Brawndo
09-26-2009, 11:15 PM
I don't think I've seen anything about this game here, so I figure a lot of people probably did what I did and dismiss based on the title and the picture of the busty gal with a sword and two guns on the cover as some sort of crappy fanservicey generic shooter.
On impulse, I DL'ed the demo from Xbox Live and WOW. This game is hugely fun.
The title is short for Wetworks, by the way.
Somebody set out to make a 70's grindhouse-cinema style game and succeeded admirably. There's even a scratchy film-grain effect (which I'm given to understand can be turned off if you don't like it). The soundtrack is all original, grimy surf-rock type music that is fantastic and matches the action perfectly.
You're Rubi (voiced by Eliza Dushku), some kind of assassin for hire whose job gets interrupted apparently, in the opening cinematic. From there you go into an in-combat tutorial where they show you each of your moves by pausing the action, and then give you a couple of enemies to try it out on.
You can jump, slide on your knees, wallrun, and various combinations and permutations of those things, and if you pull the trigger while doing any of those, bullet time kicks in and you can mow down enemies in midair in slow-mo. It's way funner than it sounds.
You mow through some goons as you travel through the demo level learning about your abilities, then it corners you in an enclosed area with three enemy spawn points (doors they come in through), where the goal is to disable the spawn points and then kill the remaining enemies. Here you get to sandbox around trying out different moves and combos, and by god it's fun. Your health regen in these sections is determined by your combo score.
After you get through that, you get a taste of Rubi Vision, which is activated somehow in the game proper (here in the demo, they activate if for you) where you start seeing red, literally. The enemies all look like characters out of Sin City, but everything else is just red, so they stand out and I'm not sure what's mechanically different but I know I mowed down a lot of them.
Then the bad guy starts getting away by car in a cutscene, and the camera pulls back to reveal you, clinging to the side of a passing truck. Here you get to chase the bad guys by jumping from one car's roof to another while they shoot at you and you get to shoot them in return. There's a lot of quick time events here, but even during those you get to keep shooting.
I had a total blast with this demo, so much so that I just had to post about it. The design and overall aesthetic just hits all the right buttons for me. It's definitely inspired by 70's grindhouse action movies, but probably even more so by their recent modern homages by Tarantino and Rodriguez. I'll definitely be picking up this game and I'm wondering if anyone else here played the demo and what your thoughts were.
On impulse, I DL'ed the demo from Xbox Live and WOW. This game is hugely fun.
The title is short for Wetworks, by the way.
Somebody set out to make a 70's grindhouse-cinema style game and succeeded admirably. There's even a scratchy film-grain effect (which I'm given to understand can be turned off if you don't like it). The soundtrack is all original, grimy surf-rock type music that is fantastic and matches the action perfectly.
You're Rubi (voiced by Eliza Dushku), some kind of assassin for hire whose job gets interrupted apparently, in the opening cinematic. From there you go into an in-combat tutorial where they show you each of your moves by pausing the action, and then give you a couple of enemies to try it out on.
You can jump, slide on your knees, wallrun, and various combinations and permutations of those things, and if you pull the trigger while doing any of those, bullet time kicks in and you can mow down enemies in midair in slow-mo. It's way funner than it sounds.
You mow through some goons as you travel through the demo level learning about your abilities, then it corners you in an enclosed area with three enemy spawn points (doors they come in through), where the goal is to disable the spawn points and then kill the remaining enemies. Here you get to sandbox around trying out different moves and combos, and by god it's fun. Your health regen in these sections is determined by your combo score.
After you get through that, you get a taste of Rubi Vision, which is activated somehow in the game proper (here in the demo, they activate if for you) where you start seeing red, literally. The enemies all look like characters out of Sin City, but everything else is just red, so they stand out and I'm not sure what's mechanically different but I know I mowed down a lot of them.
Then the bad guy starts getting away by car in a cutscene, and the camera pulls back to reveal you, clinging to the side of a passing truck. Here you get to chase the bad guys by jumping from one car's roof to another while they shoot at you and you get to shoot them in return. There's a lot of quick time events here, but even during those you get to keep shooting.
I had a total blast with this demo, so much so that I just had to post about it. The design and overall aesthetic just hits all the right buttons for me. It's definitely inspired by 70's grindhouse action movies, but probably even more so by their recent modern homages by Tarantino and Rodriguez. I'll definitely be picking up this game and I'm wondering if anyone else here played the demo and what your thoughts were.