Browsing through the list of games previously developed by the Canadians at Artificial Mind and Movement, I couldn't help but notice some less than impressive titles. I for one had great expectations for the PC version of Iron Man, for example, and yet that game was one of the worst I played in my entire life.

It is also true that AMM is the biggest independent video games developer and that you don't always get to pick whatever titles you have to create, or the time frame you need to deliver them in.

So WET is their big bang title, a brand new franchise and a chance to sit down, do things right, and shine. With great features like bullet time action, next gen graphics, a solid main character voiced over by Eliza Dushku, and fantastic music score, the game has everything on paper to make it an instant hit.

It is however with mixed feelings that I write about it, and this is after I finished it, so no one can claim "it gets better later on". Well, in a way it does, because if it were by the first couple of hours of gameplay, the overall mark would have been a lot less...

Still, I am happy the game finally got published and saw the daylight, after being dropped by Activision Blizzard. Some small things make it not the greatest game you've ever seen, but on the other hand it would have been a shame if no one would ever get to experience it.

Writer Duppy Demitrius of 24 TV Series fame pictured a nice Mafia story that takes our main heroine Rubi Malone through various locations around the globe, first as e mercenary doing various missions, and later on simply to get revenge. Yes, revenge is a dish better served cold, I know...

Rubi has indeed got style, athletics, the body and the dirty language that make her perfect for jobs like this. Armed with dual pistols, and later on with dual shotguns, Uzis, and crossbows (with an explosive dart ala Rambo), she cans spread chaos and mayhem throughout hundreds upon hundreds of hired mafia mobs.

To get you started, all you need to know is to jump or slide with the A and B keys respectively, while holding the fire trigger - RT. This will cause time to slow and give you that matrix feel-alike when you are dealing with your enemies. Of course, slower means more thinking, giving you more time to analyze the situation better and to act accordingly.

Rubi auto aims at one villain, which means you'll have to manually aim at another and execute both your foes simultaneously. You can choose to fire both guns at the same guy as well, recommended for tough bosses.

If it seems like a target will never die, you always have the option to go into melee range and use your mighty ninja sword to slice and dice around, which oddly enough seems ten times more effective than dozens of bullets in the chest.

You can combine the ranged and melee attacks with grace and finesse by chaining them together, and thus earn style points. Earned (and found - in the form of power-ups) style points can be used between missions to upgrade your character.

{pagebreak}

You can either choose to unlock all of Ruby's special moves, like shooting from poles, shooting while walking on the wall, or performing a slashing fall onto an enemy; or you can just use those points to enhance bullet damage for a specific weapon, and increase the rate of fire.

Whenever you receive a new "toy", you get to try it out at Rubi's personal desert practice range. Actually, you don't "get to", but rather you are forced to. You have to complete a run against time in order to progress through the game.

Now, this is absolutely fine for fans who replay a mission thousands of times to unlock every possible artwork bonus and find every hidden secret, but for the casual action fan who just wants to experience the story and shoot some bad guys, this can be a nightmare.

The game itself is a bit torn out... it doesn't know what it wants to be exactly. There are big rooms you enter, and enemies pour out until you slice on a special sign near a door to block it, so they can't come in anymore. Most of the times there are four doors.

This part is very action driven, and can be especially rewarding. But then, it is combined with platform elements, and because Rubi's moves are so over the top to make bullet time look good, this part is a living hell. She jumps in a weird way and the distance covered is not real and hard to estimate. Furthermore, it seems like often there are pre-defined places only, and trying to improvise-jump from any other plausible site is not possible.

Better yet, if you feel you can jump up to a ledge and you can use wall run instead, do it. It works better than jumping.

I've mentioned the "obstacle courses" and training you have to do in-between missions, so that leaves me with two more parts: best and worst of course.

I really really loved the car chases and this seemed like a fantastic way to transition through several missions. I can't explain much, but the way it works combined with cool animations and fantastic music just set the mood for great gameplay.

As for the worst, my nightmare was a mission where the plane I am on explodes. After killing tons of bad guys mid air, that have nothing better to do, instead of falling to their death, than to shoot me, the second stage where you have to dodge chunks of plane wreckage while diving to grab a parachute comes.

Needless to say I have retried this mission tens of times till I got it right. There are some moments where you have to learn exactly where the metal junk comes from, because there is no room for error. Combine an awful control and response time to that and you'll know what I mean. And then there are some moments when rubble and loose crates just come randomly... so do you feel lucky today? Do ya'? Punk?!

Finally, you might have also seen some pics from the so-called Rage Mode, used on a couple of intensive action stages throughout the game. We see Rubi shoot a melee attacker from close range, and splashing herself with blood all over her face. Funny enough, because she doesn't get a stain or scratch otherwise during game, no matter what damage she deals or she takes.

So I guess this enrages her, changes the graphic palette to red, black and some white, increases damage and fastens attack time. Both Ribi's "murder spree" style and the wacky cool background music have determined some Kill Bill fans to draw similarities between the two titles, and for a good reason.

{pagebreak}

Conclusion

Rubi Malone is an awesomely cool character, and WET can be a great action game experience at times. But there are some things that don't quite add up. There are many many cool moments to be lived in-game, but when combined, or when transitioning from one to another, they feel less than the sum of their parts. You always get that feeling: "man, I did like that last zone, but what the heck am I doing here now?!".

Gameplay: 74

WET is a recommended experience for all the action fans out there, but awkward acrobatics and character controls make the experience a lot less attractive and a lot more nerve wracking. Not to mention some scenes that look good on paper, but are a disaster in fact - yes airplane scene, I'm talking about you.

Graphics: 73

I think Artificial Mind and Movement was sneaky enough and use their Gaia engine to max out the looks, even if they don't possess the best engine on the market. A little film grain here, some blood there, rage mod with red and black palette here, cool loading videos so you don't get bored there... That's just smart play.

Sound: 91

Eliza Dushku and the other actors as well do a great job in voicing their characters. Rubi curses just like a lifelike assassin. And Brian LeBarton brings music to a whole new level so that people can talk about similarities in genre with Quentin Tarantino movies...