If I ever meet the man who decided that funny accents are endearing, I am going to punch him in the head. I am going to make him intimate with the pain that he has caused me over the years, and then I am going to break his fingers so that he may never write again. Then there will be a big party with lots of cake to celebrate his forced retirement, but he won't be invited, because no fantasy is complete without cake....The first person to quote Portal gets stabbed.

Hydrophobia's protagonist is an American woman who, whenever she feels like it, tries to talk with an Australian accent and fails. Her best friend is an American man who, whenever he feels like it, tries to talk with a Scottish accent and makes my ears bleed. The majority of the exposition takes place in conversations between the two of them, and it would probably be pretty funny if I could hear it over the sound of me grinding my teeth.

You see, I was deceived. I downloaded the trial game and started it up but was called away before I had left the protagonist's apartment. In the time I spent wandering around her living room, I felt that I had gotten to know her pretty well (which is usually when they tell me to get out or they'll call the cops): Her hobbies, her profession and her level of fitness, all of which are relevant to the game, all of which are revealed without a word of dialogue. Take note: This is the proper way to establish the main character in a videogame. So, when I left, I did so with the impression that Hydrophobia was made by a competent developer. "Lol," as they say.

I need to take a moment to explain the story before I can deride it. In the future, the world is overpopulated, and the solution is to build giant ships for people to live on. Take a moment to ponder the phenomal absence of logic behind this reasoning. The first city-ship ever built is celebrating its anniversary when a terrorist group decides that this is the best time to sink it, thus putting their plan to reduce the world's population to sustainable levels into effect. Good job, guys: 1,000,000 down, only 9.5 billion to go.

The terrorists board the ship with the help of a mysterious inside man. As he is the only other person aside from the protagonist who survives the initial explosions, my money is on "Scotty". Oh, I'm sorry, his nickname is "Scoot". The Chief Engineer in Hydrophobia is not at all based on the Chief Engineer from Star Trek. My apologies to him, as well as to Helmsman Zulo and Navigator Chetov. Could you ask Captain Dirk to let me out of the brig now? And tell Mr Slock to stop pinching me.

Every time you walk from one side of a room to another, there is a cutscene. Every time there is a cutscene, the protagonist does something stupid. I was in a party with a friend back home while I was playing Hydrophobia, and this is what he heard me say during one such cutscene:

"There are bombs going off all over the place, and you're walking towards the beeping? Oh, look, it was a bomb. I HOPE YOU'RE DEAD!"

The impression that I had before I started playing Hydrophobia was that it was, as my friend so succinctly put it, "a glorified tech demo" for the Hydro Engine. After playing it, that's still my impression, because it certainly doesn't qualify as a game. I must confess, the behaviour of the water is very impressive. It would be even more impressive if it wasn't constantly obscured by foam, but I suppose that's realistic too. Unfortunately, the way in which your character interacts with the water is not the least bit realistic. A person cannot sprint in thigh-high water in real life, much less remain standing after being hit by a shoulder-high wave. These modifications were obviously made for gameplay purposes, and it was probably the right thing to do, but you can't go around claiming to offer realistic water when it has all the weight of a summer breeze. Nonetheless, it's a neat piece of programming, and I would like to see it again in a proper game.

This is not a review. I haven't played the whole game, nor do I ever intend to do so. Writing a full review of part of a game is not fair, so I'll leave the scarifying to the people who are being paid to play this piece of garbage. This is just a warning for the benefit of my readers, and an exercise in humourous writing for myself. Feedback is always appreciated. Thank you for your time.

[tags: hydrophobia, first impression, portal, bad accents, bad writing, start trek, humour]