Rubi Malone is the sort of girl you'd see across a bar having a wild time, chugging whiskeys like Oliver Reed, singing, dancing, and looking great while she does it. You'll stroll on over all cool, ready to dish out one of the three chat-up lines you know; you'll close the gap, get close, take a deep breath, and then choke because she sleeps rough in a scrapyard, hasn't had a shower in a month, and stinks like a rickshaw boy's jockstrap. Sexy from afar and stinky in your hands - that's Wet, that is.
For those short on time, refer to our review of Wanted back in XBW78. It's the same kind of game - short and bittersweet, poorly made but confident, filled with ideas but none of them strong enough to carry the game.
Wet is as dumb as it always promised to be - fourteen stages of constant blasting with the occasional platforming interlude. There's blasting in corridors, blasting on the roofs of cars, blasting in arenas where you have to shut down the enemy's spawnpoints, and blasting with the screen painted red; there's blasting with pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and crossbows; and there's blasting in boxy locations in San Francisco, Hong Kong, London, and The Sky.
Once upon a time Max Payne doled out its slow-mo in miserly bursts but Rubi has an infinite supply of Bullet Time. Every time your feet leave the ground or knees skid the concrete everything crashes into slow-mo. Cannon-fodder enemies flood into boxy arenas and hurl themselves in front of Rubi's guns; it's Stranglehold with The Club's scoring system and Prince of Persia's wall-running, and with unlimited slow-mo every shootout is rammed with the cheapest thrills imaginable.
It's brutally simplistic in every possible way but it's simplistic by design. Wet makes for a moronic four hours of mirth but it knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be - within its own limited template it's a success. Rubi animates beautifully as she slides along every surface and dives through the air to bring her pistols to bear on the legions. Its story is pulpy nonsense and its music is rammed with twangy guitars and screaming nutcases.
It has a sense of bravado lifted from 70s cinema. Old drive-in intermission ads bookend levels while a scratchy grain filter and jumpy camera follow the action. Game designers owe a debt to Rodriguez and Tarantino for their revival of Grindhouse cinema because the scratchy grain filter thrown atop games like Wet and the Wii's House of the Dead: Overkill hide every sin. Once you embrace the Grindhouse philosophy you have an excuse for everything you did badly. No cohesion between locations? Idiotic story? Laughable acting? Legions of cloned enemies, each with the same guns, clothes, and even faces? It's not crap, it's Grindhouse. Try that trick with that report your boss is after and see how far it gets you.
You can't help but admire Wet's balls, as stinky as they may be. Like Wanted you feel like an unstoppable bullet-spewing superhuman and for just a few brief hours you'll laugh your way through ham-fisted levels, instant-death set pieces, and bad guys built solely for the purpose of being shot.
Wet isn't a bad game because its designers failed at what they wanted to do; it's a bad game because those designers made precisely the game they had always planned to make. It's built to be basic and its limitations are built into the game at its very core. The thrills are as cheap as Happy Shopper cola but they're still undeniably thrills.
In February Wet would be a rock-solid rental, in May it's a pre-owned bargain, but one week before ODST and one month after Batman, it's another Wanted-style cheeseburger in a world of filet mignon.
"Once you embrace the Grindhouse philosophy you have an excuse for everything you did badly. No cohesion between locations? Idiotic story? Laughable acting? Legions of cloned enemies, each with the same guns, clothes, and even faces? It's not crap, it's Grindhouse."
So what you are assuming is that the game was poor and so they wrapped it up into a "grindhouse" package to hide the fact? That seems like a stretch. Could it not be that you just don't "get" the style of the game? Maybe the developer should get a little credit for trying something somewhat new?
"In February Wet would be a rock-solid rental, in May it's a pre-owned bargain, but one week before ODST and one month after Batman, it's another Wanted-style cheeseburger in a world of filet mignon."
Aside from the fact that I'm not really sure how the time of year that a game is released impacts the level of fun output by it, you then proceed to compare it to the "filet mignon" that is ODST, a game which hasn't been released or even reviewed yet.
What I want to know is, how fun is the actual game? All I can tell from this "review" is that you aren't a fan of the grindhouse style or what sounds like an arcadey game style.
The 6.2 rating makes it sound like a horrible game, but then the verdict is:
"Limited by design but successful on its own terms, Wet fails - but in a likeable way."
So it fails, but it's still good?
I'm sorry but I'm leaving this review with no more information than I came with.
By the way, Wet is published by Bethesda, not Vivendi.
I'm sorry but I'm leaving this review with no more information than I came with.
Personally, I thought the review was pretty good, and I have a clear idea of where it fails (ie, the over reliance of bullet time, repetitive, unsophisticated combat and dull unintelligent enemies). Also, with regards to the Grind-house theme, I don't think the reviewer was trying to say that they had a game already and then painted it to be GH per se, I think his point was that they may have felt that because they were making a GH style game, they could compromise on the sophistication of the combat.
Also (please don't take this as me trying to pic apart your comment) XBW probably have already played Halo: ODST to death and written a review, but they are not allowed to publish it just yet.
This sucks. I was looking forward to this and Gran Tourismo, and they both turn out to be let-downs.
Well, thankfully I still have L4D2, Batman and ODST to look forward too this year..
I'm with Marty on this one. What a disappointment (presuming a hands-on experience mirrors the reviewers impressions). I had been looking forward to dipping my toes in to Wet's waters; not so sure I'll do that now although perhaps once second-hand or bargain bin prices pop up, and I've been more active in working through my current games library, I may pick it up.
I'm with Marty on this one. What a disappointment (presuming a hands-on experience mirrors the reviewers impressions). I had been looking forward to dipping my toes in to Wet's waters; not so sure I'll do that now although perhaps once second-hand or bargain bin prices pop up, and I've been more active in working through my current games library, I may pick it up.
Huh? I did what?
Though if you do want my opinion, I was sincerely unimpressed with the demo. Felt like Stranglehold, only without the 'it's an early title' excuse.
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Cheap thrills
Played the demo, its s**te! 
