Hydrophobia: Prophecy review by Tyson
Overall
Rent
Hydrophobia Prophecy is a decent downloadable game. It borrows gameplay concepts from games like Tomb Raider to Gears of War but sadly it doesn’t pull them off as good as the mentioned games. Still the game is worth checking out if you ever get a chance.
Gameplay
Hydrophobia Prophecy’s story centers around a city sized ship called the Queen of the World. From what I can tell from playing the game this ship is a prospering city of humanity in the future. Sadly during the 10th anniversary of the ships creation it is attacked by a group of terroists called the Malthusians. One of the ships enigeers Kate Wilson, our playable character, is caught in between the mess and needs to save civilans, beat the terriosts, and get out alive.
Gameplaywise Hydropobia Prophecy plays like a mix of several top selling games in the past few years. Most of the game has you going from different sections of the ship and taking out terriosts, unlocking doors, and saving some civilans along the way.
Maneuvering through the ship is pretty fun since it plays a lot like the Tomb Raider games. You will use pipes to climb up walls, jump from girders to various ledges, or crawl though giant air ducts. You also get this really cool futuristic mobile device called MAVi. This device will let you do things like remotely open doors, line up audio waves in puzzle hacking segements, or find hidden messages on the walls which helps you unlock doors. The games camera can be a problem while playing through the game. There are times where I found the camera to get a bit spazzy.
Combat wise the game isn’t all that great. Combat in the game plays like a low end Gears of War. You can take cover behind objects and do things like blindly fire behind them. When you do take damage from enemies you can simply hide behind cover to regain your health back. Though I did hate how when you get close to death the screen goes gray and the sounds fades out. Also you only get one gun during the game which I found disappoitning but at least you get different ammo types for the gun. Probably the best aspect I have with the combat is that you can use the environment to help you take out enemies. You can shoot explosive barrels littered throughout the ship to kill enemies or at times use water to knock down some enemies. I also want to mention that I found the last boss battle to be unenjoyable due to endlessly spawning enemies, constant ammo switching, and crappy use of the late game water control abilities.
The games most unique feature is its water system. Many parts of the ship are leaking or flooded due to the terroist attacks. The flooding of the ship gives access to swimming puzzles and water physics. I really like how water would come flooding into a room if you shot out a window of a flooded room. Also the combat underwater is pretty cool looking as well. You also get a fun water controling ability which sadly comes right at the end of the game.
Control
I ended up using the mouse and keyboard setting for playing this game. I found it to work rather well but I did find some issues. One such issue was that opening doors took several times for me to hit the open door button. Though I am not sure if this was because the game was loading assests. Though not all doors seem to give me this trouble. Another issue I had is that it seems like Kate doesn’t control as smoothly as she should at times.
Graphics
I really enjoyed the gaphical aspect of Hydrophobia Prophecy. The way the water looks and moves is fantastic. Character models look decent though Kate definately looks the best. I found the enviroments to look good as well. Stuff like fire or steam looks really good as well. The only issue I had was that the framerate would chug at times and I did get a couple of second long pauses during my playthrough of the game.
Sound
I wasn’t digging the audio as much as I did the graphics. Characters like Kate sound good but everyone else sounds okay to bad. I noticed that as I came close to death that the audio would go silent and that was really weird. I didn’t notice any good background music as well.