Go back 10 years and there were a lot of boat racers on the old consoles and in the arcades, one of the most memorable being Hydro Thunder. This genre of games seemed to disappear until now, where Hydro Thunder Hurricane has hit the XBLA as part of the Summer of Arcade promotion. It seems that the Xbox Live Arcade is the only place now to find a decent enough boat racer worth your cash, and it is worth it indeed! The game is developed by a brand new studio Vector Unit, but for a first title they have done an extremely good job!
Hydro Thunder Hurricane is an arcade game with a large amount of content in it - Races, Ring Master Challenges, Gauntlet mode and a Championship mode (a mix of the three types of races). Along with all this Single Player content there are also 2 multiplayer modes, one of which is a standard race with up to 8 players, and another called ‘Rubber Ducky’ mode which is 4v4 team based game. Although the title might not sound great at a first glance, this mode is a ton of fun! It puts one person on each team as a rubber duck then the other 3 as standard boats, the objective is to stop the other rubber duck so yours can win the race, delivering lots of laughs and giggles.
There are 8 tracks in the game, although that may not sound like many they are all completely different and deliver new challenges. The game being on water gives an added sense of uncertainty to what’s going to happen, also every track has a few shortcuts which can be found and used at your will to give you an added advantage. Along with all this the tracks also have packages which need to be collected for an achievement, 10 on each track. All of this makes every track worthwhile playing and with the massive drops and jumps on most tracks, it makes the game that much more enjoyable.
The game feels and plays really well too, with so much depth going into the tracks you may think that the boats don’t look great and that the controls would be affected, but not this game. The boats are not the best looking, but they certainly look good enough for an arcade game. The controls are extremely simple, taking no time to get used to and feel standard for any racer game. The controls being so simple makes the game more focused on the element of fun, what games should be, and not a grind to master.
Overall I think Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a very solid game. It’ll give you the urge to return every so often with its online leaderboards and enjoyable online modes. The game has a lot of single player content, a very good achievement list to keep you playing and trying to master the challenges, along with avatar awards - a nice feature! At a steep 1200MSP some people may be put off, but you can get many hours out of this game on the single player alone, despite the most fun to be had being in the multiplayer. Hydro Thunder Hurricane is worth every penny in my opinion, and is a must have for anyone who likes to sit back, relax and have a ton of fun with a racing game!
Hydro Thunder Hurricane gets an Official Game-Pad - 8.5/10