Hydrophobia has been on my radar since early E3 demos showed some of the gameplay footage. The problem with footage is that it can look great. Spectacularly stunning. But when you get your hands around a controller and actually start playing the game, well that's a different matter entirely. Manipulating the water to defeat your enemies in a variety of ways is definitely a fresh idea, but it lacks the polish and finesse to make a final product that is actually worth paying the fifteen dollar admission price.
Players take control of Kate Wilson, a systems engineer on a hijacked city-ship known as the Queen of the World. A terrorist group calling themselves the Malthusians have taken over, scrawling their motto "Save the World - Kill Yourself" all over the ship, conveniently including pieces of alien looking code known as ciphers required to unlock certain portions of the ship.
The entire premise of the game is decent; Kate must stop the hijackers from completely destroying the ship while saving her own neck. She's accompanied by her Irish and highly annoying handler who repeatedly offers encouragement in the form of the same reused lines over and over. Slugging through waist deep water that constantly knocks you off your feet only hear "Right.. you need to get to the next loading bay. And guess what? It's encrypted!" in his smarmy voice makes me think the developers realized how repetitive Hydrophobia really is.
Footage would have you believe you are escaping a doomed ocean liner with a bad ass character like Lara Croft or Joanna Dark, but what you're really doing is playing the leftover bits of mini-games other developers rejected from their mainstream titles. I'm surprised the hacking mini-game in Hydrophobia wasn't the connect the pipes hack featured in Bioshock. Instead, you match up frequencies using both analog sticks in a given amount of time. The only game with a more frustrating hack sequence is Alpha Protocol.
Hacking isn't the only mini-game you'll play, either. Instead of finding clever ways to block off access to the ship until Kate needs to be there, the developers have included the previously mentioned ciphers. Apparently the Malthusians have some sort of invisible spray paint for spraying alien graffiti that only Kate's MAVI device can detect. These tedious mini-games make up more than half of the game and contribute nothing gameplay wise other than serving to frustrate the player.
The rest of the time you spend playing will be fighting with the water the developers have lauded. The effects are nice, but perhaps they would be better put to use in an inside look at the Titanic sinking. Some sequences in the game require you to swim from point A to point B underwater perfectly and with the jerky camera and terrible controls, you will find yourself repeating these parts more than once.
The combat in the game isn't much better. Kate's only weapon is a gun capable of creating mini-sonic booms that can influence the environment. Creating these sonic booms to blow up guards or cause them to drown is fun the first few times, but afterwards hiding to take pot shots until you finally kill a guard who wouldn't budge wears on your nerves. Halfway through the game Kate finally gets another type of sticky ammo that causes explosions, but you find so few of these pieces of ammo at a time that they're never a replacement for the sonic blasts.
Overall, Hydrophobia is an interesting idea, poorly executed. Had the game chosen to take a more actiony spproach like Perfect Dark, it would have been highly tolerable. Instead, what you are left with is slogging through a sinking ship playing mini-game after mini-game until the end with terrible combat and controls interspersed. If Hydrophobia is to see the episodic release the developers have discussed, then their first offering is full of failure and there are better things to spend your fifteen bucks on. Why Microsoft chose to start their Game Feat with such a terrible, mediocre game, I'll never know.
