Hydrophobia Review

Hydrophobia. It’s been a long wait, and the leading title of “Game Feast” is finally upon us. Does this thrilling boat cruise live up to the hype? Keep reading…

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If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll tell you what the game is about. You play the role of Kate, a systems engineer aboard the Queen of the World cruise ship. When the ship is taken over and badly damaged by a group known as the Neo Malthusians, Kate must enlist the help of her friend and boss, Scoot, to escape to safety.  The game has bragged about its incredible water physics and intense combat for months now.

Now, I’ve played the game, or at least most of it, and I’ll explain that a little further on, so let’s talk about the gameplay of Hydrophobia.  For those wanting the short version: Majority of the time, it’s more frustrating than fun. The game starts with Kate exploring her apartment on board, then you hear some loud bangs, flooding water, and you’ll be somewhere below deck without a weapon. You’ll have an item known as your “Mavi” which acts as a tool to locate hidden ciphers on the walls of the ship, as well as “documents” which acts as the games’ collectibles. Get used to bringing it up with the D-Pad as you’ll need to do this often.

The gameplay uses a relatively simple formula – You have to get through specific doors by finding a “Frequency Key” and a “Cipher”. Frequency Keys may be found lying on a desk, or on a green-flashing body later on in the game. Ciphers will require the use of the Mavi though. Using it, you can slowly walk around areas, scanning the floors, walls, and ceilings. Doing this will allow you to see yellow marker arrows to guide you towards a hidden cipher somewhere on a wall. At times, you’ll need to do some leg work to access seemingly unreachable areas to find some ciphers. When you find them, record them using “X”, and then you should be able to decode and access the specified doors. It doesn’t sound complicated, but too often you’ll have to do these tasks without any guidance. Travelling from point A to point B will involve a mix of walking, climbing, shooting windows, and of course, swimming.  The in-game map offers basic help at times, and it can be viewed in 2D or 3D, and while it may show you where your objective lies – accessing that area can prove to be a frustrating experience. This is most notable in the lengthy dive portions, where you can easily drown.

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A little further in, the game introduces your weapon – a sonic pistol, and of course, enemies to test it out on. You would expect the game to become more enjoyable at this point, and while this added some cool aspects,  the combat feels rather out-dated and clunky. With your initial ammo, you can only knock over enemies, though three fully-charged rounds will kill an enemy. To help you out, and give you some self satisfaction, you can shoot rounds at explosive barrel, electrical wires, or gas canisters to create chain effects to take out one or more enemies.  You can also drown enemies by using the sonic pistol to keep enemies under water long enough.  Later in the game, you’ll get semi-auto rounds, explosive gel rounds, and more. The variety is welcome, but you won’t really be required to use it often, and ammo is rather scarce.

I did encounter various issues with the responsiveness of controls, and at times it wouldn’t immediately toggle cover, or it would not jump when I wanted to – this often resulted in my death from enemy fire. Fall damage also seemed inconsistent where a 20 foot drop into water left me with zero damage, yet a 4-5 foot fall into water would have my screen glowing red which indicates you’re near death and must let your health regenerate. While I seemed to always end up progressing, even if I hit a few snags, I felt frustrated playing it. In a sense, Hydrophobia is partially a puzzle game so you can’t expect it to ‘flow’ in a continuously smooth motion, and you’ll have times when you stand around attempting to figure out what’s next.

When mentioning earlier that I hadn’t completed the game – there’s a reason for that. First, let me make a quick note on the checkpoint system  – it’s unforgiving. Checkpoints are often slightly far from one another, and you may find yourself going the wrong way to collect a ‘document’ then back the other way for the story – only to die, and have to repeat that process. I can overlook that because while it may be an annoyance, it doesn’t break the game. However, when I finished playing Act 2, I decided to save the final act for the next day, and I let the cinematic run its course, then properly quit the game. The next day, I attempted to continue from the last checkpoint – but instead of being in the area I left off at, I was back in the water at the end of Act 2 with an objective. That objective was already completed on the previous playtime, and the game would not allow me to redo it, nor would it unlock the door required to get back to Act 3. Upon quitting to the main menu, I attempted to load directly into that Act, and the same issue occurred. This leaves me at a point where I appear to be, well, dead in the water. I have the option to restart Act 2, and replay 2-4 hours of the game, but that appears to be my only option. Quality Assurance testers should have found an issue like this, and while I’ve notified the developer through their Twitter account, I remain in an extremely frustrating situation.

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Visual and technical presentation of Hydrophobia offers a mix of quality as well. The water effects look really good, but not amazing. The physics may seem unrealistic at times, but it’s really entertaining to shoot out a window and see the water flow from room to room. Other fun times can be triggered with explosive barrels or simply charged sonic blasts. You can create crushing waves to topple Kate or her enemies over, and send various pieces of debris floating through the narrow hallways. When you take a closer look at the environments visuals though, the textures seem blotchy at times, or simply uninspired. It doesn’t look ugly, but it’s not as crisp and shiny as it has appeared in video footage of the game. A fellow reviewer and friend from another site made a valid point by saying: “It’s a good game… 5 years ago.” He’s exactly right – and as we all know, Hydrophobia has suffered numerous delays for various reasons. Had this game come out five years ago, we’d have been extremely impressed by the technology. But, the fact is we’ve seen some very impressive LIVE Arcade titles in recent years, and Hydrophobia feels like an old game that should have been released years ago.

In terms of the sounds of Hydrophobia, the background tracks feel uninspired and the voice acting just isn’t up to par with other titles in the XBLA library. Scoot speaks with a heavy Scottish accent, and thankfully the game supports subtitles, otherwise I’d miss ‘alf the stuff he says. The voice doesn’t match his character appearance whatsoever, and it just doesn’t fit well. The quality of the voice acting isn’t terrible, but it’s not great by any means either. It’s just… included in the game.

It would seem “Game Feast” has begun with a rough start. While the review may be negative, Hydrophobia isn’t necessarily a terrible game. It does have too many bugs, but that can be fixed. It’s just behind its time, and it can’t keep up with the flow. For 1200 :MSPoints: you can definitely get a much higher quality title, but it may be worth picking up during a Deal of the Week.

For more information or to try the demo, visit the Xbox.com Marketplace.

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