“Weren’t expecting that, were you?”
Coming from the developer of Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls series, you wouldn’t expect Bethesda to be really publishing a stylish, 70s set Devil May Cry clone. Well that is what Artificial Mind & Movement have done with WET. You take up the role of Rubi, a mysterious, sword wielding, double pistol touting women who really doesn’t take no shit. WET is kind of defined as Wetworks, and is suitable for what this demo does.
The first thing to say perhaps about the WET demo I played is that at last it’s a proper demo. By that I mean it shows you the key elements of the game, teaches them to you very quickly and sets you off on a level. The fact that it doesn’t really give you much of a idea towards the plot is probably a good thing, as it allows you to concentrate on the very straightforward task at hand.
Gameplay wise, you’ve probably seen a lot of what WET offers, but it’s the way it offers it which makes the demo at least so appealing. You interupt a meeting gone bad, and whilst the begining essentially guides you through the 3 ways for Rubi to move through the environment and how the shooting works when doing this. You can jump, slide and wallrun, and whilst doing these just by a button press doesn’t add any extra animation, if you do these and then begin shooting, you go into a slo-mo, twirly bullet time mode, which allows you to take out quite a few enemies in one move. This works the same for when you slide along the floor or wall run, with Rubi automatically pointing her other gun at the second target.
However, Rubi doesn’t just have guns to dispatch her foes, she uses a sword in a pretty gory way. From sliding along the ground and then swinging the sword upwards, or spinning off a wallrun then cutting some dudes down. Whilst the mechanics of both of these are pretty simple, it’s execution appears to be its highpoint, for the moment anyway. It uses a system of giving you points depending on the way you have killed them, essentially how stylish, quickly and efficiently you get rid of enemies.
One thing that is uniform throughout the game is that it has a definite attitude straight out of the 70′s. Not the corney, over the top 70′s, but a bloody, angry and stylised 70s. Environment’s played through the demo for the most part look like they are from the period, and the game has a “cinema reel” look to it, with artifacts on screen, although without that, you probably wouldn’t care when it was set. Other examples of this attitude is that when you find a health pick up, a lovely dose of alcohol, Rubi throws it up in the air and shoots it in half. Just cause she can.
There is a few “gamey” elements that appear in different places. So towards the conclusion of the first part, you have to disable “spawn points”, which is basically just destroying something that makes a shutter fall down over a door. I’m not sure if this the same in different levels,but seems a bit unoriginal. During a scene where you are jumping from car to car, it generally comes down to a quicktime event, but I found the buttons not quite being clear enough. Sometimes I’d mash it, other times press it once and not always would it be picked up.
If Rubi goes in a strop, you sure know about it
Another major gamey thing, but is probably more of a positive than the previous two, is that Rubi has a Rage mode. This in the demo is shown by after killing an enemy, her face gets covered in blood. In this mode, the colour pallete changes to a bland, almost Mirror’s Edge look, with pistols firing at double speed and double your normal health. I’m not entirely sure how clearly this is triggered in the main gameplay mode, or even if it can, but it was useful to getting rid of lots of enemies and gain lots of points.
WET is a stylised and interesting take on the genre, but my fear for it, mirrored by what others have said, is that it could get hit by the main fault of this type of game. It could get very repetitive and even with more moves and possibly more weapons, it could struggle to keep the pace. I feel that WET could be a double edged sword. Make it too long, and gamers get bored and the mechanics become tired, make it too short and it becomes expensive. WET is something we nearly have all seen before, but if it can pull it off, it may take the hack ‘n slash ‘n shoot crown.
WET is coming out on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (demo played) on the 15th September (US) and 18th September (UK)
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