Hydrophobia

This review is for Hydrophobia: Prophecy, a survival-adventure game by Dark Energy Digital, published by Microsoft Game Studios released this year.

The story is pretty cool. You play Kate Wilson, an engineer on the massive luxury cruiser called The Queen of the World. The ship is more of a floating city where people live rather than a pleasure cruise. It's attacked by a fanatical group or terrorists called the Malthusians who plan to kill most of the world's population. Their slogan is "Save The World - Kill Yourself." You are guided by a fellow engineer on a radio headset who's trying to clear the way for you to get out of the bowels of the ship where you are trapped. The ship has sustained heavy damage and is quickly becoming flooded.

This game is all about water effects. All the water in the game is fully dynamic. It's really innovative. When you open a door that has water behind it, it will rush out at you until you close the door again. Conversely, if you're in a room full of water and open a door that has a clear room behind it, you will get rushed through with the water.

There is this constant fear of drowning in this game. Some rooms have only ankle deep water, but others are so completely full that you have to swim from air pocket to air pocket to survive. The fact that the ship is so positively damaged provides for really interesting environments.

There are three major parts of the game: doing puzzles, such as finding computer keys to open locked doors, moving through the damaged ship which has a tomb-raider-y type feel, and combat sections.

The puzzles can be interesting, though sometimes repetative. Climbing around the environments is pretty fun since Kate isn't a major athelete, there is only so much that she can do. Unlike Lara Croft, Kate moves more like a normal person would.

The combat, however, is definitely the weakest point. As an engineer, you don't really have a whole lot of weapons. It's pretty realistic in that your character isn't running around with an M-16, which wouldn't be available on an engineering level of a ship. You have to find slightly more innovative ways to kill enemies. For example, shooting them with a stun gun a couple of times can kill them by drowning when they collapse into the water. Sometimes you can shoot at an electrical pannel behind an enemy to electrify them -- nevermind the fact that that electrical current should be transferred to you via the water, but whatever.

What bothers me is that your little stun gun takes a while to charge, and when you're in an open water section with bad guys all over the place, you're completely shot to hell before you even knew where it was coming from. Plus, the character controls are pretty slow to respond, and difficult to control. You do come across slightly better bullets, but they're few and far between. Your stun gun never runs out of ammo.

Again, it's cool that you can find ways to kill enemies using the environment, but even that gets repetative. I like that you never know where the enemies are going to be, however. You spend some of the game running through dangerous areas, and some part of the game peeking around corners in case there are bad guys.

Something else that's fun is your little handheld computer that you carry. You can use it to hack into computer systems, or even into the camera system overhead. This lets you get a glimpse what might be behind doors or where enemies are, or where you might have to go.

I really like the look of this game. Granted, Kate is kinda ugly, and some of the game is pretty repetitive, but I really enjoyed it. As someone who's really afraid of drowning, playing this game is pretty scary. The water flowing through the areas of the game, and the difficult to navigate submerged areas really make you feel cut off, and trapped. I have not yet finished this game, but hopefully after finals I'll be able to continue. Thanks for watching my review!

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Hydrophobia