WET [X360]

What's better than a kick-ass, take-numbers action hero, who is as comfortable with a pair of pistols as they are with a samurai sword? After witnessing a hands-off unveiling of Sierra's newest star, the answer is simple. Give the action hero the looks of Angelina Jolie and Uma Thurman combined, and set it all in a Tarantino-esque mixture of Hong Kong and Mexican action. The result is WET, a sexy new title from Sierra.

The only way to truly appreciate the curves of the game's protagonist, a tough little minx by the name of Rubi, is to bring the camera out to a third person perspective, hence the game's third person action nature. From this viewpoint it's hard to not to admire her shapely figure and rather sexy butt-swingin' swagger. Rubi is a "problem solver", happy to take care of all of your mercenary needs for a big enough pile of greenbacks. Be it theft, assassinations and even the protection of VIPs, Rubi has the skills to earn the bills.

Our presentation kicks off with a pre-rendered introduction cinematic, and it's immediately obvious the influence that Tarantino and Rodriguez have had on this game's art style. Rubi lazes in bathtub in a trailer somewhere in South America, her naughty-bits luckily covered by some strategically placed bath water. It merges into a flashback scene, with Rubi whuppin' seven shades of ass, showing off her ability to wield a sword just as capably as a heavy firearms. Asian gangsters fall to the ground left and right, amidst enough blood to make Kill Bill's infamous House of Blue Leaves club scene (the one that played out in black and white) seem like a chick flick.

Once the pre-rendered clip flickers to an end (all kinds of retro film filters have been applied to the video, giving it the budget Super-8 film grain look that is oh-so-cool these days), it's time to see what Rubi looks like in the flesh. A special demo level is loaded up on the 360 debug machine, giving Rubi the chance to strut her stuff in a texture-less, grey, blocky environment, avoiding the frame-rate issues that would normally affect a game so early in its development (the code we're looking at is around 10% feature complete, so there's still a long way to go).

It's here that we see the other styles that Rubi has borrowed from. As she back-flips off walls, slides backwards down ladders with both guns blazing and hops from ledge to ledge, it'd be easy to classify her as the Prince of Persia, but with the body of a goddess. She's easily as acrobatically endowed as our beloved Prince, but with a few more tricks up her sleeve. Thanks to the use of split animations, where the upper and lower portions of her body are separately animated, Rubi can whip out the boom sticks during any manoeuvre. Whether she's climbing a ladder, sliding under a small gap or doing cartwheels over tables, she's never truly vulnerable, always ready to squeeze a few rounds into anything that stands in her way.