INTRO:
Games that prominently feature water as obstacles, tools and hazards all at the same time are very rare, mainly because of the difficulty of simulating water physics in convincing ways.
Hydrophobia, the original version of this game on the Xbox Live Arcade, tried to be one such game, and though it has very commendable physics-scripting for its bodies of water, it had many problems, many of which were caused by the developers' overlooking of ease-of-play and half-realized ideas.
Given the time between the release of the XBLA version to its release on Steam, Dark Energy Digital has addressed a lot of the concerns that had been raised by reviewers.
Hydrophobia: Prophecy is the result. Many of the changes are positive, bu some issues from the original version of the game lingered. More importantly, and unfortunately, the game still suffered from pacing and story-related problems, likely due to the developer's insistence on keeping ideas for sequels that may probably never see the light of the day again, as Dark Energy Digital has since shuttered its doors.
PREMISE:
After explosive population growth has caused the collapse of modern society, corporate giants were the only ones with the resources to save anyone.
It just so happens that some of them, led by NanoCell, have decided to strike out on their own to build a mobile city-state that floats across the oceans: the "Queen of the World", a stupendously large vessel. The Queen of The World only takes in the best and brightest; every citizen borne to the sea-faring city also grows up to be highly educated and skilled, if only to serve out the rest of their lives to operate and improve their luxurious, self-sufficient home.
Kate Wilson seems to be one such citizen. As a systems engineer, she is one of many responsible for the security and reliability of the electronic systems on the massive ship. However, her busy but otherwise comfortable life was not to last.
On one fateful holiday in the ocean-bound city-state, numerous electronic failures occurred. While she set off to investigate them, terrorists attack and damage many important segments of the ocean-faring city from the inside. A fanatical group subsequently took credit for the calamity, citing their belief in a drastic solution to a socio-politico-economic disaster that Thomas Robert Malthus had predicted. Kate is reluctantly pulled into a conspiracy while being forced to do things that she had never expected to do.
PLATFORMING:
The platforming gameplay of Hydrophobia is the first major gameplay element to be shown. Shortly after the troubles on the Queen of the World began, Kate discovers that the commutation systems on the ship have been knocked out, such as the elevators.
Fortunately, Kate conveniently happens to be quite the outdoorsperson and the Queen of the World happens to use a lot of conventional hydraulics and other mechanical means of operation. Thus, she can and will have to resort to climbing the various pipes, beams and such other structural links to get to where she needs to be – something that the game will drill into the player very early on.
It is worth noting here that the issues concerning the camera that affected the platforming gameplay in the original version of the game had been mostly addressed. The camera now gives a much more expansive view of the heroine's surroundings, while the heroine herself does not obscure too much of the screen. As long as she is still, be it standing, suspended in water or hanging from something, the player can have the camera swinging around to give a good view of the environment with mere flicks of the mouse.
Having Kate move across the environment is almost a breeze, as most of the movement is context-sensitive. This would not have been worth noting as plenty of other competently designed games with 3D platforming already have such movement, but the original version of Hydrophobia did not have such competent designs.
Unfortunately, there is a gap in the design of the context-sensitive movement; Kate cannot move downwards when climbing vertically across consecutive ledges. Instead, the player has to use a "drop down" maneuver to descend. This works if there are still many ledges below her, but if there is just one or two, the player may want to move upwards a bit as when she drops down, she drops for several ledges before she catches one to avoid falling any further.
Also, the developer has not learned enough from competently designed games with 3D-platforming. In these other games, the player character can walk or run off ledges and he/she/it would automatically catch the edge of the ledge.
In Hydrophobia: Prophecy, this does not always happen, because she can only hang from ledges which are scripted to allow her to do so. There is no reliable way which ledges that Kate can hang from just from their looks. For ledges that do not allow her to do so, the player will discover to his/her chagrin that Kate just walks off them.
There is also an annoying balancing mini-game to struggle against when Kate has to trapeze-walk across narrow beams. This is an antiquated platforming shenanigan that has long since been replaced with more sensible beam-shimmying in more competently designed games with platforming gameplay.
SWIMMING:
Being a game that is set on a ship that is taking on a lot of water, there is understandably a lot of swimming involved, mostly in flooded areas.
The level of the water strongly determines the mobility of humans that are caught in it.
When the water is just ankle-high, it is not too much of a bother. However, when it is below the knee, Kate and other characters do not have their mobility impeded too much and jumping to higher levels is still doable. When it is knee-high, wading is slowed down tremendously and jumping is made impossible, but characters can still aim weapons or otherwise use their arms for handling things.
When the water is chest-high, it is at its most problematic. Swimming is not entirely possible unless the player has Kate diving and staying close to the floor, yet wading through it is a ponderous affair and almost any action is made impossible by the splashing of waves and floating debris. Speaking of debris, waist- and chest-high water shifts objects about a lot. Hard objects that are being pushed about exceptionally fast by the water becomes collision hazards that can knock over and injure anyone in their way.
When the water reaches above chest-high levels, it is time to swim – or drown. Conveniently, Kate Wilson happens to be an expert swimmer that can hold her breath for a few minutes. Also, any air pocket that she can reach will always have enough air to refill her lungs; there is not any physics-scripting for reduction of breathable air in these places.
Any object that is suspended in water and underwater no longer behaves as a collision hazard, though they still impede swimming. Kate will brush them away with her swimming strokes if they are light and small enough objects, but anything as big as a crate or bigger is an obstacle. Fortunately, the camera renders anything that could block its view of Kate and what is in front of her transparent.
Kate can latch onto certain objects to move them about, which will be instrumental in a few puzzles. However, generally, holding onto objects confers little benefits; in fact, they slow down her swimming.
When the camera is close to the surface of the water, the screen can become rather disorienting, especially when the player tries to change Kate's direction while she is just underneath the water.
DOOR ACCESS:
One of things that the original version of Hydrophobia has been criticized for is the linearity of progress in the game and the prevalence of backtracking. Unfortunately, such complaints would still be present in Prophecy, as the game still uses a system of locked or busted doors to prevent progress and limit the game's potential for Metroidvania gameplay.
A convenient plot development has wiped all access clearance from Kate's ID device, trapping her in the bowels of the Queen of the World. Some doors can be accessed without any clearance, but many others require unlocking. Appearances of such doors typically means that Kate is going to be sent on a mission to find the means to unlock them; this is little more than key-hunts, oft-used challenges that are dull as they are old.
Other doors are simply "malfunctioning" or absolutely locked, further reinforcing the impression that the game is very linear to the point of restricting exploration.
Almost all doors and hatches that the player would come across are advanced enough to be remotely opened using the M.A.V.I. device, which will be described shortly.
However, some of them are old-fashioned enough, such that they can only be opened by the pressing of buttons, though these buttons can also be secured with electronic locks. They would not have been much of an issue if not for the game's omission of any tip about them. Up until their introduction, most of the doors that the player would encounter are those that can be remotely opened, and these have very distinct models. The manually-opened ones are very different-looking, resembling steel fences more. Fortunately, there are only a couple of these doors in the game.
M.A.V.I.:
The game has Kate retrieving this device right at the start. It is a peculiar scroll-like tablet device that can be used like a PDA, a scanner or a remote control.
It can be used as a tool for a simplified hacking mini-game. This mini-game occurs when there is a console that Kate needs to bypass. Hacking is little more than a mini-game of matching an input wave signal with the wave signal of the console, which is gameplay that has been done before in other games.
Kate can also view her surroundings through the M.A.V.I., which sometimes reveal details in the environment that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. These often include scribbling on walls; most of them are rants, but some are deliberate patterns that can be decoded into decryption keys, which allow the player to unlock encrypted doors.
The M.A.V.I. also simplifies and colour-label the textures of objects that are seen through it, making it easier to find objects of interest such as doors.
As mentioned earlier, certain doors can be remotely opened with the M.A.V.I. However, the utility of this feature is limited to rigidly-designed plot-progressing scenarios in the game, such as when Kate has to open the door to a flooded room so that its water content can flow out to douse a fire or when certain inundated corridors have to be flushed in order to become accessible.
The M.A.V.I. can also be used to take control of cameras in the environments. These cameras are peculiarly huge, though such an oddity does conveniently help the player look for them. Upon taking control of a camera, the player can generally look all around and under it, with the exception of a few cameras that have limited arcs of rotation. The cameras can also trigger the opening of automated doors, which is a feature that is used in certain puzzles.
Unfortunately, some of the cameras are bugged. For example, there is one moment in the game where Kate has retrieved a decryption key from a corpse in a control room, upon which the game will spawn and place some enemies just outside. There is a camera inside the control room that could be hacked into, presumably to allow the player to cycle through the cameras in the area to look for said enemies, but the cycling is somehow disabled.
FLASHLIGHT:
Kate has a flashlight that she can use to presumably illuminate dark places. However, the player will discover that there are very few places in the game that are dark enough to require its use. Other than that, the flashlight does not seem to have any other use. This is a shame, as the flashlight's illumination is visually decent to look at, when compared to the other, simpler sources of light in the game.
HEALTH SYSTEM:
For better or worse, the game makes use of regenerating health for Kate, even though Kate would not seem to be anywhere near a protagonist of a shooter title.
The health system also comes with visual effects that typically obscure the edges of the screen with bleeding blood, which is counter-productive. What is even more counter-productive is the loss of colour saturation as Kate comes closer to death's door.
These are oft-used game designs that can seem to distract from the few but otherwise unique qualities of Hydrophobia: Prophecy.
PISTOL:
Sometime into the game, Kate retrieves a peculiarly advanced pistol that can fire many types of rounds, including its default ones, which are actually sound waves from its sonic emitter. The player can fire as many sonic rounds as he/she likes, which will be of use in many situations, including for combat, which will be described later.
Although sonic rounds can be lethal if enough of them can be put into an enemy, they are not suitable for every fight. Fortunately, there are other kinds of munitions that the pistol can use, but which Kate has to find. These other types of munitions are much more powerful than the sonic rounds, but they are in limited supply and the game does give plenty of other ways to deal with enemies – at least until the latter parts of the game; there will be more elaboration on this complaint later.
There are regular lethal rounds, of which there are two variants: slow-firing but powerful semi-auto rounds and rounds that are made for rapid-fire saturation. The former can be overkill, but a shot to the head kills almost any enemy instantly, whereas the latter may be useful if the player is faced with lots of goons that are too close to each other.
Next, there are gel rounds, which can be fired almost noiselessly, though any enemy within several feet will hear the discharge. Gel rounds do knock down enemies when they impact, though this is the least of their concerns; the gel can be remotely detonated to kill them instantly. Oddly enough, the explosions are greatly suppressed; other enemies have to be within several feet to hear them.
Perhaps the gel rounds are designed to give the game some modicum of stealth-sneaking gameplay, but that plastic explosives are used for stealthy elimination can cause some disbelief.
Finally, there are rounds that can stick onto surfaces like gel rounds do, but these release electrical charges instead, which promise agonizing deaths to any enemy that they strike.
There are a couple of complaints about the user-friendliness of the pistol.
Firstly, although Kate will make a reloading animation when switching between types of rounds, there is not any visual aid on the pistol itself to depict which round is being used; the player will have to glance at the icon on the bottom right corner of the screen to know that.
The second complaint is that the game does not appear to inform the player of the size of the pistol's magazine. Different rounds lead to different magazine capacities, but these capacities and the numbers of rounds that are left in magazines do not seem to be visible to the player at all.
HAZARDS:
There are other hazards to be encountered than just the flooding of the ship. Most of these appear due to damage that has been inflicted on the Queen of the World, though not all of them are understandably believable.
One of the most dangerous hazards are exposed power cables, which discharge electricity into their vicinity, including into the water in a huge radius around where they touched the water. Kate has to either shorten the cables by deliberately shooting them so that whole lengths of them fall off, or shut off the power if there happens to be switches nearby.
There are also barrels of propane that have been released from storage by the floods. Like typical explosive barrels in video games, they can be shot at to detonate them, though it takes many shots with sonic rounds to cook them off. Fully charged sonic rounds immediately detonate them, but charging can take a while.
Once a propane barrel has been detonated, it will briefly conflagrate the immediate area around it, turning it into a fire hazard temporarily. However, the presence of water would quell the fires very quickly, though the fires will still stay for a short while and may even float around before they die out.
Some other fires continue to burn anyway. This is most common for machines that are already burning, though this can cause quite a lot of disbelief if there happens to be water nearby lapping away at them.
At times, the placement of the hazards can give an impression that the engineering decks of the Queen of the World are not OSHA-compliant. For example, there are a peculiarly high number of machines that are on fire, and exposed power cables sometimes dangle from unlikely places.
COMBAT & ENEMIES:
Eventually, Kate will run into hostile and armed people that have very murderous intentions. They generally pack far bigger guns that can kill Kate very quickly, even on the lowest difficulty setting, if the player is careless. They also happen to have unlimited ammunition, so there is no such thing as waiting them out.
There are two types of enemies: thugs that happen to use mainly shotguns and flashlights, and mercenaries that use assault rifles and laser sights. The former are slightly weaker than the latter, but the latter's laser sights make them quite easy to locate.
Despite their fearsome firepower, they are some of the most dim-witted enemies to be seen in a video game.
Although the enemies in this game are aware of each other's presence and will use their numerical superiority to flank Kate with, they are not entirely aware of their surroundings. Although they will avoid any hazards in plain sight such as fires and electrical leakages, they are not aware of potential hazards around them, such as barrels or fuse-boxes that happen to be nearby and which Kate can shoot to dispose of them in painful ways.
Despite being capable of swimming, all of them are not prepared for having waves of water shoved into their faces. If the player can wait for them to come close enough to flooding hazards, he/she can have Kate shoot away at them to release the water on them. The water will knock them off their feet, injuring them.
Enemies also happen to have limited knowledge of Kate's whereabouts, though these limitations are quite understandable and believable. They will remember Kate's last seen location and will attempt to flank her using this knowledge, but if the player has managed to have Kate slip outside of their view, she can do some ambushing of her own. Enemies will respond to commotion, however, so the player might want to continue moving.
Conveniently, the engineering sections of the Queen of the World happen to have many objects that can easily obstruct one's view of something. This applies to the A.I.-controlled enemies too, so it is very easy to have Kate slip by unnoticed in places such as server farms and power plants.
The player can attempt to scout out the positions of enemies by using the M.A.V.I.'s scanning features and its ability to take over cameras, but this renders Kate virtually immobile and at risk of being attacked while she is occupied.
All enemies can swim, but most enemies that appear early in the game do not have breathing apparatus, making them susceptible to drowning. The later ones do, however, which makes them better prepared for when they get caught in floods; they also happen to patrol flooded hallways.
Enemies that are swimming underwater are much more difficult to locate and counter, mainly because they are no longer bound by gravity and thus their movement is less predictable.
Most enemies are usually aware of hazards and will not walk into them if they can help it, but sometimes, they still unwittingly do so. This usually happens because movable objects have shifted into their default paths, causing their pathfinding A.I. to recalculate their paths, which may bring them dangerously close to hazards. Consequently, sometimes, the player can get notifications that enemies are dying off-screen.
COVER:
Hydrophobia: Prophecy has a cover system that allows the player to have Kate utilize objects to obscure her person while having the camera reorient itself to convenient positions to give the player a view of what is beyond said objects. Players who are experienced with competently designed games that have decent cover systems would be quite familiar with the one in Hydrophobia: Prophecy. The cover system does not work under-water, however.
With a press of a button, the player can have Kate sticking to the nearest piece of cover that the player is looking at (and not just the nearest piece of cover regardless of the player's perspective). Kate can partially reveal herself from behind cover in order to aim and fire, or she can blind-fire if enemies happen to be quite close.
She can turn around the corners of pieces of cover that have them, slip over to another piece of cover that is parallel to the piece of cover that she is currently behind or sprint towards the next piece of cover that is directly in front of her current one. However, sprinting is only possible when the water is below her knees.
(Speaking of sprinting, it is odd that Kate cannot sprint at other times; sprinting is only doable when Kate is behind cover.)
Such cover-based movement would be nothing new to veterans of third-person shooters, but at least it happens to be functional.
To move out of said cover, the player must have Kate moving in the direction that is perpendicular to the face of the cover that she is stuck to. Unfortunately, this is not something that is informed to the player.
Enemies will use cover too. They are smart enough to choose cover that obscures the player's view, as well as aim around corners. As long as Kate is pinned in place, one or two enemies that are already shooting at her will not come out of cover, while the rest will slowly advance to flank her. However, as mentioned earlier, they are not always aware of any potential hazard that may be very close to where they are cowering.
In water, virtually no one can make use of cover. Kate can hold onto containers or crates and use them as both flotation devices and mobile cover, though this is at best just a novelty as Kate's mobility is reduced when doing so, as mentioned earlier. Kate also only holds out her mobile piece of cover in front of her, which makes it useless against any attacks from any other direction.
However, swimming around with mobile pieces of cover is part of certain solutions to water-based puzzles, though these are rare. They are also heavily scripted; for example, there is one puzzle where the player needs to pack a container with floating objects to make it float, but the player will discover that he/she cannot make the container float any higher by filling it with more objects after a certain amount.
WATER-MANIPULATING:
Very late into the game, the player is introduced to an outrageous gameplay feature, which is also part of an alternative game mode that will be described later.
After a certain incident – and some annoyances – Kate is gifted with the ability to manipulate water. Specifically, she can raise a tower of water and levitate anything caught in it.
The maximum height of the tower appears to be scripted according to the room that Kate is in. Usually, it is more than three quarters of the height of the room, though there are some exceptions.
The tower of water does not shoot up to its maximum height in an instant. Depending on how violently the player is aiming – more on aiming the tower later – it may reach maximum height very quickly. If the player's hands and fingers are still, the tower of water gains height slowly. However, the player should not expect to be able to control the tower's height reliably, especially when Kate is under fire.
As for the things that she can levitate in the tower's violently turbulent water, they are practically anything that is not part of walls and ceilings. Relatively small objects like propane barrels can be lifted almost to the top of the tower, whereas heavier and bigger objects hover around the middle or at its base. In the case of people, they fluctuate between the top and middle, at least before they die from the trauma.
Any object that can be suspended in between the top and middle can be launched out of the tower violently; the game will highlight which object in the tower can be catapulted, though its selection is random.
"Aiming", or more precisely, shifting, the tower around can take a while to learn and practice. This is mainly because the game does not alter the camera to give the player a better idea of the relative distance between Kate and the tower. There is a bright visual indicator of where she is aiming before the tower appears, but once it does, it will be obscured.
More importantly, the shifting of the tower uses the same control input for aiming. The player has to toggle between the default pistol-aiming and Kate's water-manipulating powers; the player cannot use both at the same time. However, Kate can still shoot her pistol at whatever is suspended in the tower of water, though her accuracy is quite terrible.
Another important restriction to note is that Kate cannot manipulate water while she is sticking to cover; she can only aim and fire her pistol. This is a lost opportunity to make the game more sophisticated and fun.
Most disappointingly, the impact of these water-manipulating powers on gameplay is limited by the game's uneven pacing. These powers are only available very close to the end of the main game mode, which can leave many players unsatisfied.
LEVEL DESIGNS:
As mentioned earlier, Hydrophobia: Prophecy is tremendously different from its original XBLA predecessor. Most of these differences can be seen in the designs of the levels, at least by people that have played the original game.
The very first level, which is Kate's apartment, happens to be one of those that had been reworked for Prophecy. Originally, Kate's apartment is quite dull-looking, having lousy and unimaginative architecture. It has since been reworked, looking much more convincingly designer-made with plenty of stylish decor.
Although the purported improvements can only be discerned by those that have experienced the original version of the game, what levels there are in Prophecy are quite competently done, or are at least believable. However, they lack variety, but this is an issue that will be described later.
There are corridors that lead to storage rooms, fuselage compartments that are designed as ballasts, and administration offices adjacent to engineering facilities, among other places that might be recognizable to people who are familiar with nautical vessels. The sci-fi leanings can make the machines and other hardware on the ship look too outlandish though.
Most of the objects in these environments can be used as cover, if they do not otherwise float around when water floods them. However, floating objects do not make for good cover underwater, as mentioned earlier.
The first half of the main game mode tend to be designed in either one of three ways. Firstly, they may be designed to be platforming-heavy. The player has to have Kate jump, shimmy and climb her way about into this or that shaft or room because the quickest route has been blocked.
Secondly, they may have plenty of objects and fixtures that can act as cover, which hint at the presence of enemies; if there are propane barrels and other potential hazards around, this is even more likely.
Thirdly, they may be flooded or have to be flooded later for the purpose of progression. Kate will have to do a lot of swimming in these places, usually against the direction of gravity. In these levels, there are columns of water that Kate has to swim up and down, which can be nerve-wracking as there is of course no means for her to catch a breath in such places. Flooding an atrium, lobby or complex so that Kate can swim upwards to higher floors is also a common activity, made all the more uncomfortable later by enemies that swim into the flooded area.
As functional as the levels are, they were designed for what is linear progression. If t the player needs to have Kate go somewhere, her options of paths would be coincidentally/conveniently narrowed to just one. There are paths for purposes for flanking, but the player should not expect much in the way of free-form exploration; the game also has quite a lot of backtracking.
The sci-fi look of the levels can be seen in the glut of detail in them. There are panels, holographic buttons, display screens and LEDs, as well as graffiti scribbles that are made with invisible ink that can be seen with the M.A.V.I. Some of the graffiti starts out as illegible rubbish, but as the player obtains more cipher codes, they become more readable, though they are actually little more than fanatical ramblings.
However, as the game recycles levels over and over, these details become more difficult to appreciate over time.
MAP DISPLAY:
The rather rigidly designed map display system that the game uses makes the appreciation of the level designs in this game even more difficult.
If the player wants to gauge where Kate is, the player needs to bring up the map display – which will not help much in figuring out where Kate is relative to where she needs to go.
By default, the player is shown the 2-D map of the current level, flattened to the vertical height of the room that Kate is currently in. While this display mode is alright if the immediate area is just a single-level region, it is useless in showing the verticality of areas with multiple levels of height, such as engineering rooms.
The player can switch over to 3-D displays, which is better for regions with verticality. However, the higher floors obscure the lower ones, if there are any directly underneath them. There is no tool to peel away the layers that represent the upper floors.
Sometimes, rooms that should be adjacent to the room that Kate is in are not rendered unto the 3-D map at all. This appears to happen when Kate has moved into the next "cluster" of rooms.
Both display modes are ineffective at showing where Kate needs to go to in order to achieve her objectives. The cross icon for the objective area can be sometimes at where she needs to go; at other times, it is centred on Kate herself.
There is a tool to have the map camera moving from Kate to the objective and vice versa, but it moves along a single straight line between the two locations and not along the path that Kate needs to take.
If there are anything that are helpful about the map display, they are the icons for air pockets, which are helpful in levels where there are flooded areas, and the colour-coding for doors and rooms which prevent too much time being wasted looking for paths of progress.
COLLECTIBLES:
Throughout the game, the player will find objects that Kate can retrieve and somehow carry on her person without any regard for space.
These items usually impart more information on the backstory of the game, and players who like well-conceived stories may appreciate them.
Unfortunately, these objects start to become increasingly rarer as the game progresses; incidentally, it starts to behave more and more like a third-person shooter when this happens, no thanks to the uneven pacing of the game that will be mentioned later.
Next, there are citations and adaptations of Thomas Robert Malthus's writings that are strewn in nooks and crannies of the levels. Players who have an interest in socio-economic-political arguments and have yet to hear of Malthus's works may appreciate these, but to other people, they can seem quite inconsequential beyond their suggestions that the antagonists of the game happen to cherry-pick.
MISCELLANEOUS BUGS & DUBIOUS GAME DESIGNS:
Water levels are actually not affected much by the flow of water. It may seem that the player can flush out excess water from one room by opening the door to the adjacent room, but the movement of water is just an illusion; the water levels in both rooms will only level out if they are scripted to do so.
Dying and reloading an earlier checkpoint sometimes prevent the player from decrypting any more messages off walls. When this happens, it can only be worked around by exiting and re-launching the game.
Sometime into the game, Kate is afflicted with a predicament that requires constant medication. Instead of implementing this tragedy as an ever-present gameplay element, it is little more than a series of scripted events in which a timer starts and the player must get Kate to somewhere as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, the player does not have to put up with this for too long before this recurring annoyance is replaced with one of the aforementioned gameplay elements.
STORYWRITING & PACING:
Unfortunately, there are few positive things that can be said about the story-writing and pacing of the main game mode.
The prologue and the first half of the first act are perhaps the best fleshed-out portions of the story. There are a lot of titbits on the backstory of the game and exposition on characters other than Kate and Scoot that are seemingly significant. This part of the game also introduces gameplay features in understandable ways.
However, this otherwise pleasant entrance eventually gives way to repetition of things that the player has already seen earlier, while the introduction of new things start to lessen to a trickle. The platforming segments also start to reduce in density. The only worthwhile elements of this stage of the main game mode are the mixed methods that the player can use to eliminate enemies with.
Eventually, character development stalls as the player is left with lonesome Kate. The gameplay also changes, from making use of the environment and Kate's tools to deal with enemies to just cover-based shooting that has been seen in so many third-person shooter titles.
Perhaps this change can be spun as more variety in the gameplay, but the game would have been better off with the more refreshingly different combat seen in the early parts of the game.
The game does introduce the water-manipulation powers, but this occurs so late into main game mode that its impact on gameplay can be perceived as very limited. The game does provide enough things in the environment for the meticulous player to experiment with, but other players would be dissatisfied that the game does not provide more gradual scenarios for their uses.
Worst of all, the game expects the player to be already quite familiar with it by the time the end of the game comes, which is very soon after the water-manipulation powers have been introduced.
The greatest disappointment is perhaps the fact that the game does not feature much of anything other than the engineering decks of the Queen of the World; there are some metro stations and subway plazas, but these are just it. Considering that the prologue showed a rather breath-taking view of the upper decks of the vast ship, that the player does not get to see more of them can be dissatisfying.
All of these issues detract from the awe that could have been had from the game, as well as limiting its potential.
CHALLENGE ROOM:
The other game mode in Hydrophobia: Prophecy is the Challenge Room. It can only be accessed after having completed the main game.
The Challenge Room can be played in one of two ways: the default way, or practice mode. In either mode, Kate is placed into a large room with entrances that she is barred from using.
There are two floors to this room: an upper floor that is made of perforated sheets of metal, and a lower floor that is flooded with a few feet of water and strewn with objects of various masses.
Anyway, the Challenge Room's practice setting would have been quite suitable for the purpose of practising with Kate's water-manipulating powers – if it was made available before the player completed the main game mode.
In the regular setting of the Challenge Room, Kate has to contend with enemies that are coming through the four polar entrances into the room on the lower floor.
They will take cover among the aforementioned objects, so the crafty player can actually use this behaviour against them by shifting the objects around to displace and knock them over.
Sooner or later, the player will also realize that the tower of water can be created through the upper floor, lifting anyone underneath the upper floor. The tower also clips through the upper floor (which can seem a bit unsightly). Enemies cannot shoot through the upper floor either.
In addition, there are ammunition boxes that are strewn about the upper floor, which reappear after every round so that the player can resupply.
All these designs can seem to give Kate an unfair advantage over enemies, but the latter compensate by having great numbers and the multiple directions of fire that are granted by their entry points. Moreover, the player has only five minutes each round to eliminate them (though this would probably be more than enough for skilled players).
Anyway, there are five rounds in the Challenge Room. Every round has a set number of enemies that have to be eliminated, though only several of them will be in the room at any one time. As the player kills them, new ones replace them, at least until their reinforcements are depleted.
Each round introduces more and more enemies, starting with thugs who are eventually replaced by mercenaries. Rounds 4 and 5 can be quite hairy.
The player accrues points by killing enemies in imaginative ways, as well as completing the round as fast as possible. Players who want to optimize their scores may want to juggle between killing enemies in multiple ways and saving time.
The biggest complaint about the challenge room actually concerns an audio flaw that had been unwittingly left undiscovered and unsolved. Enemies are spawned simultaneously in batches of two or three; all enemies of the same batch will execute their voice-over scripts at almost the same time, which result in incessant chatter and taunts as the developer has not seen fit to ensure that enemies of the same type choose different lines from their library of voice clips.
SCORES & LEADERBOARDS:
The meta-game in Hydrophobia: Prophecy involves the racking up of points that will eventually be entered into leaderboards for bragging rights.
In the main game mode, these points are generally accrued via destroying objects, defeating enemies or collecting documents and other collectibles. In the case of anything except defeating enemies, the point awards are fixed.
However, the game rewards the player for being creative at killing enemies. To be more precise, the player gets more points for committing overkill on them. There are several ways to kill an enemy with; there are visual indicators that appear on screen when the player kills an enemy with one or a combination of these methods. These visual indicators happen to be amusing variations of warning logos that are often seen on items or machines of industrial-make.
The scores that the player have accrued throughout the few acts in the main game mode and the Challenge Room are uploaded to the Steam leaderboards. However, in practice, this is perhaps best used for competition among friends who play fairly – assuming that they would want to play this game in the first place. This is because the highest rungs of the leaderboard are occupied by entries with stupendously high scores that strongly suggest of cheating.
CHARACTER MODELS:
To people that have played the original and much more flawed version of Hydrophobia, the changes in the models for the characters in the story can seem to be for the better.
Kate herself is mostly unchanged, though more (unsettlingly) observant players may notice that Kate looks a lot more convincingly athletic.
The character model that received the most significant changes is that for Scoot, who is Kate's immediate superior. In the original version of the game, Scoot was visibly overweight. For whatever reason, his model was changed to a more generic-looking white male. Perhaps some players were pleased by this, but such a change may raise uncomfortable questions, such as a suspicion of less-than-nice regard for overweight people.
However, other than Kate and Scoot, there are few other unique character models, and even these get little screen-time in-game outside of cutscenes or video recordings.
As for everyone else, they can be grouped into a few model types, with variations mainly in their head polygons. This is especially so for the fanatically murderous thugs that Kate would encounter. Although they do have other sources of variations like some of them wearing vests instead of T-shirts, they will eventually start to look all alike.
Fortunately, every character is convincingly animated. Kate is of course the best animated of the lot, having believable running, wading, climbing and swimming as well as cover-taking and aiming. Kate's sneaking does not look entirely convincing, but it is not too comical either.
However, the prologue that occurs in Kate's apartment would apparently show that the developer does not pay attention to minor details. Although Kate is within her own home, her pose is the same as that when she is in peril.
The other animated characters that the player would see are the enemies. They move and fight in decently believable ways, but they would not seem impressive to players that have played many shooter titles before.
The game does not resort to ragdolls too much when characters die from violence, which is fortunate considering what water physics would do on ragdolls. Models have restrictions on their limbs to ensure that they are not contorted in ridiculous ways when they turn into corpses, though this does not prevent them from being propped up against objects in the environments in unseemly poses.
There are animations for deaths caused by hazards, such as enemies flailing about while being on fire or shuddering violently when electrocuted. These can be satisfying to players who like to juggle with the point-scoring system.
Facial animations are quite minimal, outside of in-game cutscenes or the playbacks of in-game videos. Only a few characters have facial animations, with Kate having the most. Even so, these facial animations are not well-applied; where a set of facial expressions would have been fitting for a certain scenario, they are missing, giving Kate or another character a dead-pan face.
If there are any changes in facial expressions, they are mostly seen on Kate when she is engaged in combat, platforming or swimming, and even so, these are brief.
As for lip-synching in the game, it is just barely decent.
VISUAL DESIGNS OF WATER:
The water in Hydrophobia: Prophecy is perhaps the best-looking element of the graphical designs for the game. In addition to having loose jiggle physics as to be expected of fluids, bodies of water have either true polygons for the ripples on their surfaces or very convincing normal mapping of textures, or perhaps a combination of both. It is surprisingly difficult to make out which technique is used, even with deliberate repositioning of the camera along the water's surface.
The best graphical designs that the water has can be seen when it laps up against solid objects. The water surges and flows about them in very convincing ways, and sometimes decals of bubbles and foams are generated around the lines of contact to make this effect even more convincing. If the player has a powerful machine, he/she may even see copious sprinkles of water.
The water's surface also has very convincing reflections of its surroundings, when it is looked at while the camera is above the water's surface. The movement of the water distorts these reflections in believable ways and different viewing angles give different reflections. Moreover, the visual designs for reflections can also be seen underwater when the player looks up at the water's surface.
Going underwater also dims and reduces the player's range of vision, with greater depths resulting in darker surroundings, assuming that there are no light sources to illuminate the darkness – not that there is a need for that as the game won't force Kate to swim through very dark places.
Few other games, if any at all, could depict water in any way that is close to that in Hydrophobia: Prophecy.
The visual designs of the water also happen to hide the repetitiveness of the sci-fi industrial looks of the levels, as well as to disguise the fact that the player is backtracking a lot. Of course, this only works on players that are not observant.
The beauty of the water is disrupted when the player uses Kate's water-manipulating powers, as the jiggling-body physics of the water become more dominant over its more convincingly fluidic ones. It can appear as if the player is creating jelly out of the water and moving them about.
SHADOWING, LIGHTING & PARTICLE EFFECTS:
Much of the shadowing & lighting for the environments in this game, unfortunately, has been spent on the water. When water is not around, the game can seem drab. Fires are not believable light sources, actual light sources do not have bloom as befitting light sources and shadows are hardly dynamic.
In fact, if one is to use Kate's flashlight, he/she would have an impression that much of the effort that has gone into designing the lighting in the game has been invested in the flashlight's beam and its creation of shadows; these are comparable to those seen in other contemporary titles. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, there is very little reason to use the flashlight.
However, where lighting matters in gameplay, it appears to be adequate. The enemies' use of flashlights and laser sights gives away their presence; this is especially important when fighting underwater.
Most of the particle effects that the player will see in the game are rudimentary-looking, especially when one considers the particle effects that are seen in visually impressive contemporary games. Lightning arcs are little more than jaggy squiggles of bright purple and white, and the flames that are seen in this game have been seen in many other games before. At best, they look ominous and dangerous enough to inform the player of the presence of hazards.
Kate only has one gun but different rounds for them, so it is fortunate that every almost every round has its own particle effects. The exceptions are the semi-auto and rapid-fire rounds, which have subtle differences in their particle effects. Sonic rounds will be any player's most-used rounds, so it is convenient that sonic rounds leave behind a trail of blue helixes, which help the player aim.
VOICE-OVERS:
Most of the voice-overs are decent and pleasant to listen to – which is fortunate, considering that the same could not be said of the original version of Hydrophobia.
In the original version of the game, the voice of Scoot was done with a terribly stereotypical Scottish accent. He was almost unintelligible, which made him very difficult to listen to, even with subtitles turned on. There were also a lot of technical issues with his voice-overs, which were also considered too many by some.
Fortunately, in Hydrophobia: Prophecy, Scoot's sound designs have been reworked. This version of Scoot is voiced far more legibly by a voice-actor that is much huskier. Reworked Scoot is also a lot less chatty, which made him a lot more pleasant and more convincing as a "voice-in-the-head" character archetype.
Reworked Scoot also happens to make humorous remarks that are more convincingly amusing. For example, he makes a reference to Legend of Zelda when Kate has managed to make progress beyond an obstacle that she could not get through earlier.
Other than Scoot, the rest of the bulk of the voice-overs can be heard from Kate. Kate has a peculiar accent that hints of Australian, English, Scottish or Irish upbringing, but though her ethnicity is difficult to discern, her voice-overs are fortunately legible and more importantly, have convincing portrayals of her emotions. Kate also has convincing but not too overbearing grunts and groans for her swimming and platforming activities.
The enemies that Kate has to deal with also have their own voice-overs, but these are difficult to listen to over the din of the Queen of the World failing all around them. At best, their voice-overs serve to tip off the player to their presence.
SOUND EFFECTS & MUSIC:
Most of the sounds that the player would hear in this game are of the Queen of the World breaking apart. Damaged metal hulls creak and groan under the pressure of water, water splashes noisily just about everywhere, exposed power cables spark and crackle and if a room is huge enough to have a lot of water, the lapping of waves can be heard.
Other than these, there are the sound effects for when the player takes overt actions to handle threats or create a path for Kate. Damaged hull sections give way with loud clangs when the player shoots at them to implode them, propane barrels hiss as they catch fire after being shot before exploding and the crash and crinkling of pieces of fibreglass can be heard when transparent panes are shattered, among other sounds that denote when environment-changing occurrences have happened.
Then, there are gunshots. The enemies in this game are armed with shotguns and assault rifles, so there is not much variety to be heard from their weapons, though they are distinct enough to be heard when both above- and under-water. The underwater muffling of the gunshots is also quite convincing.
Kate's advanced pistol has different sound effects for different rounds, which complement the different particle effects for them as mentioned earlier. In particular, the reports for the semi-auto and rapid-fire rounds, which are almost visually similar, are aurally different; semi-auto rounds have thumping discharges, whereas rapid-fire rounds rattle off.
The musical soundtracks in the game are decent to listen to, but they are not memorable either. There are gentle tunes in the prologue, emphasizing the comfortable lives of the occupants of the Queen of the World. This is replaced by more ominous tracks for when the troubles start and even more suspenseful ones when enemies are in the vicinity.
CONCLUSION:
Hydrophobia: Prophecy has a lot of good ideas for unique gameplay and at the very least, it has shown that these are workable and quite fun when it is. However, dubious pacing and cliff-hanger story-writing gives a very strong impression that the game has wasted a lot of its potential.