Bethesda's Wet is a video game that's easy to fall for

Wet (Bethesda; PS3, Xbox 360; rated mature)

I fell in love with this game the first moment I laid eyes on it.

Its star is the beautiful and deadly Rubi Malone, voiced by Eliza Dushku. Rubi is Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, Chow Yun-Fat’s Tequila, Uma Thurman’s Bride. Rubi is, well, Rubi—an extreme and violent wetworks specialist, which is a sanitized way of saying she kills people for a living.

This game, from Montreal developer Artificial Mind and Movement, owes a debt to the filmmakers who brought those characters to life. It’s got the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, the craziness of John Woo’s Hong Kong gangster flicks, and the cool of Quentin Tarantino’s assemblage.

Rubi’s story is one of excess and stylized violence. It’s intentionally over the top. Structurally, it’s a simple game. Rubi moves from one carefully designed set to another, where she has to eliminate the enemies with as much style as possible. Run up a wall and backflip off, slide under tables, leap around corners, target bad guys everywhere.

There are also collectible elements to encourage exploration, but the developers really shouldn’t have bothered. We’re not playing Wet to find cymbal-bashing monkeys. We’re playing it to get Rubi dripping with the blood of those who stood in her way.

Armed with two pistols and a katana, Rubi heals by taking a swig of whiskey. When she fails to land a jump she doesn’t die, but the movie we’re—literally—playing rewinds a few seconds so she can try again. If she goes down in a hail of bullets during the major fight sequences, the screen bubbles as if the projector lamp has melted the celluloid film.

Now, I don’t want to hear any talk about how Wet gets a bit repetitive. Or how the controls are a little wonky, and it’s more than a little frustrating when Rubi falls off a balcony because she jumped instead of hanging off the railing.

Nobody’s perfect, after all.

With me and Wet, it was love at first sight. I’m glad that now we’re living together, the magic is still there.