[Review] Thundering Through the Waves

Hydro Thunder Hurricane released 2 weeks ago on the Xbox Live Arcade as part of the Summer of Arcade promotion.  The eccentric speedboat racing game is a remake of the age-old racing game that used to be played in actual arcades.  Most of the game is centered around racing around tracks, on water of course, and unlocking various items, like boats, skins, championships and more.  The one part that isn’t as much racing as it is precision are the Ring Challenges, which on expert take a considerable amount of skill to get even a bronze trophy, let alone a gold.

For an arcade game, it looks fantastic.  The water is rendered beautifully and can impact your race quite significantly.  You could be thinking its smooth sailing, and then a giant wave flings you up into the air and into a rock, making you have to reset your boat and lose valuable time and speed. That could very much be the difference between first and second, or on expert, first and even fourth.  A fair portion of the events that happen within the races are somewhat scripted, so some waves can be somewhat predictable, but there are still ones that can throw you off.

The environments are vast and you can take a few routes to win each race.  In fact, in some of the expert races, it’s imperative that you use shortcuts to win.  The environments are also exactly that, where everything from various signs to even the various wave inducing factors are made to seem like they’re actually part of the environment. Finally, the last part of the equation is the boats.  Each has 3 skins which are unlocked by collecting the various hidden Hydro Thunder logo collectibles on each track.  Each track has 10 collectibles, whether in weird or hard to reach places, so get hunting!

The typical arcade dynamic of starting you in last place and having you push through to first is present in every single-player mode. As of writing, I still have yet to score a first in the last race of the series, Area 51 on Expert.  Also, unlocking various races, ring challenges and championships is done by scoring credits from placing well in races.  The better you place, the more credits you receive, the faster you unlock new things; it’s a pretty simple but effective dynamic.

The game really shines when you take yourself online versus other players.  There are those that literally know the tracks off by heart and are quite hard to beat, but what game doesn’t have those?  When you race people at your skill level the game can get super intense: pushing each other out of the way of power-ups so you can swipe them from right under their nose.  The satisfaction of boosting away from them when you know they have no boost is absolutely priceless, but can be equally frustrating when it happens to you.

One other online component the game brings in is friend leaderboards before you race.  This brings in competitive spirit between friends and trash talking online in the game and even across other mediums.  Shadow Complex and Trials HD did this amazingly well, and the sincerest form of flattery is replication.  While HTH does not have the same pop-ups as Shadow Complex, it does give you splits at each checkpoint to your next person that is fastest on that track.  Are you the fastest on your list? Don’t worry, the game well get you your next target from the global leaderboards.

Overall, the game is a blast to play and play again.  Replaying a track just to top a certain friend’s time will surely keep some players coming back for more.  Of course, getting all the achievements in the game will take quite a while as one of them is for nailing out all the gold trophies every game type and boat class combination.  With that said, if you like racing games, you’ll likely enjoy racing in this game as well.