I’m always interested in games that tout some kind of new tech. I played with the Force Unleashed to see how they had put the Havok Engine (which deals with physics), the DMM (Digital Molecular Matter) engine (which deals with how materials bend or break) and the Euphoria AI engine (which deals with how the various characters interact with each other, and the environment. I played Fuel, because of their procedurally generated world.
So when I saw Hydrophobia boasting the “HydroEngine” billed as “the world’s first fluid dynamics engine for games”, I decided to try the demo.
I very quickly became irritated by cut-scenes that seem to interrupt every 5 seconds. At least that’s what it feels like! Some of the cut-scenes work, and I can’t think of any other way to progress the story without them. The rest, though, they could do different ways. In many cases, since a lot of the exposition is radio communications, then they could just continue the action. They do take this tack a few times anyway – just not often enough. The other technique they could use, taking a leaf out of Valve’s book, would be to have an ‘interactive’ cut scene, where things happen around the character, while you can still control them.
The one saving grace is that you can skip the cut-scenes. Except that I don’t want to skip them the first time though, because I want the story. I just don’t want it to interrupt the … cough … flow of the game.
Oh, the HydroEngine? Uh .. I’ll let you know after I’ve played again.
