Wet

Wet is a Tarantino fan's (ahem) wet dream: trashy, derivative and ultra violent, filled with dialogue that's little more than a series of quips and action setpieces held together by the flimsiest of plots. Similarly, it's also a hell of a lot of fun.

You play as Rubi, an implausibly-athletic gun-for-hire voiced by Eliza Dushku, who is double-crossed by a crime syndicate and seeks revenge. Yes, the plot's about that paper-thin, and the game doesn't really linger too long on the whys and wherefores, letting Rubi get on with the much more urgent task of fucking shit up. In fact, where other games would have an exposition-heavy cinematic cut scene, Wet fakes a film sprocket tear and resumes later in the story, once the action begins again. While the gameplay is pretty solid hack-and-slash-shoot ultra-combat, it's the design that turns it from a decent weekend's play to a classic-in-waiting: no cliché, B-movie trope or fake film effect is spared to make Wet look and feel like an interactive pulp drive-in flick from the early 70s, and it's that attention to detail that allows you to overlook the fact that every level is essentially the same (jump Rubi from balcony to overhang to fire escape until she ends up in a room of goons just begging to be killed as acrobatically as possible).

The punkabilly soundtrack and drive-in-movie ad loading screens perfectly complement the action on-screen, and if the odd jump mechanic is unnecessarily fiddly, that can be easily forgiven once you blast half a dozen gunmen in one slow-motion leap. Unlike the genre it's lovingly parodying, Wet is far from B-grade.

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