Bethesda's WET - But Are We?

With terms like 'A2M' being tossed around, how can we not be? Stunning action sequences in Bethesda-published slashfest.

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Unlike most gun-totin' run-and-jumpers from the last three years, the aforesaid slow motion gunplay isn't constricted by circumstances or resources. There's no "adrenaline" or "focus" metre you have to keep topped up - the temporal retention can be laid on at any point, whether you're swinging from a pole, halfway through a mid-air forward flip or gripping a ladder with your thighs, head tipped backwards as you slide guns a-blazing towards a posse of earthbound yakuza.

Doing so is useful not only because it allows you to appreciate Rubi's 100% sexually uninteresting physique at your leisure: there are, as you'd expect, practical benefits too. While operating in normal time you aim and shoot just one pistol with right stick and a trigger. Kick back with the slow-mo, however, and Rubi develops a mild multiple personality disorder: her right-hand pistol remains under your control for surgical shots, while her left-hand pistol auto-locks (in theory) onto anything you're not manually aiming at.

There's a straightforward rationale behind this carrot-but-no-stick approach to the hoary old "bullet time" gambit: players are lazy, and if you want the feckless sods to tinker with all the tools available you'll need to make it worth their while. "We know players are always going to find the path of least resistance," Fortier explains. "So if they can just walk around with one gun and kill everybody that's what they're going to do. So [the targeting system] is designed really to create this feel of empowerment, and make it really clear to them that when they do acrobatics because you have a second gun and are doing double damage, because you're in slow-mo and you can line up the shot better, and because you have the auto-lock and you're guaranteed hitting the target. These things just make you feel that much more powerful, just reward you instantly for using the acrobatics," he concludes. "Acrobatics equals efficiency."

Ismail likens WET's combat arenas to skate parks, with the player stringing together bar swings, platform vaults and knee slides ad hoc into one, personalised, free-flowing athletic sentence, punctuated by gunshots, Rubi's sword strikes being the "exclamation marks". In the finished game you'll have access to a feature called "Rubi vision", which lights up stuff you can climb on, kick off and so forth, much like the scarlet environmental highlighting in Mirror's Edge.

If WET veers towards a sandbox sim in this and certain other regards - one of the extra modes lets you free-run in the aeroplane graveyard Rubi calls home - elsewhere the game keeps players on a very tight leash. Rubi's "Rage" outbursts, which boost her speed and hitting power whilst stripping the textures down to red and black silhouettes, have been built right into the level script. There are seven or eight such episodes dotted across the 10 hour story, each with its own particular quirks.

Where another developer might have danced around the subject of the game's linearity, A2M seems completely at ease with it. At the end of the demo we're shown a frantic road chase on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rubi leap-frogging car bonnets through a deluge of automatic fire and cartwheeling wreckage. Control at this stage is reduced to point and shoot, with bouncing button prompts taking care of the transitions from car to car. Ismail offhandedly terms the sequence a "glorified dynamic shooting gallery" - words which could have sprung from the rickety keyboard of a vengeful reviewer.

If they spring from ours, we suspect it'll be because we've bought into WET's unpretentious, tightly wound ethos, rather than because we want its blood on our hands. Rubi may thrive on messiness, but her game seems remarkably clean - clean in concept, clean in execution. A2M knows what it likes, in short. So do we.

WET is due out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Fall 2009. Or autumn, if you're a fellow Britisher.

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