Hydrophobia

Welcome back, fellow game enthusiasts, to The Game Cave. On today's agenda: A little-known XBL Arcade game known as Hydrophobia.

Hydrophobia is a game that depicts a floating city-ship on the ocean. You play as an engineer that helps make sure the whole thing doesn't go down faster than the Titanic. So you have your character, Kate Wilson, working with all the engineers to keep this ship, the Queen of the World, up and running. The Queen of the World was created to help solve the main problem the world faces in this game: Overpopulation. The company that developed the ship has been constantly striving to solve this issue. The game begins with Kate sitting in her room with the news on her TV. The news story on the TV is about the company, The Five Founding Fathers, has developed a new nano system that will help solve the overpopulation issue. I never really understood how that's supposed to work (it never really gets explained all that well). The system that runs all the tech in Kate's room mysteriously shuts down. Kate gets into contact with a friend engineer and starts to investigate the system shutdown. She quickly finds out that the rest of the ship is experiencing similar issues. As you investigate further, you find out that parts of the ship are breaking down and flooding and falling apart. Kate runs around the hull, directed from afar by her friend, until she comes across a room. A fellow engineer is sitting at the console. Kate, searching for an add-on program to her engineer tool, asks him if she can use the computer. No response. She turns the chair around and he falls out of the chair, dead. Kate looks around and sees a message on the monitors around her: "Save the world - Kill yourself." You later learn the ship is under attack by a group of terrorists calling themselves the Malthusians. The game becomes a survival story in which you fight against the terrorists for the fate of the ship. Then, just as the story starts to get good... To be continued. WHAT. What is this crap?! Finish the freaking game! I decided to do some research. The game is supposed to be part of a trilogy. I loved the game, but if it doesn't get good reviews, I won't get to find out what happens! Make a full game next time! Good lord...

Well, the story is great. I love it. Just need to FINISH IT. On to the gameplay. It revolves around water physics (the game is called freaking Hydrophobia. No duh it uses water physics). So, you can destroy parts of the ship to raise or lower the water level, water can rush through opened doors, sweep you around, throw you against the walls, and all sorts of stuff. Godly awesome water physics. The combat is good, but not great. The controls make it easy to miss your targets, but the game makes up for it with creative underwater combat. You can strafe, dodge, drown opponents, or sneak up on them from underwater. Fantastic underwater combat. Never seen anything like it.

So overall, Hydrophobia is a great game. It's letdown down by slightly finicky controls and a cliff-hanger ending, but it does leave you wanting more. I desperately want to see a sequel released. 9/10 in my book. Excellent game.