Rubi, WET’s sexy gun-for-hire heroine, is all about style, but not tight-tops and short-shorts Lara Croft-like style. Oh, she’s got the curves, and oh yes, they’re held together nicely by revealing skintight, black leather, but she prefers to let her personality shine through her action rather than her assets. You see, Rubi is a stone cold killer whose skills behind her blades and bullets are only matched by her acrobatic prowess; the title adopts an absorbing ’70s B-movie style—the developers cite Kill Bill and Desperado as influences—complete with a grainy filter and Tarantino shout-outs galore, that totally embrace Rubi’s over-the-top moves. On solid ground she’s a whirlwind of swinging katanas and dual-wielded pistols, but in the air, on walls, and even on ladders, she’s so much more.
For starters, she possesses an amazing flip kick move that has her essentially climbing an enemy’s chest, feet first, before kicking back from him and firing a hail of hot lead into his torso. She also pulls wall-climbs with Prince of Persia-like ease, and performs across-the-room knee-slides while capping baddies with a pistol grasped at the end of each outstretched arm. Performing these moves individually looks like a blast, but chaining them together seems to offer the biggest blockbuster-style bang for your buck.
While these early, acrobatically charged firefights had me recalling Kill Bill’s best battle scenes—the game promises plenty of Crazy 8-like sequences—Rubi actually managed to one-up herself, pulling a feat of flexibility I thought only Aeon Flux was capable of; rather than climbing down ladders—you know, feet first?—Rubi straddles them with her legs, slides down while hanging upside down, and, of course, keeps those two pistol triggers working double-time. It’s seeing this sort of thing in action that makes watching hands-off demos such torture, as you want to be the one clutching that gamepad, experiencing what it’s like to empty clips into an alley full of goons while straddling a fire escape.
Rubi also likes to play in traffic; during a high-speed chase rail mission, she leaps from vehicle to vehicle—many flipping and exploding in her wake—via quick time event button presses. The mission appeared far more thrilling than the usual on-rails fare, and its cinematic complements made it more like an interactive version of a Michael Bay film sequence than a vanilla scripted event. If the actual gameplay and controls can match the stylized combat, pulp film paint job, and special effects-laden presentation, WET could blur the line between Hollywood blockbuster and videogame like no title before it. Hell, I almost expected the demo to conclude with “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.”
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