After hearing about Hydro Thunder: Hurricane a few months back, I’ve been pretty excited for it. I was a huge fan of the first one and was stoked that a true follow up was coming. So when the game released on LIVE this week I picked it up. I was pleased as well as let down.
As far as staying true to Hydro Thunder it does that, but what I seemed to forget about Hydro Thunder is that it’s a bit of a shallow game. There are different kinds of race modes and challenges. All the unlocks are based on a credit system. You score credits doing various races on various tracks and game modes. The harder difficulty the more credits you earn. Pretty simple set up. That seems to be the problem with the game. It’s as ‘Pick up and Play’ as you can get it. I suppose that’s fine for some people, but being a fan of the game I wanted more depth.
There are three boats in each class to unlock and several a few tracks. To be honest I can’t remember at the moment how many tracks, but one of the nicer things about the game is even though you use the same tracks for every game mode they always vary. You will run a different route for each game type almost every time. On top of that each difficulty setting changes things up on a large scale basis every time you change up. So I guess the thing that should be said is the game is pretty shallow for content, but makes up the difference in game modes.
There are Avatar Awards for Hydro Thunder as well. You get a Hydro Thunder Avatar shirt as well as a Avatar prop that is one of the boats from the game. There are also gamer pics to be un-locked. All the unlocks on the game are pretty easy to come by. The hardest one is gathering 18,500 credits to get the Avatar prop.
All in all, the game is a solid buy for racing fans, fans of the series or casual gamers. Anyone else will have a hard time paying 1200 MS points to purchase the game.
