(Note: from now on, all reviews will have the same scoring system as the GameAxis Unwired of yore. A 1.0 means it blows hard, while a 10.0 means that it’s perfect in every way)

I never did touch the first Hydro Thunder game; I never did care about the craze of racing games in the arcade, no matter how stunning it looked and how flexible it controlled. Well, unless the game rhymed with “Aytona”.

Even if I don’t have any fondness for a ten-year old game, I don’t need it to tell you that its sequel, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, is a blast to play if only for the cheap arcade thrills you’ll be getting. What HTH lacks in depth, it makes up for its focus on achieving a lot out of its simple mechanics. All you need to worry about is collecting as many boost tanks as possible to allow you to accelerate as fast as possible, as well as familiarize yourself with the layout of the course. Reflexes play a huge part when you’re tackling a course the first time, of course, but a little memorization never hurt anyone, particularly if you’re grinding for credits to unlock new maps and challenges.

Unlike land-based arcade racers, bobbing waves play an intricate part in the game. Using a boost jump as soon as the water bobs upwards gives you more height and airtime for your jumps while going downwards onto a crashing wave speeds up your descent and adds to your speed. When the tide bogs down, certain obstacles (like exploding barrels) will submerge which means you can bypass them for a brief second.

The water tracks themselves are plentiful and are well-designed; each map has its own traps and tricky turns for players to deal with. It also helps that it’s chock-full of detail; well, as much detail as a downloadable title can get. The Stormy Asgardian track has a huge Norse motif, while the Monster Track has water-based dinosaurs popping out of the water at certain intervals of a lap.

Still, there are a few impurities in this hydro-based entity. Ring Master mode, a gameplay type which literally makes you drive through hoops, can be a bit too tough unless you’ve been at arcade racers since the days of Outrun. While driving through each hoop gives you a speed boost, it’s hard to get to the next hoop without slowing down. And if you slow down too much just to get trickily-placed hoops, you end up losing too much time. Ring Master mode demands perfection, and frankly, I’m not the kind of guy who strives for that kind of achievement in an arcade racer.

Did I also forget to mention that the only thing you’re unlocking are new vehicles, challenges, and tracks, and there’s only one definite way to get them? As I mentioned before, you can just grind for credits by playing through the races over and over. Whatever happened to giving out specific objectives that give you extra credits while on a race? If anything, HTH could have used some semblance of variety in that field.

At the end of the day, it’s not everyday that developers drop a water-based racing game onto your lap that’s worth a damn, so we should be thankful that someone had the decency to give us something like HTH. HTH is indeed worth shilling money for if you get your jollies from arcade thrill rides, provided that you’re expecting nothing too deep. Or if you’re the kind of player who thinks the recent Outrun remake is too easy.

Rating: 8.0 (Pretty Good)