Game Improvements 01.22.10: WET

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 01.22.2010

Bethesda's action game gets the Improvement treatment as Chris Lansdell tells you how to fix WET!

Hey yo! Welcome to Game Improvements, the column where I take a recent (or recent-ish) game and make suggestions on what I would have liked to see to make the review score just a bit better. We'll also be encouraging you the readers to tweet, comment or email your suggestions for improvement as well, so feel free to join in.

Why are we doing this? Well it seems to me that as game reviewers, we spend an awful lot of time saying what's WRONG with games and not enough time talking about how to make them better. It's just so much easier to complain. To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney: "Hey dude, About your game…We took the bad parts, and made them better". With that mandate in hand, bring on the

BANNER!

Project 3 – WET

Reviewed by: Adam Larck
Review score: 6.6
The 411: Overall, WET was a decent title. Unfortunately, the time between publishers didn't really help the team when it came to extra time to polish the game. The story mode is fairly short and doesn't really offer much after it's beaten. This game is worth a weekend pickup, but don't expect anything long lasting out of it.

A lot of writers don't write the way they talk. I do. If anything, I'm more reserved in print. Quite often it earns me some funny looks, which I'm sure has nothing to do with my rather unique appearance. The plus side to it is that I build up good relationships with everyone from co-workers to cashiers at the supermarket to the sales people at my local video games store. It's because of the great relationship I have with the crew down there (shout out to Rosalie, Vince and the gang at EB Games in Mount Pearl!) that I was able to go in during the Boxing Day sales (the after-Christmas sales, for my American readers) and say "Get me Wet."

Yes, I just spent a paragraph setting up the obvious joke. I'm terrible. I promise I'll make it up to you.

Still, I'm very glad they got me Wet, because it's a fun little romp. If we really must define the game I'd call it an action platformer, but there's plenty of guns and gore here. Since this is Game Improvements and not Gee I Love This Game, let's dive in to the nitty gritty, shall we?



Wet is supposed to feel like a 70s movie, and it does that admirably. You know the old drive-in movies where lines would crackle down the screen at intervals? That happens during the cut scenes. Everything about the game feels like you're in the setting, from the original soundtrack to the vehicles to the hairstyles. A truly immersive experience is rare enough in video games these days that it should be credited when it does happen. There's more than a smattering of Kill Bill influence in this game, even down to the David Carradine-like chief bad guy and the katana wielded by Rubi, who like The Bride is a hot chick in a jumpsuit. Not that that's a bad thing you understand…

Ever since the release of The Matrix, hyper-athletic, acrobatic protagonists have been the norm in action-adventure, both in film and in games. Although I'd glass Wet as more of an action platformer due to all the jumping required, Rubi Malone is certainly no exception. Like Trinity she is a hot chick in a jumpsuit and from the very first action scene you learn how to run Rubi along the walls, how to leap and twist and fire in mid-air and how to slide along the ground while shooting in all directions. Soon thereafter you learn to chain these moves together, making you something of a murderous yet graceful combination of Svetlana Boginskaya and Vincent Vega. And if that image doesn't make up for my opening joke, stick with me. There's more. These acrobatic displays are great fun, and the fact that they give you more points and point multipliers make it rewarding to be stylish. Too many games place no emphasis on style, as long as you get the job done. Wet actually penalises you for a lack of style, as your health regenerates faster the more stunts you pull. One particular combination saw me vault off a pole, twisting and firing, into a slide along the ground shooting all the while, and ending with a rising sword slash. I took out every enemy on screen and it was way more fun than any smart bomb I ever launched. A quick pull of the right trigger will highlight all the stuntable areas so that you don't miss a trick. Like Lindsay Lohan.

One thing that really pleased me about Wet was that it had an actual story to it. With acrobatics, ninjas, action and a hot chick in a jumpsuit it would have been easy to ignore any semblance of a story, or at best give us a clichéd "rescue the damsel in distress" or "retrieve the MacGuffin" bit. Instead you get a story of a crime lords and mercenaries and the in vogue "bad guy with a conscience" that, although not epic, at least adds a dimension to the game. I may be in the minority here but a mindless action game is worse than one with an impossible-to-follow story (like Prototype). If the game is a killing romp, I want to have a reason to be on this killing romp…but I don't want the mind games to detract from the killing spree. Wet seems to strike that balance.

The game scores real points with me by varying the gameplay. Jumping and shooting can get boring if that's all you do, but the addition of some "minigame" levels helps to break up that monotony. Without venturing into the realm of spoilers, there's a car chase which sees you trying to keep up with someone by leaping from vehicle to vehicle while killing bad guys, there are a couple of tutorial levels which can be pretty addictive on their own, and there's a level where you are free-falling from an exploded plane, trying to dodge burning wreckage while aiming for a parachute. There are also the rage mode levels, which are triggered by Rubi getting blood splattered on her face during cut scenes and ask you to chain together as many kills as possible for huge bonuses, and arena levels, which require you to block off enemy-generating doors and kill all the bad guys, normally while avoiding some environmental hazards in the level. Combined with the odd jumping puzzle, the game has plenty of differentiation to keep it from the monotony pile.

Plus, and you might not have picked this up from the rest of the column, the lead character is a hot chick in a jumpsuit. Any game with a hot chick in a jumpsuit is automatically better than a game without a hot chick in a jumpsuit, because it has a hot chick in a jumpsuit. And this one is modelled on Eliza Dushku. So…yeah. How can that possibly be a bad thing?



The idea of acrobatic death personified is a good one, but Wet makes it monotonous. Especially in the arena levels, the game is simply a case of jump, mash the shoot button while moving the right analog stick, land and slide, repeat as needed. Trying to shoot from standup is not only unrewarding, it's actually penalised. You're left feeling like a jackrabbit with two pistols at times, and it takes a lot of the replay value out of the game. Even that annoyance would be tolerable if every jump didn't feel and look EXACTLY THE SAME. There's no variation to the cinematics whatsoever, thus adding to the tedium.

The idea of Rage Mode is a good one but it's flawed. The cut scene that triggers rage mode is the same each time, with only the backdrop changing.: a guy runs at you, you shoot him point-blank in the face, and he is inconsiderate enough to shower you with skull fragments and goo. YUMMY! That's a fairly minor gripe on its own, but it's what happens after the brain facial treatment that grated on my nerves Then Rubi sees red – literally – and the scenery turns to line drawings while the bad guys look like you are viewing them through a thermal scope. Although it's no trouble to pick the enemies out, and the whole scene looks very cool and very Japanese, it can be nearly impossible to pick out the route through the level, and to make some of the jumps. The Leap of Faith to a non-visible platform is a long-time enemy of platform games, and this issue falls under that heading. Dying in Rage Mode is almost impossible unless you fall (if I can't manage to die from damage, it probably can't be done because I'm not very good), but the whole idea of these levels is to kill multiple enemies in a row with no gaps in between, and if you're fumbling around trying to find the next wall to climb that becomes an annoying impossibility.

I really like some of the songs on the soundtrack. Honest I do. However, each stage has a set song (at least it does on my copy), and that song replays if you are unlucky (or unskilled) enough to die during the stage. Not bad if you die once or twice and at different parts of the stage, but if you die early and often (and you will in some of the tougher stages, like the aforementioned free-falling one) you will quickly be pressing mute.

Adding a sword to the character had the potential to bring a whole new dimension to the game, but as it is the weapon feels tacked on as an afterthought. A lot of time and effort was clearly put in to the gun system in this game, but the sword is so much more basic that it might as well have been left out. You can slide and do a pop-up attack, you can do a jump attack and of course there's the standing slash. If there's any more to the swordplay I have yet to find it. I get that it's a secondary weapon, but it doesn't even feel like that much.

Vary the attacks and acrobatics - This could have been so easy, or they could have gone with a more detailed route. Simply having 2 or 3 very different jump animations based on whether you were running or walking or which direction you pushed would have helped. If they wanted to go further, they could add sword duels or at least give us a melee combat system instead of just a plain attack button. Drop one of the guns and assign the sword to a D-Pad button, and go nuts. Another suggestion? Since you can already run on the walls, why not add more parkour to the game and make all the scenery trickable?

Add an RPG element - Increase the number of unlockables and thereby make players choose what they wanted to upgrade, instead of the current system which allows players to unlock everything before the end of the game. Put more emphasis on stylish kills, giving more XP the more you do in style. Finally, make each skill level-up on its own, so that players are able to evolve Rubi how they choose.

Fix Rage Mode - It's a good idea, but it feels so forced with the way it's set up. I don't think a random trigger is necessarily the best way to go, but maybe have it go off in mid-level sometimes, or have preset places in levels where a certain combo or certain way of killing someone will trigger Rage. While we're at it...let's not make it nigh-impossible to see what's happening once we're raging, hmm?

Rotate the songs - Pretty simple here. This game can be very tough, and having to hear the same song over and over will grate on the nerves even if you like the song initially.

Add sword acrobatics - You have a sword. You can jump into the middle of a ton of bad guys, firing your guns the whole time. But can you spin and twirl with your sword out, making like a walking SlapChop? No! So let's add it. Rubi is a death machine, this seems like a natural change.

More interactive environment - Sandbox games are all the rage these days. I dno't mean to suggest that Wet should be sandbox, since it clearly has a linear goal and is an action platformer through and through. That's fine. But with Rubi being able to do so much, it's a shame that there is so much in the game to which she cannot do it. Let her run up more walls, swing off more rails...you get the idea.

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And that about does it. Twitter Break!

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Got a suggestion for a future game to cover? Got some thoughts about this game? Drop me an email or leave a comment. I'll be back with another game next month. Until then Stay Cool, Rock Hard.

Lansdellicious – Out.