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Who would have thought a game about water would be so good. The game takes place in a book and the ink has taken over making a mess of the place and its your job as the puddle of water to riddle the book of the ink beings and get it looking like normal again by collecting drops of rainbows...? Sounds silly, but the actual game is brilliant. You start out as a puddle, doing minor puzzles using water based physics, then proceed to unlock abilities such as keeping your water in a blob, turning it into ice and even a cloud. Your wiimote basically acts as a tilt mechanism, but you can also give it a nudge to jump. The 1 and 2 buttons are used for some special abilities the ice and clouds gain further down the track. The game is huge for a wiiware game, there are 4 worlds to progress, each holding 20 rainbow drops and some jigsaw pieces that unlock some mini games. The trick here is that some rainbow drops can only be obtained by unlocking more abilities, so here's where it gets all metroid on you. You will revisit areas only to access new puzzles that couldnt be done before because you didnt have the ability to do it. On top of that areas of each world can only be unlocked by collecting a certain amount of rainbow drops. Its not all roses, there are enemies, the ink blob that if you dont kill them correctly with your water, can wither it away pretty quickly, theres also a bunch of obstacles like lava, spikes, poison clouds and water suctions that can deter your puddle. In that sense if you dont concerntrate enough and lose focus on you water, you can lose life pretty quickly. You can gain a maximum of 5 lives by collecting water droplets throughout the level, think of them as sonic's rings. They are scattered in the levels but defeating ink will give you some as well. Your water when at full health can not get any bigger, but as you start to lose water it will diminish in size to a point where if you lose too much it must be refilled by the drops you collect. The game does a stellar job of introducing the mechanics slowly and the worlds are designed as such that you'll never get stuck and always have somewhere to explore. It has a cartoony look, very basic, as is the music and sound effects, but they all do the job and never detract from the experience. There is some frustration, especially in the later levels where precision is vital, but its all part of what makes hydroventure so good. One of the best wiiware games ive played for sure! Did anyone pick this up? |
Hydroventure
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figaro7 1,396 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 15 years ago -
Oh-Bollox 6,513 posts
Seen 2 years ago
Registered 14 years agoI'm fucked currently, lost my SD card, no space left on my Wii's HDD. No more Wiiware games for me.
No games for me full fucking stop because I've ran out of space for saves. -
Don't like to see a great game get lost with no one giving it a chance and whilst there isn't much love for WiiWare games on here anyone who has a Wii and can access WiiWare should download this as this is up there with Lost Winds and World Of Goo as being in the top echelon of downloadable titles (and when I say downloadable I mean right across the console spectrum, not just on the Wii
At 1200 points it is one of the more expensive titles but when you see the quality that has gone into this game you can understand why, it is an almost faultless puzzle/platform game, figaro7 pretty much sums up the playing mechanics up above but would just like to add that this shows perfectly how the Wiimote can be used in games, all the movements come natural after a while, the power-ups are nicely placed and the puzzles themselves grow in difficulty at a nice pace.
Some puzzles are really simple one screen affairs, some cover many screens and are very intricate in what you need to do, swapping between water, ice and cloud, using rain, thunder and wind all in one massive puzzle.
An excellent game that really should be played by more people.
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