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Hydrophobia


SomTervo
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Hiya chums,

 

Upon reading an article on Hydrophobia in an issue of Edge ages ago, I was pretty interested in the game- if mostly for it's approach to DLC gaming. But of course, it turned out to be pretty flawed in it's interface and design, and critically it got pretty average reviews.

 

Has anyone played the oober-update Hydrophobia Pure? Sure looks like it has made the title a lot more playable and funs.

 

Here's Dark Energy Digital's blog post on it: http://www.hydrophobia-game.com/pure.php

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I haven't played it yet, but I'm planning to. I'd been following the game very closely until it released and I heard how flawed it was. I'm glad to see they addressed at least some of the problems.

 

Yeah I'm planning on getting it too, as soon as I'm back home after the holidays. However I thought I'd better ask the opinion of the ever-critical TAYpeeps- in case it's really not worth it.

Edited by kenshi_ryden
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I find myself always interested in games that get slammed in reviews, but have their own charms and quirks, and thus I end up liking them anyways. So I was planning on picking this game up already. But then I heard about this super-update (and a price drop too!), so now I'm DEFINITELY interested. Next time I have points I'm buying it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I actually got Hydrophobia because I respected the guys so much for improving it. It's really pretty playable, and seems like a good adventure, though I'm only an hour or so in.

 

The voice acting though... Is probably some of the worst I've ever heard. The main character seems to have a nothing accent, with a twinge of occasional ridiculous Irish, and your over-the-radio conductor is meant to be Scottish.

 

Being Scottish, I find his accent bordering on offensive. The actual pronounciation is kiiind of okay, but he speaks as if, rather than having any other emotions, he is just constantly super-excited and passionate. Like between lines he's snorting coke and taking E's. It's horrible. Such a high pitched insane voice. Argh.

 

Good game though, it seems.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Alright, bought it and played through the first two acts. My thoughts:

 

Graphics and atmosphere are quite nice. However, there's a small amount of slow down and lots of clutter on the screen that sometimes make it a bit disorienting.

 

Plot should be cool but they don't flesh it out enough. The villains are fairly one-dimensional, definitely missed a chance to make them interesting.

 

Actual gameplay is decent, climbing around and looking for items/ciphers works fine. Annoyingly, the update include the option to show markers on the HUD for not only your main objectives but the cipher locations too - effectively killing the exploration in finding them. You can turn the markers off, but then you don't have the markers for objectives unless you use your scanner thingy.

 

I can't say too much about the combat since I'm going for the 'use the default ammo only' medal, but it's also average. Shooting stuff in the environment is fun and easy, but the actual aiming is wonky. It zooms in way too much which makes it hard to look around your environment.

 

Overall, it's rough but it has it's charms. I don't hate it but there's a lot of stuff that could still be easily improved. I'm having fun playing it though.

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  • 3 months later...

Alright, so with Hydrophobia: Prophecy coming out soon I thought I'd move this thread over to multiplat, rename it a bit and give it a bump.

 

It looks like there are a lot of awesome improvements for Prophecy over vanilla Hydrophobia, and even over Pure. I'm trying to figure out if those improvements will ever see their way to XBLA though. If not I'm going to be a little upset with DarkEnergy. I bought the XBLA version when it was on sale a while ago but haven't gotten around to playing it yet. Apparently though Prophecy changes the backstory and the ending and such.

 

I don't feel like I'm entitled to all the additional content necessarily, but the changes to the backstory and ending seem like something that will affect how the rest of the games in the series play out.

 

*Edit* - Well I asked DarkEnergy about it on Twitter, and they said they're trying to bring the Prophecy updates to the XBLA version, but it's early in their discussions with MS and they're not sure if it's going to work out or not. At least now I know that if it doesn't come to XBLA it's not DarkEnergy's fault.

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From Wikipedia:

Hydrophobia Prophecy is described as version 1.5 of the Xbox 360 version of the game. Hydrophobia Prophecy is to be released on Playstation 3 and Valve's Steam service.[22] The game includes new levels (approximately 70% of the game is new and previously existing levels have been reworked).

I also like the iterative design style, provided they continue to provide the newer iterations for free to those who already bought the older ones. That's what they've been doing so far though, so they are gaining my confidence. If MS prevents them from adding the Prophecy update to the XBLA version I might just buy the Steam version too.

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Ok I preordered it on Steam when it went up, I mean its been really improved so a new player like me should just have a great game to play?....not exactly. Damn this game is really rough. Just everything about it is rough, the cutscenes, the controls, the low quality textures. I'll pace on though cause I like the setting and water based games

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Ok I think I'm at the end of chapter 2 on PC. Hydrophobia is simply, a mess. You start the game in a static completely uninteractive apartment. Kate's eyes always seem so dead for some reason. And her accent. Its impossible to tell what her accent is it changes so much. You have your guy talking to you through your headset called Scoot, who's American for sure but the dialogue is atrocious.

 

You run around the apartment and try to jump on things but it does nothing. You pick up items which seemingly have no affect on anything. Then you get the real game. Endless identical halls of barrels and shit. The platforming sections simply consist of climbing vertical pipes like a bizarre Assasins Creed except completely focused on climbing up.

it feels so disconnected from the actual swimming sections that you may as well be playing another game. After a while you get your gun. The gunplay is so medicore and shitty and doesn't have a melee attack, so when your right in front of a guard your swinging round widely like an idiot. There's a searching mechanic for writing on walls that's simply trail and error, and most of your time is spent simply running to the next checkpoint. The swimming is ok. I'd give it a 2/10.

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Wow, I had nowhere near as bad as an experience as that. It was a little bland graphics-wise, but the rest of it seemed pretty playable and a decent adventure. I'm only an hour or two in, but I'd give it a 13 or 14 out of 20. Give the trial a go, Gerbil.

 

It could be the PC port is worse? On my Xbox 360 it was okay.

Edited by kenshi_ryden
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