Hydrophobia is one of the most ambitious new titles for XBox 360’s XBox Live Arcade. Using the HydroEngine to power the game, Dark Energy Studios creates a dark future with some of the most impressive water technology ever seen in gaming. Taking a third person shooter and adding it to this new environment, Hydrophobia attempts to reach new levels of a download only title both visually and in terms of technology.
Gameplay:
Hydrophobia isn’t a standard third person action shooter. Employing a cover system similar to that of Kane & Lynch 2 or Alpha Protocol, Hydrophobia is a thinking man’s shooter. Fans of running in guns blazing will quickly feel how fast they can be gunned down in a flicker of glory.
Starting off with a pistol that shoots non-lethal stun rounds, Kate must navigate the halls of her hijacked vessel using the environment as her weapon. She can ignite gas canisters and venting pipes, break glass walls holding back gallons of water and unleash electrical surges on her unsuspecting opponents.
The controls for this system haven’t been perfectly honed yet and players will find times where they cannot properly move will in the cover system despite an enemy flanking them in to a corner. More times than naught, certain gameplay aspects like the actual cover provided by a cover object or a jump in an opposing direction don’t work as well as one would hope which leads to a string of repeated deaths.
There are also times the gameplay can hit dead ends when certain objectives either aren’t explained thoroughly enough. The difficulty can be somewhat reminiscent of titles from the NES days that the difficulty became more frustrating than rewarding for beating certain areas of games.
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