WET

Along with another face button for her katana, the idea is to combine the lot to move fluidly around environments dancing and floating between gunplay, swordplay and Lara Croft antics. There's also a combo meter and multiplier icons scattered about for further encouragement, with higher scores doled out for chaining kills before landing. In between the main sections, Rubi also goes through 'Rage' areas, where the combo meter becomes a kill counter similar to The Club, and the action is sped up - all the wall textures swapped out for blood red and bad guys reduced to Killer 7 cartoons.

The demo culminates in a QTE-driven highway shootout, which sees Rubi leaping between the rooftops of cars, trucks and lorries as you match A and X button prompts (or decelerating fatally along the tarmac as you don't), all the while you clamp the right trigger and wave the right stick around to dispatch enemies firing out of car windows. Eventually Rubi catches up with the Asian gentleman and relieves him of the goods, and his driver of his brains, before she's subjected to a few purple words by the bad guy, who's spilled out onto the floor in a puddle of petrol. Knocking an unlit cigarette out of his mouth, she tosses him a light anyway. Whoomph. Fade to black.

It's an interesting mix, although playing through it raises some concerns. There's a decent amount of flexibility in the combat, but it feels disjointed - particularly in the transition from gunplay to swordplay - while the sample sections are full of identikit enemies who do little to defend themselves, but whose hit-response is almost non-existent, so the twin pistols lack punch. As for the highway chase, which ends on the Golden Gate, it's heavily scripted, and one enemy leaning out of a car with a gun is much the same as the next 15.

Then again, it's a demo, and Bethesda assures us that higher difficulty levels will make more of the bad guys (driving Rubi to drink in the process - she tops up her health with whiskey she finds lying around). And, with apologies to Duppy Demetrius, the characters and dialogue are uniformly cheesy, and A2M isn't taking itself too seriously, sprinkling collectable clapping-cymbal-monkeys around the levels for no obvious reason. The voice acting shouldn't be terrible either, with Elisha Dushku on Rubi duties, and Malcolm McDowell and Alan Cumming also attached, while later levels will introduce different weapons and a visual filter for locating platforming points, among other things. There will also be a separate challenge mode.

The world certainly has enough third-person action-adventures already, and WET doesn't do a lot to distinguish it from other games in the genre. But after half an hour as Rubi Malone, at this stage it's an accessible, unselfconscious knockabout, and with a bit more polish to the combat the results should be nothing to sneer at.