Hydrophobia Hands-On

A sinking ship would definitely rank up there as one of the worst places to be left in and have to fight for survival. Usually if you're fighting aliens, zombies, or ghosts, you have some sort of weapon or at least an open area to keep your back against. However, in Hydrophobia, we started out with having to scramble to another level just to ensure we had enough air, and when we were faced with terrorists, all we were given was a tiny stun gun. Thankfully, you're not limited to the stun gun for the rest of the game, but with limited weaponry, you are forced to use the environment to your advantage, which is the purpose of Hydrophobia.

Who's Making It: The game is being developed by Dark Energy, located in Manchester, and Microsoft is publishing the title.

What It Looks Like: Hydrophobia is set 30 years into the future aboard a giant vessel called Queen of the World. It's like the Titanic of the future (after it hit the iceberg), and you are walking around metal corridors and winding staircases and swimming up elevator shafts that are not usually flooded with water. What's interesting is that you can control how much water you want in your area by keeping certain doors closed, or to make things more interesting, you can open up the floodgates.

What You Do: As the reluctant heroine Kate, you are a systems engineer who is on board when the terrorists attack. Your goal is to survive and take out the enemy, but you're not exactly a fighter. The game is designed to highlight more exploration than combat. The ship is massive, and you'll encounter obstacles that you'll need to find a way to get past, because your world is crumbling down around you. When you are eventually armed with a weapon, the game plays like a third-person shooter with a cover system. We were told that there would be semiautomatic weapons later, but with the stun gun, it was difficult to keep enemies down unless we used the environment to properly dispose of them.

How It Plays: When in combat, you use the right bumper to draw your weapon and the right trigger to fire. A white dot onscreen is used to aim, and a red target reticle will appear when there is something that can be shot at, whether it be another person or a box or explosive barrel. What's convenient is that while you're maneuvering through water that is almost waist high, there are plenty of barrels to aim your stun gun at to cause an explosion to finish off the terrorists, as well as create a mini tidal wave in a cramped corridor. There is never really a swarm of enemies coming at you from what we've seen, but carefully placed oil barrels can easily dispose of a group after they explode.

The cover system allows you to press A to hug one of the nearby walls. It's not the kind of game in which you'll want to run out with guns blazing. Instead, you need to sit back and carefully think about how you want to proceed. To knock out an enemy, you have to charge your gun first before firing; otherwise, you're only sending mini shock waves with the stun gun, which doesn't seem to do much except annoy the enemy. Once you do get them on their backs (we were hoping that they'd drown), they get right back up again after a few moments, so you have to either fire at some oil barrels or shoot the electrical switches on the wall to send sparks flying.

In our demo we were given mission objectives, such as tracking down a key to progress to the next area. It seemed simple enough, but we had to swim through flooded chambers to get to it. You are given a map to help you navigate the enormous ship, and as you're exploring, you're playing with the constant flow of water that is spilling in from just about everywhere. You can fire at windows to let more water in, or leave it the way it is and try to handle the situation with the current water level. There are situations where you'll be swimming through completely flooded halls, so you'll need to look for patches of light and head up for some air.

What They Say: Hydrophobia is the first game developed using Dark Energy's revolutionary HydroEngine, the world's only full computation fluid dynamics engine for games. This incredible technology allows water and other liquids to flow and behave realistically, resulting in the most dynamic and dramatic gameplay you've ever seen.

What We Say: Because of our own fear of drowning, Hydrophobia was an intense experience (and yes, we know it's called aquaphobia). Between looking for pockets of air to make sure we could make it to the next door, Kate had to keep an eye out for terrorists, who were armed with much better weapons than we were. The constant flow of water and the changing environment were impressive. It forces you to rethink your strategy, because you may have fired at an oil barrel and caused it to explode, but now the burning oil is heading toward you. It's good to see some variety when it comes to survival games, so look for Hydrophobia when it's released on September 29.