I had a lot of high hopes for Hydrophobia: Prophecy. The character design, unintentionally funny dialogue and voice acting, basic military shooter story, low review scores, and gimmick of water physics manipulation really checked every box of what I look for in my firth person shooter games.

The only box it didn't check though was it being actually fun to play. Most of the game is spent scanning way points on walls with a scan pad, then doing Batman Arkham City style wavelength puzzles, and finally doing a bit of Uncharted style scripted climbing sequences, finished off with a little underwater swimming sections. The first 2 chapters (out of 3) have very same-y environments, filled with a lot of elevator shafts and air vent crawling.

When you do get to do shooting, combat feels very bad with your starter charge pistol ammo being the best in the game. I had no incentive or reason to use any other ammunition until the final (and only) boss which suddenly asks the player to use the electric ammo. You also don't even get your water powers until the last 10 minutes of the 3 hour campaign.

I didn't like this one very much... But I will say the water physics are very impressive. The way the amount remains consistent when filling a room up or emptying it out into an adjacent room does showcase some quality engineering.

Hydrophobia was a game that was announced a few years ago, but quickly was forgotten about and seemed to have gone into the way of vaporware, but suddenly it came back as an XBLA game. The game was boasted about excellent water and physics to support it, as well as a mantra of “the water is your enemy” selling point. Upon release, the game seemed highly overrated with dated visuals, poor combat, and lackluster level design. While most of this is true there is still something to be had in Hydrophobia.

The PC port boasts better graphics and refined gameplay mechanics, but there are still some issues. The water physics really are incredible and I haven’t seen anything quite like it with water bursting in through a door and making Kate act like if you were actually in an ocean or being bombarded by waves. While it feels a bit stiff to maneuver through this it makes you feel like you are trying to desperately escape this sinking city. While the physics are good the story is a bit lacking with little to go by due to the short length. You are trying to stop some crazy Russian woman named Mila from using a corporation’s nanobots as a biological weapon and that’s about as far as it goes…literally. Why is the game called hydrophobia? Does Kate have it? It seems that way because when you get close to drowning you can hear her thoughts of maybe in her childhood she almost drowned? The game never explains this.


While you trudge on through the watery depths you can clamber your way up to areas for platforming segments which are far and few between. The beginning of the game mainly consists of this then slowly becomes very combat heavy. Combat isn’t very fun in the game due to a poor cover mechanic (there really isn’t one except ducking) and the shooting feels a bit stiff. You have one pistol that you can swap ammo with such as semi-auto/auto rounds, explosive gel, electrocution rounds, and your main ammo type is a charged kinetic shot that can knock enemies dead. Later on in the game, they throw so many enemies at you that it detracts from the watery atmosphere.

Another issue is level design because everything is very claustrophobic and is built of just tons of hallways. It’s another problem when your MAVI unit tells you to go in one direction and sometimes it will be a pain to find out how to get there because of the lack of natural clues. Sometimes you have to go into a hacking minigame, sometimes you have to find a decipher code on a wall that you can only see with the MAVI and find these will drive you nuts sometimes.


The visuals are good for the level that they are at, but even with a high-end system, you will experience frame rate drops and stuttering. They have gotten better since its initial release, but it still exists. The visuals overall have some low-resolution textures, and the characters have terrible lip syncing and the art style is pretty stale. What should you play the game for? It’s a decent 5-6 adventure with great water physics that haven’t really been done before. That’s pretty much it and for the low price point, it’s well worth it.

The gameplay is repetitive, the story pacing is sloppy, and the fluid mechanics add essentially nothing to the game. I found myself yawning often while fast paced music attempted to keep me awake. I don't usually regret buying games but this is one of those rare moments where I wished I had done some research beforehand.

I played a fair amount, enough to give me a very good idea of how excited I'll probably be if I decided to beat it. Obviously it wasn't a lot of excitement, because I decided to write this review instead of finishing the game.

Don't bother with this game unless you need to take the express train to Snoresville.

Obviously unfinished, but playing with just enough interesting ideas to make that a lament instead of a dig. The game was made to showcase water physics, and although the level design doesn't always play to that strength, the few puzzles that did prickled my game liker's intuition, as if to say, "maybe water puzzles don't have to suck," even though most of them do.

Hydrophobia wears its influence of Metal Gear Solid 2 on its sleeve and nearly every article of clothing it has. Out at sea on a giant scientific research facility, terrorists attack, take hostages, and later reveal the science being done is different than the science being advertised to the public. It is up to you, alone, (with a guy in your ear) to sneak around and/or kill the terrorists and save the science, with your non-lethal pistol and highly strapped athletic wear.

There's no getting around it, the combat is not fun. On paper, we have sneak attacks, guards that react to footsteps and gunshots, and sticky bombs that can be detonated on a timer or remotely. In practice, enemy lines of sight are impossible to read, the music glitches when it should be indicating whether enemies are still alive, and the gunplay is clunky. Add in the "screen turns red when you get hurt instead of a real healthbar" mechanic and you will likely die of confusion more than once.

"Unique water physics" is the only part worth recommending about Hydrophobia, and is criminally underutilized. Being on a sinking boat, there are plenty of set pieces of rooms flooding other rooms, but this rarely registers as an interactive experience. Partially that is a form of praise, as the changing water levels and the player character's seamless transition from walking, partially submerged, and underwater transversal animations were so natural as to go unnoticed, even with roiling waves that buffeted Kate with a felt, but subtle conservation of momentum.

The only time I appreciated what this game had was in my attempt to complete one of the game's (pointless) objectives, to flood a given hallway. Doing so required opening and closing doors from two and three rooms away, standing by them to keep them open, and watching the water pour in. After that leveled out across the rooms, I had to break glass walls within the hallway to release more water. (Delightful fact: the metal doors affixed to these glass walls still told me "access denied" after their walls ceased to exist.) If I had closed the door to the hallway before breaking the glass, the water level would finally rise to flood the entire place. It was such a unique feeling that I had understood the architecture of the level design and the physical properties of waterflow that made me think how "normal" water puzzles in other games consist of flipping a switch to raise or lower the water level to pre-determined heights. A whole game like this, about presenting you puzzles that required you to think about water and the space it inhabited, could have been something special. But this great moment was completely optional. The game was more interested in making me shoot things and fall off jungle gyms.

Aside from the story being a Le Croix of a plot and ending in what would feel like the first chapter of a finished game, you can tell the game is unfinished because it throws a unique gameplay mechanic in ten minutes before the final boss. And it has a dedicated shoulder button! Clearly the water physics were meant for this mechanic, but the developers ran out of time. You get to play with it a bit in a challenge room after you beat the campaign, but still remains mostly as a glimmer of what could have been.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and I give Hydrophobia Prophecy a C- at 1.5 stars. It's glitchy and buggy, but not unplayable. There's ambition behind its brevity, but even some of the completed elements are still kinda bad. It has claimed some real estate in my brain for the legendarily bad line, "I've got two balls, Kate, and neither of them crystal." For $2, you could do worse.