Hydro Thunder Boat Race Game

Download Hydro Thunder and race through adrenaline-pumping waterways in this high-speed boat racing game! Master powerful boats, navigate treacherous courses, and conquer the competition. Make waves and play now!

If you ever saw my good self playing a racing game you'd never want to get in a car with me. You'd also steer clear of hopping in a boat with me as well, thanks to Hydro Thunder. This game, which substitutes cars for power boats, is fun but by no means a perfect racer. A certain amount of suspended disbelief is required as you race round a New York disaster area or a ship graveyard. Your boat doesn't really take much damage, even when you're dodging lava flows, killer whales and plunging down the odd 200ft drop.

In all you have a choice of nine boats, with nine difficulty tracks, plus four bonus tracks for your money. Hydro Thunder is purely about speed and agility, although, since half your time is spent in the air, if you are skilled at timing your jumps it might as well be a flight sim too. It's simplistic and highly addictive, elicibng the much-needed adrenaline rush lacking in so many games.

Game Reviews

Hydro Thunder is the result of 18 months of hard Midway's San Diego team, this game is the ultimate in super boats--an area of racing mostly overlooked in the arcade industry. "I have looked at several boat simulators, mostly on the PC," states Steve Ranck, head designer. "Even though they say on the box they use realistic physics, nothing stands out." He's right. Most "boat simulators" put you in the cockpit of a stationary object as tons of sprites and backgrounds come racing toward you. Hydro will be different. What looks to be the ultimate boat sim focuses on three types of boats: Catamarans (a cool speed boat with two pontoons), Super Boats (your basic V-hull power boat) and Hydro Boats (those awesome two-pound boats that always look like they're about to flip over). There are also a few secret boats, one of which will be a hovercraft, and another is a concept speed boat created by the team. This leads into the levels of difficulty. HT has three difficulty levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Unlike some games where a ramped-up difficulty simply means harder competitors, HT offers more control over your boat. In the Beginner level, your vehicle is very stable. As you advance, you get into faster vehicles like the Hydro Boats, and you learn how to use waves to get to boosts hanging in the air or to jump to a higher placement.

Gameplay

If you are looking for a challenging racing game, look no further. This game has to be one of the most difficult racers I have played in a long time. It is not quite difficult to the point of frustration but it is difficult to the point of wanting to play it again and again to just win one more race. This is the sign of a good racing game in my eyes. You will not sit down and finish this game in one or two gaming sessions. Hell, I would memorize a track and race it 15-20 times more before I would beat it. The game is broken out into four different racing categories and you must start at the first (easy) to unlock the next category (medium). There are three easy tracks and three easy boats that you can select. If you finish in the top three on all three of the tracks, you unlock three medium tracks and three medium boats. You must finish in the top two on all three of these tracks to unlock the hard tracks. If you finish in first place on all of the hard tracks, you will open up bonus tracks and boats. The game starts getting difficult on the medium tracks. I spent hours trying to get past them and I think that I am pretty good at racing games.

There are two real stars of this game. The first star would have to be the boats and the different designs. All of the boats look, feel, and handle differently. Some look like traditional hydros while others look nothing like a hydro but are cool all the same. Each boat has different speeds and handling and it is very important to select the correct boat -- it makes all the difference in the world.