Review: Wet - Xbox 360

If Max Payne and Lara Croft had a drunk and steamy night together, then Rubi - Wet's anti hero protagonist - would have been their daughter... their rebellious, morally grey daughter. She dives, slides, flips, runs up and along walls, and swings around flag poles in slow motion while blasting dual weapons at relentless crowds of thugs, criminals and anyone else unfortunate enough to get in her way. She's crude, she's rude and if you tried to chat her up in a bar you'd probably end up locked in a cubicle in the gents sobbing into your lap. Controlling her is relatively easy and standard, left stick for movement, right stick for camera/aiming, right trigger to shoot. Other buttons are mapped as follows: A - Jump/Dive in slow motion, B - Slide along the floor in slow mo (which you can do on it's own or at the end of a dive), X - use your sword, Y - is your context sensitive action button, use zip lines, open doors, etc. Any time you do anything slightly acrobatic and pull the right trigger to fire your gun, the world slows down but you can still aim in real time, giving a very matrix effect to the whole affair. One very cool thing about this is that Rubi makes good use of dual wielding her guns, any time you are in acrobatic slow mo, she will auto aim one of her guns at an enemy who will be highlighted, allowing you to either target the same one or a totally different guy to make every bullet count, which provides some awesome cinematic moments as you slide on your knees into a room shooting two gangsters in the head at the same time.
The more stylish your moves the more points you rack up, and these are used in an upgrade shop to purchase new moves and upgrade your guns. And with that masterfully executed link, your guns come in 4 flavours, standard dual pistols which provide infinite ammo, dual shotguns for getting up close and personal, dual sub machine guns for spray and prey mayhem, and lastly dual cross bows that fire explosive bolts for when you absolutely, positively have to kill every mother f*cker in the room.
The levels themselves are all designed with plenty of scenery to dive behind, jump onto, grab hold of, and leap from to showcase Rubi's acrobatic prowess, and are all styled in the appropriate scenery as the story demands - US west coast freeway, hong kong opera house, london docks, and so forth. The story is presented in a Tarantino grindhouse style, larger than life characters that are treated as every day occurrences the world they exist in, the midget torture expert, the female, blind, albino, gothic body guard, the token British bad guy (4 of them in fact) and of course rubi herself closely resembles a more gothy version of the bride from Kill Bill.
A few set piece levels break up the action a bit; jumping from car to car on the freeway while having a shoot out with the mafia who are shooting at you from speeding cars, various sections of levels where Rubi gets blood in her eyes and literally sees red allowing you to go into a berserker mode painted in a noir pallet of reds, whites and blacks. There is even one level, caused by Rubi's less than stealthy infiltration of a carrier jet, that sees Rubi sky diving without a parachute amongst the wreckage of said jet, while shooting the other doomed occupants (who despite their predicament still seem to be hell bent on putting as many bullets your way as possible), avoiding the chunks of wreckage that are hurtling towards London's sky line with you, and trying to grab the only parachute in sight, which is bolted to the inside of a piece of the hull. This scene seems to have been completely lifted from the Clive Owen movie 'shoot 'em up', only Wet somehow manages to make it more believable!
The run time of 8 - 9 hours on normal difficulty seems to be pretty standard these days, I'd rather it was longer but as all other games of it's type seem to be about the same length, criticising it would be unfair. What really got my goat was the lack of New Game+ or being able to revisit the levels you have already done, once you reach the end of the game, that's it, you can either start over, from scratch without any of the skills you have unlocked, or just play through the final scene again, which wasn't much of a boss fight, but fitted well with the grindhouse setting. Not being able to go back and play the memorable moments again with your full arsenal feels, at best, like a huge oversight, and at worst, like a very cheap way of forcing you to replay the game.
Technically there are not many faults with the game, I didn't see many glitches, a couple of visual quips here and there, and while the graphics aren't ground breaking, they are tailored to the grindhouse theme, although I turned off the movie scratch/grain effect immediately to avoid feeling ill.
Scoring this game isn't all that easy, I had fun playing it and there were some truly breathtaking moments of over the top action and violence. It's faults are not really in what it has and does, but rather in what it lacks, there are key features that I feel should have been included, some as standard, and that's what really brings this game down for me, an anti climax to the fun.

6.5/10