That something is the game's lead character, Rubi Malone. In the Tarantino Lite world of Wet, Rubi is the game's Uma Thurman. But rather than going whole-hog and giving her a billion lines of dialogue about pop-culture minutia, she's usually portrayed as a tough chick of few words. And those words manage to have a good, vulgar impact. For example, after stealing a rare book and freefalling through the burning wreckage of an airplane that she essentially destroyed while fighting in midair for a loose parachute, she returns to her employer and simply mutters "here's your fucking book." A lot of the dialogue is brief and curse-filled in a way that almost seems shocking in spots. Eliza Dushku, who voices Rubi, usually does a great job with the dialogue in those shorter bits. But in the few instances where Rubi rattles on for a bit longer, the spell is broken and the character starts to sound a little hokey. Then there are things like the noise Rubi makes when she dies, which sounds more like the grunt someone would make after discovering they got a parking ticket than the sound of someone getting murdered in some horrible way.
When you're not flipping out and killing people, you're doing a little wall-crawling. None of the time spent jumping from one ledge to another or shimmying sideways on ledges is especially difficult. It's occasionally tricky to figure out where to jump next, but the game is usually really good about automatically positioning the camera in a way that makes it really obvious. There are also a couple of sequences where you ride around on the tops of fast-moving cars, which combine basic aiming and shooting with some occasional quick time events. Some levels are also done in "rage mode," which isn't really a mode at all. It's mostly just a visual change that makes the entire world red, makes blood white, and generally makes the game look a bit like Killer7. Like most of the other things in Wet, it's cool the first time you see it, but not very cool at all the second time it pops up. The game also takes time out of the action to force you through some really boring challenge levels, where you have to run and jump through hoops as quickly as possible. They feel really out of place.
The story of double-crosses and revenge feels pretty inconsequential over the course of Wet, but it manages to get the game's sharp dialogue across, so it certainly has its place. But that's probably the best thing that can be said about Wet, because the rest of its interesting moments get driven into the ground through repetition over the course of its 12 chapters. It's certainly not all bad, but more variety combined with its razor-sharp lead character could have resulted in a much stronger final product.
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