Hydro Thunder

"This game just feels "thrown together"..."

Graphics: 9

Okay, I have to admit that the graphics are pretty good for Hydro Thunder. The boats look nice, the water looks nice, and the levels look nice too. There's no pop-up or anything stupid, everything is smooth, and there's even nice water sprays from your boat (although these could probably have been better). I guess there's nothing else to say here.

Sound: 7

Well, I don't know... the sound is of generally high quality at least, but somehow I don't like it. The announcer's voice just seems annoying to me, and they use it a lot. Otherwise, the sound effects are okay, but not spectacular. There are some sound effects that trigger through the level (like a tarzan yell when you go over a huge waterfall or something) that are kind of neat though. There's some music in the game too, but it's not very good. I think it plays music during the race (it's very quiet), but it's the bad music during the high score screen that really annoys me somehow.

Gameplay: 6

Here's where things start take take a real turn for the worst. This is boat racing, so the control is not really like cars obviously. This isn't the bad part though, the strange part is with the boosters. As you race around the track, you pick up booster fuel, and use it for speed boosts. This is all well and good except for two uses of this boost fuel. For one, you can JUMP using it. That's right, the boat jumps. What you do is hold brake, and then hit boost, and for some reason, this causes your boat to jump. The only real use for this is to get to secret areas, and to jump for more boost fuel when necessary. The second use of boost fuel is to use your ''mighty hull'' (I'm not making this up, this is what they call it in the manual!). What this ''mighty hull'' does, is when you activate your boosters, your boat flashes a bit. If your hit another boat while doing this, it will be sent flying. This really doesn't affect it that much, and you can't really go flying ahead of them by doing this, so I don't really see much of a point to it. I suppose it would be fun to smash your friend around a bit, but that's about it. In fact, the stupid name ''mighty hull'' alone is enough to annoy me.

Oh, and there's a bunch of locked stuff (I hate locked stuff. I already *paid* for the game, just give me the damn game). You get 3 out of 12 boats at first, and 3 out of 12 courses. Things get unlocked in groups of three, and there are three categories for each of the boats/tracks: Easy (unlocked by default), Medium (these are unlocked next), Advanced, and Bonus (unlocked last). The game actually gives you a verbal warning before you pick the advanced boats or tracks, which seems stupid to me, because they're really not that much harder. I'm not terribly good at the game, and I can still do decently well with an ''advanced'' boat on an ''advanced'' course, so I can't imagine this taking that long to win at. The boats all have stupid names like ''Damn the Torpedoes'', ''Miss Behave'', and ''Thresher''... the bonus boats are interesting, but are kinda out of place in the game.

The two player mode is pretty basic... there's a vs mode, and that's it. No four-player either.

Options: 3

Uh well... there aren't many really. I mean, you can change the volume, and use the jump pack and all... but there's no cool options like reverse tracks or anything like that. There isn't even a tournament mode or anything, just single races. In fact, the VMU saving is pretty bad... you have to save and load manually for some reason, so if you forget to save (or get mad and turn the system off right away), you'll lose whatever you just did.

I suppose the main stuff worth mentioning here is the unlocking of courses and boats, which I've pretty much already mentioned.

Overall: 6

I can't shake the feeling that this game was thrown together, and released before it was really finished. Maybe it's just from having played Mortal Kombat Gold, but I really can't recommend this game with so many other good Dreamcast racing games available. If all of what I said above actually sounds good, don't believe it... I can't really convey just how badly this game fits together... it has great graphics, and some good sound and stuff, but it just isn't fun somehow.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/02, Updated 01/06/02