Hydrophobia: Prophecy is a pretty looking game (at least, the PC version is, although it's allegedly been heavily retooled from earlier editions) all about being on a boat. And fighting terrorists, for some reason.
It follows the plight of Kate – an engineer on a large ship which is supposedly the last hope for humanity – Earth has run out of resources and so the scientists on this ship are working on a solution to this problem. The problem – extremists attack the ship during a random celebration party (which was a lead up to an announcement, which is never made nor mentioned again once the shit hits the fan). Kate is in an elevator when the extremists attack, causing her to fall onto a lower deck of the ship, which is quickly flooding. You need to help her escape through puzzling, jumping, climbing, and shooting.
I Liked:
- Potential in the plot (what happens when Earth runs out of resources?)
The plot has potential, the setup being that you are an engineer on a large ship, which houses a technological powerhouse that is working on a way to create enough resources for humanity to continue to exist on Earth. It has the potential to explore the issues of resource use, what happens when we eventually run out of resources to sustain life with, and so forth. Frustratingly enough, it fails to explore this topic in anything bar a superficial method to place you on a boat, and to have terrorists attack said boat.
- Water Power
One of the cooler powers in the game is the ability to control water. This could allow for all sorts of interesting puzzles and combat situations. You can essentially create a tower of water to carry and throw objects with.
However, much like everything else that was good about this game, it is underutilised. More on this later.
- Water graphics
You would be hard pressed to find water graphics this pretty outside of Bioshock. I find Bioshock's to be a bit nicer, but really, water is difficult, and this water looks great. It even acts in a way that makes sense, spilling out when a door is opened from a flooded room (although it does seem to mysteriously disappear once the door is closed). One point worth mentioning though, is when the aforementioned water control powers are being used, the water suddenly looks horrible. I can understand the difficulty of making it look right when you do this kind of thing in real time, but it looks very different from the nice water just below the tower you've created!
- The hacking mini game
You are an engineer. Early sections of the game explain that the extremists lock you out of your own system, thereby justifying the myriad of broken or locked doors you come across (which makes this game linear as all hell), and need to hack to gain access to wherever you are headed at the time. Hacking doors – you all know what this means. This means a minigame!
However, I quite enjoyed the hacking minigame here. Unlike some more intrusive or nonsensical hacking minigames (ie the demented tetris/columns game in Secret Agent Clank, the pipe dream hacking game in Bioshock), you simply have to match a waveform displayed on your hacking device to the waveform from whatever you're trying to hack. This makes them run quite quickly, and nonintrusively, keeping you in the game. More importantly, it makes sense considering that you are an engineer. Unlike Bioshock's “I'm going to hack a security camera by playing with some water pipes” confusion.
I Hated:
- One gun with lots of ammo types – all of which suck
Early in the game, you are weaponless. Eventually you get a gun, but it fires “Sonic Rounds” - used to knock people unconscious, but having the ability to kill someone if they are shot enough with it (which is played off as an unintended use of the device). It's all well and good to begin with a stun gun, but instead of giving you access to new weapons frequently, Hydrophobia gives you new types of ammunition. This neatly solves the problem of “how can you carry 12 guns?”, but leaves another issue which didn't sit well with me – how can you jam bullets into a sonic laser-esque weapon?
Also, why do all my bullets seem useless in comparison to the unlimited sonic blast weapon? I found, at most, 8 bullets for the regular “Semi-auto” bullet type. Admittedly, later on there was plenty of rapid fire rounds, but I always found myself falling back on the sonic weapon, with the exception of the final battle (where you're forced into using the electricity blast weapon). Underwhelming, to say the least.
- Understated plot
As mentioned before, the plot has potential to be an interesting commentary, or “what if?” situation, with the potential future running out of resources being a major cause of the events that unfold. Instead, however, we are presented with this as only a backdrop (and large parts of it we have to infer from out of game material, since much of the scenario such as the state of the world itself is left out except for passing mention in hidden documents strewn about the world).
Challenging moral questions such as “if we were to go into population control, who decides who is to be killed” are completely ignored in favour of a generic “megalomaniac extremist thinks that mass murder is the only method to solve the problem and sets about doing that on your boat”. As the events begin to unfold, your mission begins as “survive and get to a safer spot”, until eventually Kate (your character) arbitrarily decides that she should figure out what the extremists are aiming for, stop that from happening, and somehow ends up chasing the enemy leader herself by the end of it, in a series of contrived revelations / events. This unfolds a little too quickly for my liking, and she seems to change very quickly from “engineer just trying to survive” to “action hero who sounds a little scared, but is still killing swathes of extremists all the same.”
- Underuse of powers
I mentioned that I liked the water power you gain in the game – I find it to be a nice, innovative idea. Quite fitting too, considering that you spend the game on a boat with large sections flooding. The issue is that you don't get many opportunities to use this innovative ability. Much like everything that was good about this game, it is underused.
You do not actually obtain this power until a short period before the end of the game (for plot reasons), and get to use it for one puzzle, a few combat scenarios, and the end (or should I say only?) boss encounter. There could have been any number of interesting puzzles and combat scenarios created with this mechanic, but the developers decided not to use what they created, sadly.
- Fiddly controls
There was many a time I wanted Kate to jump at an edge, where she waited to jump until after I ran off, even though I let the spacebar go about three steps before it. Many a time she refused to walk where I wanted her to go, and the water power contr4ols were frustrating. I can only imagine the input system was (badly) ported from a console, it just feels clunky, though also feeling like it would work on a controller.
Overall
The game was worth a look for me, because of its interesting setting. “Save the World, Kill Yourself” is spray painted over a lot of the walls, succinctly demonstrating the extremists viewpoint.
It resembles my view of this game closely enough – save your money and kill any thought of buying this. While it was entertaining in parts, it fell frustratingly short in every account as far as I'm concerned. A missed opportunity.
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