Gaming is a highly competitive industry, possibly more so than ever before. With budgets in the tens of millions and a market more crowded than downtown Bangladesh, it's getting harder and harder for a game to get noticed, let alone picked up and purchased. And while the gaming demographic has shifted from the teenage boy who only wants to pop pimples and caps in asses, young men still make up a pretty hefty part of the market. So really, calling a game "WET” and sticking a hot chick with a gun and a sword on the front pretty much seems like a no brainer...kind of surprising nobody did it sooner, actually.

At this point I feel like I need to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and disabuse you of any impure thoughts: the only time a woman gets wet in this game is if she falls into the ocean. Good, now we've cleared that up, the rest of us can continue with the review.

The suggestive title here is actually an abbreviation of "wetwork”, a charming euphemism used by agency spooks and army doublespeakers to describe operations that involve the shedding of blood. Why the shortening must be in capitals, I don't really know, and why it applies to Rubi Malone, who is neither a spook nor a soldier, is also a mystery. Once you start playing WET though, the chances are you probably won't care, either.

The basic premise of WET is that you're an amoral chick who is startlingly efficient at slaughter, who has to go around doing exactly that. The story involves a group of hard men, a briefcase containing a human organ, a double-cross or two, being tied up and a midget...and if you read this and still have impure thoughts, you really ought to do something about that...and no, not that!

Anyway let's be honest, just like porno, nobody really cares about the storyline here. And really, WET is pornography, just with violence instead of sex. What's more, it's the low-budget, no-frills sort of porn, the kind that even more makeup and better lighting can't make look classy. Which is okay...if you're into that kind of thing. WET is about nothing else but massacring hordes of enemies in stylish slow-motion, chaining the kills together into combos to earn more points and unlock more ways to dish out the death. It's about as simple as modern gaming gets, and if that floats your boat, you'll probably want to dive headfirst into WET's ocean.

Like Stranglehold, the hook in WET is that you dispatch your opponents primarily in slow motion. But where Stranglehold cribbed from John Woo's cinematic style and had you sliding on dining carts and dropping air-conditioners onto your foes, WET pretty much just involves diving, sliding or the occasional wall-run to get the juices flowing. WET adds a guns-akimbo feature that lets Rubi automatically target an enemy with one gun while you handle another, but beyond this there's not a whole lot going on. You earn points for every kill, with more points being issued for a slow-mo kill or a headshot and things like that. Ironically, you'll be penalised slightly for repetitive behaviour, so if you just keep repeat-diving for example, you'll earn less than if you mix that up with the occasional slide.

Unlike The Club, WET doesn't really embrace these arcade sensibilities as much as it should, because there's definitely a market for people chasing the longest combos or shortest run-times. But WET doesn't even have Leaderboard support, which is a real oversight, and means the only incentive for even bothering with combos is to get points to unlock new abilities or improve your weapons.

Right now, WET probably doesn't sound that exciting, and that's partially true, but the game isn't a complete misfire. Because the only thing it does emulate with any real success is a Tarantino-style aesthetic – think one part Grindhouse and one part Kill Bill. It's like an old 70s exploitation flick, complete with the over-the-top gore, freakish characters and even a retro film-grain effect (which can be turned off if it irritates you, thankfully). Sadly it lacks the high calibre plot and dialogue you'd expect from Tarantino, but in terms of look and feel, WET does a pretty solid job of feeling like a dodgy movie you'd watch at 3am.

The backhand compliment is intentional, because WET really just does feel cheap and a bit dodgy. Beneath the faux film grain and 70s aesthetic lies a basic engine that does a pretty weak job visually if you stop for long enough to notice it. The framerate is solid, but the camera is a pain, and while some of the locations look pretty good, there's others where you'd be forgiven for thinking it was 2006 and you'd fired up Red Steel on the Wii. The one exception to this is Rubi's rage mode, where the whole thing turns into a really angry comic book, all blacks and whites and lots of red, with a super-powered silhouette Rubi dispatching legions of foes who explode in puffs of black dust. These few levels are the only real standout in WET, and are almost worth the price of admission alone.

In fact speaking of buying things, if you could buy the soundtrack to WET, it'd be a much better investment than the game itself. The frenetic rockabilly tunes never fail to make the game feel more exciting than it actually is, even if the music can be as repetitive as the gamplay when you're stuck in a certain level for too long. What's more surprising is that WET boasts a voice cast that includes Malcom McDowell and Alan Cumming; talents the game entirely squanders with a half dozen lines of dialogue between them.

WET will only take you a few hours to finish – 3 to 8 depending on your skill and the chosen difficulty – and with no multiplayer there isn't a whole lot to bring you back. Completing the game will unlock a new difficulty as well as "golden bullet” mode, in which most enemies die with one shot but Rubi is also much more vulnerable. Additionally there is a points challenge mode which gives you a high score to beat on each level, which again makes you wonder why there's no Leaderboard support in the game. Besides a few standalone challenges though, there's really nothing else here to get you wet. There, I made the damn dirty joke finally!