Yeah, look, we really didn’t want to play Stranglehold again. Whatever you think about Midway’s John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat shoot-’em-up, you have to admit that after a few levels of running up stairs and diving about shooting it got old very quickly. And even though Patrick Fortier, the creative director at Artificial Mind And Movement, has said that, “We’ve worked really hard to make Wet different from any other action game available,” you have to wonder where he was two years ago when all the ‘Woah, this Stranglehold’s a bit shit’ reviews were coming out.

The gameplay is near identical, bar the fact Chow Yun-Fat could run up banisters and Wet’s heroine, Ruby, has a sword as a back-up close-quarters attack. But all the rest of the diving, sliding and leaping about feels just far too familiar to anyone who has ever played Stranglehold or even Max Payne. Sure, now you’re not limited in your diving about and every time you start shooting during a leap everything slows down so you can whirl your targeting reticule around and try to get a few headshots in before you hit the ground.

You do get rewarded for all your leaping about and sliding on the floor and earning style points enables you to unlock more moves for Ruby. But this throws up one of the first irritants. On the loading screens, which go on for annoyingly long times, you’re given hints indicating that Ruby can use her sword while sliding around on her knees or that you can shoot people while sliding down a wire. Only you can’t. You try it and nothing happens. Then you get to the upgrade screen and you find out you have to buy all these moves before Ruby gains any of these, what appear to be, normal standard moves. Then comes the toss-up of buying moves or increasing the power of your weapons.

After about the second level, after you’ve been through a somewhat-interesting highway chase with Ruby jumping from car to car at the touch of a button, you unlock a shotgun, but it’s possible to power-up Ruby’s pistols to make them more powerful than said shotgun. The pistols have infinite ammo while the shotgun requires you to pick up ammo from smashed crates, so it’s easy to see which power-ups are actually useful.

By now there’s a good chance you’ve played the demo, so whatever reservations you’ve had about that are only going to be expanded upon throughout the rest of the game. The repetitiveness never goes away. The groaning sigh that emanates from your mouth every time you come across a room with enemy spawn points only gets louder. And your eyes start to water with every flicker of the Grindhouse filter until you feel a bit ill. Thankfully you can turn that off in the options – we found this out after a couple of levels and it actually makes the game look slightly better because you’re not wondering what’s wrong with your television.

The Grindhouse angle is unique, but there might be a reason why Wet is the only game to have tried to jump on this three-wheeled bandwagon. And that’s because Grindhouse is a rubbish genre. It didn’t work with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ‘project’ because no one wanted to watch two shitty films back to back. But here it’s used not just in the filter you should immediately turn off but also in the sections, which are always scripted, where Ruby shoots someone and the resulting blood explosion covers her face.

… continued