3rd person action games over the years have been pretty hit or miss. A good couple of hits have been, Max Payne, God Of War and Devil May Cry. Does WET fall in to that category?
hmm.
You play as a hired gun called Rubi Malone. You are a ruthless, brutal and very skilled woman who loves to get the job done in style. At first you are hired by a Londoner called Trevor Ackers to collect a heart from the black market in order to save Trevor’s dieing father. Someone gets to the deal before you and it’s your job to get back what is rightfully yours/Trevor’s. After a couple of levels you get it back, save Trevor’s dad then skip forward three years.
You are then approached by a guy who claims to be Trevor’s dad three years later. You’re then hired to collect Trevor and bring him to his father. Over a couple more mission you do so and the guy murders Trevor which is a bit weird. You then find out that he isn’t the guy who he said he was and all hell breaks loose. Not a bad story really, simple but effective, I found myself getting a little into it at some points, but it was kind of predictable once it got rolling.
What really swung this game for me when I played the demo was the game play. A lot of people have compared the gameplay to John Woo’s Stranglehold. I haven’t played Stranglehold so I dived into the game relatively fresh-faced. If you didn’t catch up on my demo review, here is the low down. You are armed with a sword and fire arms for combat, you also have abilities such as wall run, slide and jump. If you do these moves coupled with the firing of your weapons you will go into a slow mo mode, kind of reminiscent of Max Payne’s bullet time, where you can aim at you enemies. What I really love about this style of combat system is you could link moves together. For example you can wall run, jump then slide while you were gunning thugs down, and the beauty of this is the gunning in slow motion has a total 360 degree view so you you could shoot pretty much anywhere. The icing on the cake here is you can aim one gun at one enemy and your other gun at another, making for some pretty sweet shooting action.
On top of that you have your sword attacks, they are a nice addition but not exactly Devil May cry. You have the ability to link sword attacks after slides etc for some good chain kills, but for me the sword fighting could have been a little more in-depth.
Depending on how stylishly you kill your enemies you are given style points, which at the end of every level you can upgrade Rubi’s abilities and weapons. What I though was a bit rubbish about this upgrade system is that some of the moves that you had the opportunity of unlocking were pretty mandatory moves, these should have been there right at your disposal, right from the start, like dodge roll for example, or mid air sword attacks. They could have done so much better with the upgrade system if they gave Rubi the fundamentals at the start then thought of more impressive/inventive moves to unlock.
The level design at the start of the game was pretty good I got pretty into it all. The Levels consist of killing enemies and basic Tomb Raider esqu platforming/scaling of enviroment. There is also some interesting sections where you were put into an open area with enemy spawn door, the idea here is to shut down all the spawn doors and kill all the enemies, again simple but effective. Then there was the rage sections of the level, each of these section started off with Rubi gunning a guy down, getting blood on her face which then triggered off her rage mode. The whole screen would turn black and red, kinda reminiscent of reservoir dogs, and you would play the level in this mode getting scored on kills alone. All these sections sound good in writing, but as your progress through the game, they kind of got predictable and tedious, which is a shame. The game tried to steer away from repetitiveness with levels here you would be riding on top of cars gunning people down, there is also a level where a plane has been blown up and you gunning thugs down while you free-falling through the air. A nice touch but it wasn’t enough to steer away from the repetitiveness of the later levels. They even tried to throw in some Quick time events, but I tell you this now, not trying to spoil the game for anyone here but the use of Quick Time Events in his game are over used and really, really should not be used in some places.
After completing the game you have the opportunity to do challenges, these challenges come in two flavours. Rubi’s boneyard challenges, which consist of speed trials where you have to run and scale the enviroment, while going into slow mo to take out targets, which in turn take seconds off your time. And there is the point challenges, where you pick any level and score the most point possible. Some pretty cool gameplay to keep the game going after you have completed the story.
Visually the game had really good potential, the game was going down the whole ‘as if the game were a film’ route, with screen scratches (which thankfully could be turned off), breaks every now and then which consisted of 70’s american style cinema adverts, and the overall feel of the game was very Quintin Tarrentino/Guy Ritchie. Grimey, dirty street crime with no good manners at all. Kind of like a drunken hobo in that sence. Which would have been great if done properly, instead it felt like a half assed attempt, more work could have gone into it. What I really did notice though was the amount of screen tearing and glitches the game had, there was even one point where the game went out of focus for me. Not good.
What I really did like about this game was its soundtrack, the songs from the game fit in really well with the whole theme, and there is one from the very beginning of the game that still gets stuck in my head. The voice acting is well done, With Eliza Dushku (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Tru Calling and Doll House) taking the roll of Rubi, she does a great job of voice acting the part but sadly her death cries are pretty rubbish. There are some other famous voices such as Malcolm McDowell (Heros, Doomsday), who plays the voice of the main bad guy, Rupert Pelham.
WET tries to be such a good game, there is apart of me that still wants to really like it, so I might go back for a second helping sometime, but all in all the repetitiveness of the levels, the glitches in the graphics and the overuse of Quick Time Events back this game fall into the Mediocre pile. This game is More…moist, and believe me, thats not in the good way either.
