Wetlands (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
222A playthrough of New World Computing's 1995 FMV rail shooter for PCs running Dos, Wetlands.
Played through on the "wet" (medium) difficulty level.
Wetlands is a game that I remember always wanting to play after seeing the full page ads that appeared in magazines. The graphics looked super-slick, and it seemed like a really high quality version of some of the FMV games that I loved on the Sega CD. I could never find a copy, though, so I never played it until way later.
When I finally did, I was glad to find that I wasn't wrong on, on either count, with what I imagined Wetlands to be. It is a rail-shooter, with enemies and other things to be destroyed layered as sprites over top of pre-rendered CG video backdrops. It's a method that was used quite often in the mid 90s to varying levels of success in nearly every genre.
Wetlands is most directly comparable to games like Neo Hunter, Virtua Cop, Chaos Control, and Sewer Shark. It was actually developed by the same team that did Soldier Boyz a couple of years later, a playthrough of which you can find in my PC and Interactive movie playlists if you wish to see it. Don't let that worry you, though. This one is a far better game than Soldier Boyz ever dreamt of being.
Each of the action stages gives you control of a crosshair (via mouse or joystick - the mouse is definitely the way to go!) that you move over the video, clicking to shoot at anything that poses a threat (as well as the occasion switch or brightly colored square panel). There isn't much to the gameplay, but it's certainly fast and fairly demanding. You also have to occasionally chose which branching path to take at the rare forks in the faster moving stages, but there isn't much that will tax your mind here. I certainly didn't mind - an itchy trigger finger needs little more than a target to fire at. There is actually one stage (8th or 9th?) where you must take direct control of a probe to attack remotely, but it only lasts a couple minutes before you back in the thick of the first-person action.
That one wayward bit of gameplay is easily the weakest part of the game, though, since the mouse controls go from perfect to utter horrendous, and you'll die over and over again until you realize that that mission practically requires a joystick - trying to use the mouse on that mission is nothing but an exercise in frustration and futility. Just a heads up to anyone that is interested in playing!
Anyways, the biggest draw to this game is definitely its presentation. Whereas most of these types of games use live actors, this one uses hand-drawn animation for all of its characters. It looks awesome, straight up. The characters fit in quite well with the CG environments (as do the enemies - far better than usual per the genre), are fluid in their animation (those explosions and some of the death animations are sweet!), and the style really helps to sell the story far better the "realism" provided by poorly costumed third-rate actors flailing around on camera in similar games with live-captured FMV clips. The graphics reminded me quite a bit of LucasArts mid-90s animation style (like that seen in Full Throttle and The Dig). While it's not as well done as it was in those classics, it certainly holds its own, and does a good job of framing the fairly extreme violence seen in a few spots. The quality of the FMV is also surprisingly good, especially when you consider that it runs in VGA and occupies a single CD.
The story itself is quite well done, being far less generic than you might expect, and the soundtrack is great, even if it is drowned out pretty effectively by all of the gun and explosion sounds.
I had a lot of fun with this one, and if you like mindless, arcade-style action with gratuitous use of FMV, you probably will too.
Finally, a friendly warning: I wouldn't necessarily recommend watching this with younger kiddies around unless you've previewed it first. Even though it's a cartoon, it doesn't shy away from showing clear shots of people getting shot clean-through as blood flies everywhere.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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