during cut scenes also help to round out the experience.
One of the games key features is a rage mode that kicks in whenever the game heroine is greatly upset, perhaps from having blood spattered on her face. When this happens the whole game switches to a very
Killer 7-style where almost everything is red except for the enemies who are black, and blood which is white. It’s a nice cell-shading effect but nothing astounding. As far as I know this doesn’t have any effect on game-play either which is a bit unfortunate. Though I suppose I should expect this from a game that tries to mimic style over substance. Yeah, that must be it.
As far as the game play is concerned I was instantly reminded of
Stranglehold. For those of you with good memories of that game, you’ll probably love this (though fair warning, no table butt slides). For those of you who didn’t care for
Stranglehold, I can happily say I enjoyed the 15 or so minutes I played of
WET a great deal more than I did the hour or so I put into
SH. Take that as you will.
The game's controls are fairly standard third-person shooting. You run and gun (and SWORD!) your way through waves of enemies. However, the real fun comes in the use of the jump and slide buttons. Unlike some games that force you to manually initiate “bullet time”, the second you jump, or slide, or wall-run and begin to shoot, everything will slow to a crawl. There is no limit on this. It just looks cool and makes sense.
I can imagine it would be really hard to shoot at two people at once while diving through the air. Speaking of which, the game does allow you, in a sense, to aim your dual pistols at two different enemies. This works by automatically looking onto whichever target is closest to your reticule. You can then use the stick to aim your other hand at a second enemy. It’s a simple and surprisingly elegant solution.
When it works right, the chaining of a wall-run to a midair dive to a floor slide, all while shooting at multiple targets, to a katana slice is a damn good time. Sadly the controls seem to, *sigh*, take some getting used to. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the likes of
Ninja Gaiden but there were a few too many times when playing where I was very much facing a wall and pushing the correct button but the desired bad-assery did not follow. I feel like it’s the sort of thing that would just require some time to learn to do just right, but that hardly seems ideal. Thankfully they still have several months of development time left to tighten things up a bit.
While I don’t think it will rock anyone’s world it does look like a solid game with a lot of fun elements and some clever ideas. Throw in Eliza Dushku’s voice for our sexy (but not slutty) heroine, and you’ve got a pretty solid looking experience. Should be interesting to see how it shapes up in the remaining months before launch.
