Wet

Why is it that all game writers and developers suddenly lose any shred of creativity the moment they have to pen a female character? They always seem to resort time and again to the ‘bad-ass chick who takes no shit from anyone'. Here's Wet where you play as bad-ass chick Rubi, who takes no shit from anyone. If you don't care it's because her character has just been copied and pasted from every other female protagonist in the history of gaming.

Rubi you see, besides being a semi-psychotic woman with terribly rendered hair, is out to hunt down a man who double-crossed her. In doing so she'll travel the globe killing hundreds of identikit enemies while following his trail.

Taking influence from the rubbish Tarantino films that no one saw, which were based on older films that no one saw; Wet has a ‘grindhouse' feel to it. Basically it means that the story seeks to be poorly written, badly directed, have exceptionally two dimensional characters and be needlessly bloody. In all categories here, Wet succeeds. In the fields of being fun, entertaining and well made Wet is a terrific failure.

The gunplay itself revolves almost entirely around the use of slow motion activated by either jumping or sliding ludicrously excessive distances on Rubi's knees while shooting goons over and over until they die. The fights come in a few different scenarios, from fighting through to spawning points and closing them, to hectic encounters where everything goes cell-shaded red and black for no real reason. They are fun at first, thanks mainly to the nice ability to shoot two separate enemies at once but quickly become very dull and repetitive. The boss fights are heinous as well, usually bogging down to lame quick time event sequences. The final fight comes out of nowhere and is over with just a few correct button prompts. It stinks of laziness.

Those are the ‘fun' bits however. In between these you'll be jumping around like a rabbit on its ninth consecutive can of Red Bull since the developers felt it necessary to add Prince of Persia lite platforming sections between most shoot outs. These are slow and pretty formulaic and the controls are so unresponsive that you'll often fall unintentionally to your doom forcing you to redo the whole insipid section. Worst is that if you press jump, Rubi will automatically leap several feet forward usually sending you down some randomly placed hole. The jump button is also the same key used for skipping cut-scenes meaning that every time you get over enthusiastic at avoiding some skull numbing dialogue; you end up starting by jumping face first into a hole. Then you have to reload, and dear God does this game like to load. Neat seventies style adverts aside; too much of the game is spent waiting for it to actually be playable.

The presentation could have done with a lick of paint too. The soundtrack is pretty good, loads of catchy seventies beats playing throughout. The visuals however are abysmal in places and genuinely look like they could have been pulled of on a PS2. Fire effects in particular are terrible. This might not be so noticeable if you didn't have to sit through so many interminable movie sequences where the animation completely fails to be in any way competent. The sound effects are also pretty weak, the constant dull thud of your pistols almost headache inducing.

Wet could have been a nice idea, but they needed to hold back on the fetishism for slow mo and a forgotten genre of films. If the developers had spent as much money on the game as they have on promoting it and buying in pointless big name actors to yawn through their parts then we could have had something fun, what we have instead is a soggy mess.