Hydro Thunder Hurricane – Review

In the mid to late 90s, Sega and Midway ruled the arcades. They had a knack of producing loud, brassy and amazingly playable games with some absolutely amazing cabinets wrapped round them. Power Drift, LA Rush, Afterburner and Outrun were obvious favourites but I don’t recall ever seeing Hydro Thunder in any of the local neon palaces I used to frequent.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane updates Sega / Midway’s original overblown speedboat racer for the Xbox Live Arcade. 1200 points will buy you exactly the sort of thrills, noises and eye-popping presentation those old cabinets were renowned for.

The only problem is it’s now 2010, things have moved on a tad, and even though we’re talking about an Xbox Live Arcade game, standards have risen to the point where Hydro Thunder Hurricane looks decidedly out of place amongst the other XBLA offerings making up the “Summer of Arcade” catalogue.

To be fair to the developers Vector Unit have made something that has the same instant “jump in and play” appeal you’d expect from a good arcade title. You can almost imagine yourself chucking a couple of quid away on something like this while on holiday but like all arcade games, the proof of a good one is whether or not it keeps you hitting the ‘start’ button every time you crash out or fail to grab a podium place.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane provides you with a series of races in fantasy / theme park settings. At first, you’re given a fairly basic track and craft to race with, but winning each race unlocks new tracks, new boats and new liveries for your racer.

In an era where realistic physics and reactive fluid dynamics are the sort of thing you see bandied around in press releases, Hydro Thunder Hurricane makes no pretence that it’s realistically simulating massive waves and the wakes of other craft – though the water effects are fairly pleasing and certainly look the part. It’s just frustrating to see gigantic waves or passing opponents having no more effect on your speedboat than a fish silently breaking wind 20 metres below.

Sticking with the rather fantastical premise and handling of the game, some of the levels you’ll play in are fairly imaginative from a cruise around Valhalla (complete with speeding Viking longboats to avoid) to a quick nip around Area 51 (saucers, aliens, you name it, it’s in there). The visuals are complimented by some workmanlike rawk serving as a soundtrack but at least you can switch that off (or ignore it for the most part).

I quite liked the emphasis on maintaining boost. Like a water-borne Burnout, chaining boost multipliers together makes for an easy win early on in the game, though obviously as the difficulty ramps up a little with each completed race, you’ll be fighting with opponents, the environments you’re racing in and some fairly nasty obstacles in order to keep that boost flowing.

The difficulty curve and unlock rewards of the game will keep you playing for a while, and there are some great moments of argy bargy to be had in multiplayer. The main problem I had with Hydro Thunder Hurricane was that it just felt so monotonous and repetitive.

Perhaps the recent burst in activity on the racing game scene could be partly responsible for this failing to win me over. Though Hydro Thunder Hurricane is pretty much the only speedboat racer out there, it doesn’t mean it can rest on its laurels in that respect. It still has to have the immediate “wow” factor of something like Split/Second – but it doesn’t. It still has to have the absolutely beautifully balanced and rewarding online multiplayer of something like Blur, but it doesn’t.

Heck, it doesn’t even do much to stretch the Xbox 360’s graphical prowess as it’s fairly ugly, the speedboat designs are like something from an early 3DFX game and the whole game V-Synch tears like crazy.

Fans of the original Hydro Thunder will undoubtedly feel more positive about the game and it may win over a few fans with its mix of nostalgia and immediacy. But in this day and age, with recent XBLA releases like Limbo to compete with, 1200 points for Hydro Thunder Hurricane is too high a price to relive a few scant moments of your youth playing something that feels like it should’ve stayed as a dim and distant memory rather than get a rudimentary update like this.

Our rating

6/10