WET Review

(Sorry I took so long to get this one out. Work had me busy, and then I got ODST and I am having a hard time getting away from Firefight)

WET is the video game answer to Kill Bill, it's violent, with plenty of grit and a lot of swearing and it is also one of the biggest video game letdowns I can think of.

To start on a positive note, when the levels aren't too busy getting you killed for using the acrobatic mechanics, the combat is an absolute blast, and it really makes you feel like an unstoppable killing machine. You have unlimited bullet time and the developers didn't even bother with making you reload your guns; you can keep on shooting uninterrupted until you run out of bullets. You can also shoot from anywhere: swinging on poles, sliding down ladders, running along walls... if you can go there you can shoot from there. The more acrobatic and fluent you are, the more points you get to purchase weapon and ability upgrades. It's also pretty violent and the bonuses for kills are pretty interesting.

The grindhouse aspect of this game is, in my opinion, very well done. The language is over to top (she even swears at doors as she tries to open them) and the dialogue is nice and corny, but not terrible corny. The film grit, which you can shut off, was a nice touch, but when you're almost dead it takes over the screen and you're basically screwed. There are neat little touches, such as one part where Rubi kicks a basketball into the camera and cracks the screen, and the music is absolutely superb. It's a nice mix of rockabilly, poppy grunge wonder that makes me wish I could get an official soundtrack. Another thing I like about the music is that instead of getting big name bands to use as a selling point, they picked some smaller (but still awesome) bands that are much less famous.

On top of that all is the story. In it's (very) short span, WET tells a pretty interesting story, and I tell you that if this had been a movie it would have been fantastic. It has intrigue, betrayal and interesting villains, as you would expect from a Tarantino-Rodriguez-style game, although I have to say they didn't play a big enough roll and you never really find out much about them. The first guy you chase has a bigger part in the game than my favorite villain, Ze Kollektor, who says "I'll see you again" and then never makes another appearance. Basically the material was there for a much longer game, more character back story and a longer main story for instance, but they cut it short.

So now that I made this game sound like a good overall game, let's go to the bad sides of it. WET is like a stranger with candy, and you're a five year old who likes candy more than listening to his parents. In other words, this game starts of looking great. It has a lot of appeal, the candy, and even though its graphics and character models look a bit rough, like the man with the candy's beard, you figure it's worth a shot. However, as you probably learned when you take candy from a stranger: it's usually not very good candy, like a peppermint or something*. At first, WET amazed me. I flipped around the levels with the ease and grace of a ballerina dual-wielding shotguns, the arena fights (where you have to disable doors to stop enemy reinforcements) were well planned and a good high point in the levels. The car-hopping sequences were a definite blast, and even though the character models are a bit dated, it was all worth it.

Then, a couple hours into the game, things took a turn for the worst. Using acrobatics, the main point of the combat, became an annoying and deadly game of chance, as you would be put on a 4-foot-wide bridge with death-pits on either side and then be forced to fight a bunch of enemies. If you don't do acrobatics, a) You don't get style points, and your upgrading suffers greatly and b) You die. A lot. However if you do try to dive at the enemies or jump off them, you fall to your death nine times out of ten. After your sixth time falling off the same bridge and dying, you are about to put your fist through your Xbox, which means you no more harm than a mosquito that bites you and gives you West Nile. Another (minor) gripe is Rubi's ability to grab things. There are a few times you see a ledge then it says you can grab onto, but when you jump to grab it, Rubi fails to even try and instead falls. Usually to her death. You see, some ledges can only be grabbed if you jump from something else, like another ledge, even though when you jump from the other spot she would be totally capable of reaching it. Maybe it's because she's a woman, women are pushy and they only want things done their own certain way**. Oh, and don't get me started on the airplane. If you do buy this, you will end up hating airplanes as much as Rubi, and I won't say any more than that.

Now we get to Rage Mode. Rage Mode is Rubi's "You've made me angry, no prepare to effing die" mode, and the concept is great. Rubi gets blood on her face, flies into a rage during which she is basically unstoppable, a lot of enemies are around and carnage thus ensues. However, like pretty much every other wonderful concept this game had, WET manages to kinda kill this by throwing in all kinds of required acrobatics and forcing you to rush and it just kinda kills the mindless overkill mode that this is supposed to be.

WET is a game that suffers from too much ambition. It tries very hard to be a lot of things, (acrobatic shooter, Grindhouse game, quick-time action thingy) and ultimately ends up feeling like it was stretched too thin, like Bilbo Baggins. Overall it is a see-saw between fun and just plain frustrating, and a game I wouldn't recommend you buy unless you can get a deal. Maybe give it a rent.

Overall Score: 73%

* Don't take candy from strangers!

** I'm definitely kidding here. Kind of.

P.S. (edit) If they make a WET 2 and iron out all these kinks, I will definitely give it a shot, because this had the potential makings of a fantastic game. That is all.

WET Demo First Impressions (And a Bit on Section 8)

First off, I would like to say I'm done with the Section 8 Demo. I just don't like it. The controls are awful, the game doesn't give you any kind of tutorial, it just drops you into the action and expects you to know what to do. It doesn't tell you the objective of the gametypes, either. With controls like RB to jump (I think, they were so muddled I forgot them by now) figuring out what to do definitely takes some doing. Then there is the matter of killing someone. In most FPS games, you want a fight with another person to last a got 5, maybe 10 seconds. In Section 8, people can take forever to kill. I had an opponent standing still at one point and it took quite a number of head shots to kill him, and the knife (described as 'extremely lethal') has sometimes taken me as many as 2 or 3 backstabs for a kill. I don't like the demo, and I don't plan on playing it anymore. Sorry.

Now for the main order of business: the WET demo. I am following Microsoft on Twitter, so when I saw the WET demo was out today I was more than eager to download it. This game is one of my preorders, so I am definitely going to post a good review of this one.

The WET demo, firstly, is a wonderful demo; it gives you a wonderful feel of what to expect in the game and is split into three parts.

The demo opens up with a very Grindhouse, Tarantino-Rodriguez scene with a deal going on between two people, during which gunfire breaks out to cool music and our heroine busts in. This is where you take control. The game teaches you some basic acrobatics and then thrusts you headlong into a gunfight in a room with planty of stacked champagne glasses and exquisite glass sculptures, which appease the destructive appetite of your bullets. At first, the controls felt weird. My initial attempt at this part ended with my health startlingly low, but still dominant. The acrobatics and shooting are fun and smooth, and while you can just jump around and shoot people a ton of times in the body, the game awards you with location specific shots by giving you bonus points and cool names (e.g. BALL BREAKER and SKULL CRACKER and things like that). It is a whole lot of fun, and once you get used to the controls you become a ridculous killing machine.

Once you clear the first room of unwitting minions, you continue to chase your prey along some alley ways and rooftops, where the game demonstrates the gun/sword-play-acrobatics by doing stuff like shooting enemies while you slide down a ladder upside down. It's a blast, although some of the more specific jumping tasks feel a bit wonky. You have to be jumping in the exact right direction from the exact right spot at the exact right time. Also, the health system is pretty different. As you wander around the levels you find crates of (I'm guessing) whiskey and drinking one refills your health in a cool sequence that is a rather wasteful use of whiskey. However, when you get into the enclose gunfights, there is no suck healing item. When in these situations, killing enemies starts up a combo meter, the higher the meter the faster your health regenerates. This is nice because unlike most games where you hide to get health, in WET you keep on killing and go headfirst into the battle to get your health back.

The second part of the demo puts you into a super killing spree mode, I'm not sure what it's called yet but I'm guessing it's what they call Rubi Vision. Rubi, the main character if you hadn't picked up on that, walks into a room and an enemy charges her. She shoots him, and when she does her face is covered in blood. The screen turns red and your ears are violently assaulted, a la Kill Bill's flashbacks, and it stays that way. Everything around you is colored in red, black and white, and your health is bossted to a ridiculous point as you get attacked by a whole bunch of enemies. This part is very visual and a lot of fun, as you are basically an unstoppable force. Other than the different visuals and increased power, however, it's basically like the first part of the demo.

The third part is my favorite: the car chase. You start on the roof of a car, guns out, and shoot enemies leaning out of other cars. However, you don't just stay on one car. As the sequence progresses, you are forced to jump from car to car in a series of quick time events, often ending in dismemberment, impalement and other forms of death. If you haven't gathered, this is a very violent game, in true grindhouse style. The only thing I don't like about the car chase sequence is that sometimes the enemies have ridiculous amounts of health. I shot a few in the head multiple times and had them survive.

All in all, WET is looking to be a very bloody, fun and cinematic shooter, and one I definitely can't wait for. It's bloody, epically cinematic and, most importantly, a lot of fun. I'll be sure to post a full review as soon as I can after its release next month.

WET Product Site: http://wet.bethsoft.com/

Section 8 Product Site: http://www.joinsection8.com/

Wolfenstein Review

It's finally here! The newest installment in the series that birthed the FPS. Fitting that it will also be my first review. I am a long time Wolfenstein fan, so I was expecting a lot out of this game. In some ways it exceeded my expectations and in some ways it failed them.

The game picks up the story of series hero William "B.J." Blazkowicz as he is sent into the German town of Isenstadt to find some information on the newest supernatural exploits of everyone's favorite reich.

The game starts off looking like your average WWII shooter. You get an MP40, kill nazis to help someone who doesn't like them, rinse and repeat. This game is your typical FPS in style and functionality, but it's good. It seems to be very "don't fix it if it ain't broke" and it doesn't force change onto the player just to do it. That isn't to say it's an average game. Bizarre happenings and Nazi super-technology are a cornerstone of the Wolfenstein games, and this game doesn't disappoint. It is a fun, simple and straight-forward shooter with fun and varied level design and so many different kinds of enemies you can't just upgrade one super weapon and kill everything the same way. However, toward the end the enemies will just surprise you and get lucky and you'll just seem to die as soon as you run into an area. On occasion it gets annoying when you've fought your way through a couple of rooms swarming with Nazis only to run in a room right before a checkpoint and have six of the bastards shoot you with a rifle all at once and kill you instantly.

The graphics in this are very good. It uses the ID Tech 4 engine, which you may know from Quake IV, with some tweaks and enhancements. The cutscenes are smooth and very well animated, and the visual effects are awesome. When you enter the Veil, everything in the world changes and it looks like a whole new place. There are a lot of subtle blues and the lights look almost like they're shooting out glowing blue smoke. I also didn't have any frame rate hiccups, even when I was getting attacked by enemies throwing Veil energy at me, machine guns go off, grenades exploding and my Veil powers causing havoc. Speaking of which, Wolfenstein has Havok physics, which are always a bonus. One thing that is kind of neat is the physics are applied to doors. It's kind of cool when you know there is an enemy on the other side of the door to just open fire with a machine gun and have the door fly open from the bullets and kill said foe. The physics usage doesn't get lazy either. In pretty much any Havok-powered game, you kill an enemy and they ragdoll to the floor most uninterestingly. In Wolfenstein they mix physics-real deaths with scripted ones. Sometimes the enemy falls to the floor, but they might also hop around for a second before face planting because you shot off their leg, or stumble and fall over a railing to their death. It's also quite fun to shoot one of the enemies in the throat and have them fall to their knees, gurgling and clutching their throat as blood sprays out from behind their hands. Veil powers also let you see some cool death effects. When an ungrade makes it so that any enemy you touch flies away and turns into bones, you might be tempted to stop using guns.

In terms of story, Wolf is somewhat lacking. It tries to have drama and twists but the characters have no... well character and the plot is spread too thin. One thing that I do applaud, however, is the amount of research that went into this project. The ultimate goal the Nazis are after is actually based on something that was looked into by Nazi occult specialist groups. and the two groups you help, the Golden Dawn and the Kreisau Circle, are also both real groups. It really adds to the plausibility of the game.

The voice acting and sounds are very good, and if there was more story Wolfenstein could have actually been quite cinematic. The Nazis speak their accented English, with the occasional German phrase thrown in for good measure.

Another thing I appreciate is nods to long-time fans. One of the final bosses of the game, Hans Grosse, was the first boss you fight in Wolf 3D and in this game he weilds the same dual chainguns. There are another couple such occurences, but I have to say my favorite is the loading screen when you are on the final level.

One thing I really don't like is the collect-a-thon component of the game. In every level you can find treasure, intel and tomes of power. The intel and tomes unlock upgrades for your veil medallion and weapons, while the gold lets you buy said upgrades from the black market. One thing I can't stand is games where it's like "find x of these!". I understand it's supposed to add replayability, but to some people it can be very annoying. The only good this about the collecting of items in this is that it serves a purpose, unlike games like Red Faction: Guerilla where they have a bunch of things to find and destroy and whatever in the world that bascially are only there for achievements.

The multiplayer component will be very familiar to those who played the free Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer game that was released in 2003. You pick one of three classes, each with their own pros and cons, and you go on actual objective based missions or you can do deathmatch and a couple other game modes. The engineer class and the medic class fall short of the soldier in terms of the lack of weapons choices. The engineer and medic can only use the Kar98k rifle or MP40. The engineer can complete the objectives, such as bombing walls and disabling objects, and can also throw down ammo packages for players to pick up. The medic class can drop health packs and also revive downed teammates, provided they are willing to wait for you to get to them instead of just respawning. The soldier can use the kar98k, Mp40, Mp42, flammenwerfer and panzershreck and can drop claymores. The multiplayer upgrade system rewards you money for damage done to opponents and objectives completed which you can then use to buy weapon ugrades, equipment upgrades and class specific upgrades.

The multiplayer objective mode is where Wolfenstein really exceeds. It isn't just capture the flag or king of the hill. You actually have a mission to go on with multiple objectives, and the goal of the axis is to prevent you from completed said goal. In one level, for example, you have to steal intel from a Nazi building. This entails finding a shell for a tank parked in front of the house, loading the tank to blow open the front door, running in and grabbing the intel, then getting to an escape vehicle back near the spawn point. It is a lot of fun and definitely worth playing.

With epic boss battles, fun and straightforward shoot-em-up Nazi killing, a lot of fun powers, and fantastic multiplayer, Wolfenstein is a great game that is only thrown off by its moderately short campaign, occasionally frustrating bits, lack of story and collecty-ness.

Overall Score: 82%