Hydrophobia - one to watch out for. Pt1.

Keith Stuart has been looking at Hydrophobia - Blade Interactive’s watery adventure game. Part one of this feature fills you in on what the game is all about and why it’s looking so promising. Parts two and three will be an interview with Pete Jones, one of Blade Interactive’s MDs, and Rob Hewson, the game’s designer…

One of the cult stars of this year’s largely disappointing E3 was a futuristic adventure, created by a UK developer best know for, well, snooker sims. Hydrophobia is the latest project from Blade Interactive, previously responsible for the solid, if not exactly epoch-shattering likes of World Snooker Championship 2007. But anyone who saw the company’s brief yet scintillating E3 tech demo will know this game is about as far from Steve Davis as human comprehension can deal with. “We often say that Hydrophobia is Die Hard meets, Titanic, meets the Abyss, meets Deep Blue Sea, meets Under Siege,” says joint MD, Pete Jones. Which is a lengthy description, but by the looks of things, extremely accurate.

Set in a nightmarish near-future where rising water levels have sunk most of mankind, Hydrophobia is based aboard a lavish floating city, the last bastion of civilisation on a planet rapidly going to the dogfish. At the beginning of the game, the craft is bombed by a group of terrorists known as the Malthusians – named after political economist Thomas Malthus who predicted that population growth would one day outpace agricultural production, returning society to a subsistence level of existence. Yep, like Bioshock, this is a game with quiet socio-political pretensions. While 2K Boston‘s epic studied the barmy objectivism of Ayn Rand, Hydrophobia is a sort of philosophical eco-thriller, operating at the end of Earth’s ability to sustain human life. Which is a bit more interesting than Nazis and space monsters.

As security officer Kate Wilson, you must escape the stricken vessel while battling the vengeful eco warriors. But as the tech demo suggests, this isn’t just a standard corridor-based blast-‘em-up. Hydrophobia features a real-time fluid dynamics engine, pitching the player against a new enemy; water. The stuff is everywhere, flooding compartments, blowing out doors, submerging key items and providing a neat way to get rid of enemies. See that room full of bad guys? Chuck a floating grenade into the flooded chamber next door and boom, the wall collapses and they’re under 10,000 gallons of gushing brine.