The cheesy action shooter genre hasn’t seen that much action in the past few years outside of games like Stranglehold and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Taking after Stranglehold more than anything, Bethesda’s Wet replaces the John Woo-style to the story and presentation with that of the grindhouse style that was recently used by House of the Dead: Overkill. With that in mind, we checked out the new demo on the PS3 to see if the game can live up to the interesting parts that it’s made of.

There wasn’t much to gather about the story in Wet. It starts off with a deal going down between two gangsters over a mysterious suitcase that has something in it that our heroine, Rubi, is after. She’s watching the exchange from above when the deal goes sour as the buyer is betrayed by the seller and is killed before the mysterious seller runs off. Rubi dives in through the glass roof and starts to kick ass so she can chase down the guy with the suitcase.

This is where Wet gives you a tutorial of some of the basic acrobatic moves Rubi has at her disposal. You can slide along the floor by pressing circle, which happens in slow motion like most every other flashy move in her arsenal. This gives you time to shoot guys in front of you, behind you, or to your sides, which is nice to see that Rubi is flexible enough that you can aim in any direction regardless of where you’re sliding. Continuing with the tutorial, she can run up walls or wall run with the L1 button and then launch off with a flip where you can shoot at some more guys before landing on the ground. There is also a basic jump move that evokes Max Payne as you manually shoot at one guy while Rubi automatically shoots another guy that’s nearby.

Eventually, you see some things that ratchet up the ridiculousness of Wet quite well. The most simple is Rubi’s sword, which she can use to slice up some enemies normally or use with a slide to chain into a rising sword slash attack. Once you get out of an arena fight, Rubi gets covered in blood from a short range headshot that starts this interesting rage mode. The simple way to describe it is everything becomes cel-shaded as Rubi focuses on destroying the many enemies in her way, which gives you a noticeable bump in health that makes it easy to go nuts without preservation. The sequence following the rage mode is a car chase where Rubi rides on the tops of cars, shooting enemies driving cars nearby with Quick Time Event (QTE) sequences when she needs to move to a new car, which succumbs to the same pitfalls of other QTE games with little leeway for entry time.

While a lot of this stuff sounds cool and should make for quite a cool, ridiculous action game, the Wet demo kind of falters a bit in a key way that Stranglehold nailed quite well. Stranglehold automatically started slides and made other maneuvers simple to do so you could marvel at the awesomeness in what you’re doing. Wet has little automation so you have to be precise in your movements, like facing a wall straight on to run up it that can be annoying in the arena area since you’re required to destroy three skull-and-crossbones that are up on ledges to stop spawning enemies. Shooting also doesn’t offer much in the way of aim assist to help with the brief bits of bullet time that you get, so the four or five shots it takes to kill enemies can make that melee option the ideal way to take them out.

When it comes down to it, the Wet demo shows off some nice moves and an interesting, cheesy atmosphere that helps give it some personality. However, the lack of a little bit of automation to help make the player feel like a badass veteran rather than the amateurish impression that the demo gives may be its downfall. If you do have a UK PSN account, you can download the demo yourself to try it out right now, though the demo should be available everywhere else within the next week or so. Should you enjoy the demo, you’ll be glad to hear that the game is not far off, as it will be out the week of September 15 in North America and Europe.

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About This Author: Chris Selogy

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