Welcome back, food critics and food lovers alike, to our hallowed Kitchen Stadium.  As you well know, we’ve come to the final portion of our program, tasting and judgment.  The Iron Chef has already wowed the chairman and his guests with his five-course meal, and now it’s time for our challenger, Bethesda, to see if he can compete.  The challenger has informed us that he’ll be serving five courses of Wet today, so we’ll see if he can impress us with his culinary prowess.

So without further ado, bon appetit!

First Course: The Presentation

Our challenger today has brought us a retro-flavored dish, going for the 70′s “grindhouse” styling that has been popularized by recent films.  Our heroine, Rubi, looks like someone straight out of a 70′s action exploitation film, with feathered hair and a bad attitude.  The game keeps with this theme by working in some decidedly old-school camera angles, characters, and dialogue; some for the better, and some for the (much, much) worse.  In addition, the entire game has a “scratched, old film” filter placed over it, which works really well in making the player feel like they’re acting out an old action film.  This filter, it must be noted, also contains some fake “pops and crackles,” the repetition of which gave this commentator a headache on more than one occasion.

Second Course: The Gameplay

The challenger has come out swinging with this one, meshing several different styles of gameplay into one well-conceived dish.  The game primarily focuses on an over-the shoulder action style with a lot of platforming elements -  think Tomb Raider meets Prince of Persia… with guns.  As you progress through the game, you earn “style points” by killing Rubi’s enemies in interesting ways, such as diving and sliding over and under obstacles.  Using these style points between levels can upgrade Rubi’s abilities, giving her the ability to shoot while running off walls, swinging on poles, or even using the enemies themselves as jump-off points to set up a well-timed shotgun blast or sword strike.  Rubi’s weapons can be upgraded as well, but it must be noted that while you can upgrade Rubi’s sub-weapons (she acquires a shotgun, uzis, and a crossbow along the way), I never paid much attention to them as the pistols are more than enough to get the job done (at least on the default difficulty levels).  Unless you’re looking to get the achievements for those sub-weapons, there’s really never an incentive to use them.

While most of the action is based around these platforming levels, the game will occasionally shift to “driving” levels, which effectively turn the game into a rail shooter, having you gun down enemies while Rubi is leaping from car to car.  This game is, of course, not without Quick Time Events, and this is where they make their appearance for the most part.  Pressing the right buttons with the right timing will have Rubi running along the sides of vans, stabbing gunmen through the roofs of their cars, and leaping gracefully from car to car in pursuit of her target.

One other thing to mention is that, occasionally, Rubi will go through a door and into a cinematic wherein an enemy is running toward her; it she shoots him, she gets blood all over her face.  Instantly alarms go off, and the entire screen gets painted in blood red, white, and black.  The band kicks into high gear, and Rubi enters “Rage Mode.”  These sequences are a lot of fun, as Rubi’s speed and damage go up, while the enemy’s hit points go down.  The idea here is to get as many enemies as you can in a chain to maximize the number of style points awarded for the sequence.  This shift in the pace of the action breaks up the other platforming sequences nicely.

Third Course: The Sound

For our third course, our challenger has decided to split the dish into two separate pieces: the in-game sound and the game music.  It’s a good thing he did, too, since one part of the dish is much better than the other.  The in-game music is some of the best that this commentator has seen in a while, with numerous tracks that sound like they’re straight out of a grindhouse film.  The game will constantly have your speakers pumping with rockabilly-style music that will get your blood pumping through any fight sequence.  As a nice added touch, a lot of the time the music will actually fit the situation lyrically;  hearing “controoool….my baby’s lost control” during one of the “Rubi Rage” sequences definitely put a smile on on this jaded commentator’s face.

Unfortunately, the other side of the plate doesn’t fare as well.  In sequences where the music is subdued, or there is no music at all, all you can hear is Rubi’s gunfire.  When using a sub-weapon, it isn’t so bad, but when using her main weapon, the dueling pistols, the repetitive “bang bang bang bang” of the twin six-shooters can get monotonous at best, and downright maddening at the worst.  Given that Rubi will spend a good half the game in slow motion, shooting her twin pistols over and over, it can get not only annoying to the person playing, but ten times as annoying to anyone watching, and a hundred times as annoying to someone in the next room.  More than once this humble commentator was forced to step away from this dish because the noise it was generating was driving his significant other into insanity.

The voice acting is also a mixed bag.  While the voice acting by Malcolm McDowell and Eliza Dushku (as Rubi) are serviceable, they never really sound like they’re getting into their roles.  This could be entirely due to the fact that they aren’t given much to work with.  I’d estimate that a full 80% of Rubi’s lines are either swearing, or asking where other people are.  It was like watching “The Room”, only instead of greeting people, Rubi was trying to find them.  Another irritating point was that it seemed like the in-level sounds were either not playing at the correct times, or were strangely delayed.  I would kill an enemy with my sword, and a full 15-20 seconds later, Rubi would exclaim “Ha!  Got you!” to the empty hallway that I was now standing in.

Fourth Course: The Story

It’s intriguing that the challenger has decided to serve such a light course at this point in the meal.  Was this his intention, or was it simply through omission or poor judgment that this course turned out so anemic?  While meals of this type typically aren’t strong in this course, it’s sad to see that while effort was put forth to deliver a solid story, the resultant narrative comes across as a total mess.  The story jumps from place to place, with little to no background or reason tying scenes together outside of Rubi finding out that she needs to “go talk to” (read: talk to and then murder) a certain person, and then doing so.  Why the members of this criminal organization are spread so far around the world makes no sense, outside of the fact that it gives Rubi more interesting venues in which to mass-murder enemies.  She’ll go from medieval castles, to the streets of Hong Kong, to Chinese opera houses, all for the sake of “getting paid,” or “getting revenge,” or “taking the badguy out.”  While this is the easiest course of the meal in which to chalk poor design choices up to “artistic indulgence,” or “faithfulness to the grindhouse-era aesthetic”, the final dish still really isn’t excusable given the effort that was apparently put into it.

Fifth Course: The Ending

Now this is an interesting development;  I’m not entirely sure what the challenger was thinking here…  It appears that, while he had a very solid meal up to this point, he has skimped on the desert entirely.  While our critics were with him through solid presentation and gameplay courses, and followed him all the way up to the dessert, it appears that the reward is just a Quick Time Event followed by a credits roll.  Why would he chose to do this?  He loaded his meal with lots of great gameplay elements, had our critics earning style points throughout, and building up Rubi until she was a formidable fighting machine.  It’s like he almost intended this desert to be taken a la carte… it seems tacked on to the end of the meal, and almost had nothing to do with the rest of it.  If we were spending all this time building up Rubi, why was there no actual fight for her to use all those skills in at the end?  Our hero bravely faces down Tarantula, only to have it go to cut-scene mode and have the game act out the ending for us.  It takes the critic right out of the meal, and really leaves a sour taste on their pallets, tainting their memory of the rest of the meal.  To have an ending like this is really, really disappointing after a solid build-up.

The Verdict:

All in all, our challenger put together a very solid meal today.  The presentation and gameplay courses sat very well with our panel of judges, as did (half of) the sound plate.  Unfortunately, the meal was soured a bit by a weak story, and ultimately the dessert course left a bad taste in their mouths.  They seem to have enjoyed the dinner up to the finale, but ultimately walked away disappointed.  And the winner is…..

Mario Batali, by a score of 52 to 48!