Lara Croft had better watch her back. (WET PREVIEW 360)

Lara Croft had better watch her back. A new video game action heroine’s coming to town.

Nothing has defined the modern-day action genre more than Hong Kong cinema. The Matrix and Kill Bill, with their over the top action and flying stunts, aka “wire fu,” were arguably just big budget copies of films Hong Kong directors like John Woo and Tsui Hark had been creating for years.

Games have also tried borrowing from Hong Kong cinema, and with few exceptions, usually yield lukewarm results. Now Wet, starring a bodacious new female action star, looks to fill in the gaps with another stab at bringing HK-style action to the video game arena.

Rubi, the star of this third-person action game, solves problems with a gun and a smile.

This third-person action game stars the bodacious Rubi, a “problem solver.” Got a problem? If the price is right, she’ll pack up her weapons and make sure it’s fixed — for good.

Rubi manages to pull that off using acrobatics — wall climbing, knee slides, shimmying across ledges like a Cirque du Soliel performer – firing her twin pistols along the way.

In a brief demo of the game, Rubi emptied her guns into enemies while running up a wall and pulling a backflip over her target. In another scene, she takes out a circle of jerks by sliding into a room, clearing a path by shooting in front of her, to the sides and then bending over backwards to finish off the final foes.

Rubi also carries a sword, and while the demo didn’t show off any kind of thrust and parry action, in one segment, she jumped high into the air and sent the sword plunging into an target’s chest as a dramatic finishing move.

Wet will draw comparisons to the Tomb Raider series, if only due to the fact that it stars a sexy female with dual pistols. The game’s creators say that the title ‘Wet’ means “whatever you want it to mean,” but they say it alludes to “wet works,” Cold-War-era lingo that describes a government-sanctioned assassination.

With only a short demo, plus the so-so reception of other Hong-Kong-style action games, it’s best to reserve judgment on Wet for now. Though we’d be lying to say that the game’s highly stylized nods to film directors like Woo, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez make us eager to get our hands wet with a full-on demo of the game.