It’s Like…

…an Americanized version of John Woo’s Stranglehold if Chow Yun Fat was a hot white chick overflowing with Tarantino-esque B-movie sensibilities. In this incredibly over the top action fiasco you play Rubi, a sassy pistol toting, sword fighting, hard drinking mercenary who hires herself out for only the most dangerous wetwork (hence the title, Wet) from her home in an old airplane junkyard. Why does she take these crazy jobs? What could possibly be her motivation? Who cares? It’s just an excuse to jump, slide, and otherwise acrobatically kill a whole lot of stupid cannon fodder goons as you make your way through the game.

What Works

Wet is your classic disposable action game, and when it isn’t trying to be anything else, which is most of the time, it works pretty well. You can enter a kind of slow motion bullet-time by simply jumping or sliding across the ground, or by getting more creative and using the scenery to swing from bars, wall run, hang from ledges, etc. And that’s pretty much what you do from start to finish—jump around like you’ve had a few too many grande lattes and shoot dudes. The game keeps a pretty good balance between sections where you’re on the move and arena battles where you must close a bunch of thug generating doors before you can leave to cause mayhem elsewhere. On the easier difficulty settings the game plays at a nice crisp pace, and there’s a bunch of upgrades to unlock as you go along which provides further incentive to earn style points with which to purchase them. Otherwise this is a pretty tried and true formula—see dude, shoot dude, repeat.

What Doesn’t Work

The biggest problem with Wet is that there just isn’t really that much to it. It’s very short, beatable in just a handful of hours, and while the plot tries to spice things up with its B-movie flare it never really clicks. Once you beat the game you can try it all again on a harder difficulty to give it some staying power, but Wet is a classic example of unimaginative and unsuccessful difficulty scaling via numerical escalation if ever there was one. All it means is that you have less hit points and the enemies take a million shots to the head before they die, meaning you have to jump, dive, and roll over, and over, and over just to kill off a couple guys. It isn’t really that hard, it’s just tedious. Unfortunately other than some time trial obstacle course runs at Rubi’s junkyard there isn’t anything else to do.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line here is that Wet is one of those action games you can pick up, beat in an afternoon, master every which way you can in a couple days, and never really have any desire to pick up again. It’s a classic rainy day rental and in that capacity, as an unpretentious shoot-em-up, it works just fine. Just don’t buy it thinking you’ll be playing it for years to come, because you probably won’t.