Hydrophobia is a game developed by Dark Energy Digital. They’ve developed fourteen other games in the past, none of which I’ve ever heard, due largely to the fact that most of them were pool championship games, or, as they are otherwise known, boring wastes of time.
Now, before I went ahead and spent $15 on Hydrophobia, I made sure to read about it from other reviewers. Most of them gave it something roughly equivalent to an “ehh…” so I was hesitant about it. The free demo wasn’t quite long enough for me to tell if the game was going to be good or not. But, I needed a new game, and I’m a patron of the art of independent game development, so I coughed up the cash and dove in (no pun intended).
-Plot-
So it’s the future (again! as Ben Croshaw would say), and overpopulation on Earth has become a major problem. To counter this problem, a cruise ship/city that is roughly ten times the size of the Titanic has been launched to see if it’s possible, with modern technology, for a large populace to live at sea. The ship, dubbed the “Queen of the World,” is celebrating its tenth year afloat.
The cinematics begin with a young woman called Kate having a nightmare about nearly drowning as a child. She wakes with a start to find that her cable has gone out, so she decides to run to the lower decks of the ship to see what the problem is. You know, instead of going out into town to have some fun or just browsing the Internet or even just reading a book. Ok, ok, she’s an engineer, but she was off duty! On top of that, her boss made it clear that he was not going to give her overtime!
Speaking of the boss, he’s called “Scoot” by Kate. He remains in contact with Kate throughout the game. I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing, though, because the voice acting in this game is literally the most atrocious that has ever assaulted my ears. It seriously sounds like the developers didn't bother to hire any talent and just did the dubs themselves, and given that this is an independent game, that could very well be the case.
Anyway, Kate goes to the lower decks to check on her cable. While she’s down there, everything starts exploding, and water begins to our in from every direction. Now she has to get out before she drowns. Oh, and on the way she discovers some terrorist/death cult plot to kill everybody for the sake of killing everybody, but it’s so poorly written that I didn’t bother to read the diaries that each terrorist I killed left behind.
-Gameplay-
Honestly, the reason I bought this game despite warnings of horrendous controls and mentally challenged acting was because of the intriguing gameplay. The big selling point of the game was the water physics, and I have to say, they were truly phenomenal. As you make your way through the claustrophobic corridors, the water is constantly rising and moving about in waves. Shooting the water causes ripples and explosions cause waves.
The continually rising water combined with flickering lights, groaning steel, and the occasional gas fire work fantastically together to create a wonderful sense of tension and urgency as Kate wades through the dark, narrow corridors.
Unfortunately, this tense feeling is constantly broken by the game’s terrible habit of pausing every time you pick up a new item or a diary entry and cutting out all music and sound. It’s like we’re in a movie and the screen goes blank every few minutes. It breaks the flow like a sledgehammer against a dirt clod.
Another big problem I have with the game is the horrid controls. Seriously, why is Y the jump button? I thought it had been universally established that A is the jump button. That’s what it is in every other game, right? I appreciate you guys trying to be unique, Dark Energies, but this is like penalizing a veteran ballet dancer for not realizing on her own that she was supposed to dance on her hands for this particular performance.
And if all of that isn’t bad enough, our old friends Regenerating Health and Cover-Based Combat are back in a spirited attempt to suck any uniqueness out of the game. As I stealthed (I.E., played red light, green light with some incredibly dim-witted AI) my way through the sinking ship and paused for the occasional shootout, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing yet another clone.
That said, there was some uniqueness to the fighting, there just wasn’t enough of it present. The ability to shoot out gas lines and blow enemies up or stun your foes in a shallow pool of water and let them drown was pretty cool, but I found that the most efficient mode of combat was to simply hit them with the stun gun repeatedly until they died.
Personally, I would have been happy if no weapons were involved at all. If the developers had taken all the time and money they had sunk into programming the shooting and cover system and used it to fix the awful controls and make the stealth mechanics better (meaning actually good), then the game would have been perfect. I would much rather have played a game where I was forced to sneak by the terrorists while avoiding death by drowning. THAT would have created a fantastic sense of oppression and terror. Instead, we have yet another game that could have been great, but isn’t.
Overall
At the end of the day, I actually liked Hydrophobia. Yeah, it has horrible controls, and yeah, it has crap controls, but I’m telling you, the water physics make up for it. In the moments between hunting for codes and listening to Scoot’s cheese-grater voice against your ear drums, you’ll find that feeling of urgency and immersion that makes for a good game. When weighed against its flaws though, Hydrophobia ends up being the kid that barley graduated high school near the bottom of his class.
Adam Alexander © 2010
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