Hostile Waters (game)

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Hostile Waters was a hybrid vehicle and strategy game released on the PC in 2002 by the British company Rage Games Limited. It was inspired by a game called Carrier Command (written by Realtime Games and published by Rainbird Software in 1988).

Around the turn of the millennium there were a number of games which were essentially Real Time Strategy but played from a first-person perspective. Other examples are Battlezone, Battlezone 2, and Uprising. These games were characterised by standard first-person controls for movement of the player's avatar and the use of equipment and weapons but also supplemental controls for giving orders to other units under the control of the player.

Hostile Waters takes place in a utopian future where war has been abolished. Old-school dictators have come up with a plan to scare the world into asking for their protection by engineering an artificial threat. In order to stop them, the last war machine ever used is to be revived and captained by you. The machine in question is an Adaptive Cruiser called Antaeus, which houses massive nano-assemby units capable of building whole vehicles in less than a second. Antaeus is sent to a chain of islands, where the dictators are establishing their power base, with one purpose - to stop them.

In Hostile Waters the player is unable to build structures on the island battlefields. Resources are gathered by recycling objects and wrecked enemy vehicles. A vehicle fitted with a recycler can reclaim and transmit energy remotely (it just has to roll up to the object and recycle it there and then) or a transport helicopter can fly to the object and airlift it to the rear of the carrier. The rear of the carrier contains a sampler, which is much like a recycler except that it is able to store the patterns of deconstructed objects so you can then replicate them. Some of the new vehicles and weapons in the game are unlocked by sampling the appropriate objects.

Missions

Missions are linear and they slowly introduce the player to all the controls they need to play the game. One of the main features of Hostile Waters are the "soulcatcher" units. These contain digital imprints of deceased former crew members of Antaeus that you are able to install into vehicles. Each has its own distinct and colourful personality (replete with bad language in some cases, assuming you have allowed it in the game options) along with their own preferences for vehicles, weapons and tactics. Ransom, for example, prefers helicopters and is very aggressive, often charging towards turrets that can take him down before he can do much damage to them. Patton complains loudly if his vehicle isn't fitted with the Warhammer howitzer and isn't land-based ("Son, I drive tanks!"). The personalities slowly gain experience over the course of the game and improve. Multiple copies of the same personality cannot be used simultaneously.

Control

Vehicles can be directly controlled by the player using the keyboard to control movement and the mouse to control weapons.

When controlling a vehicle it is possible to use hotkeys to issue orders to other units. The hot-key orders are issued in real time and require a quick sequence of key-presses. They usually represent the player selecting a unit to order, giving an order and then giving a target for that order. A target is either "Me", "The location I'm pointing at" or "The target I'm currently locked on to".

The order hotkeys are the same as the movement keys (WASD and QE as well as ZXC), so when you give an order the player can't move around. However, you can press three keys very quickly so it doesn't impair gameplay. The fact that you don't have to move your hand to give an order is a feature not normally seen in this genre.

There is also a tactical screen from which orders can be given to any vehicles equipped with a soulcatcher unit. Unlike the hotkey orders the tactical screen pauses the game. Also unlike the hotkey orders, it is possible to queue up several orders at once. This allows the player to create complex battle plans.

Vehicles

There are a number of vehicles in the game that are progressively unlocked as the missions progress. Vehicles contain a number of slots into which you can fit equipment. Smaller vehicles contain a few unconnected small internal spaces, one or two squares in size. Larger vehicles have huge grids of internal space. Equipment items take up a number of squares and so more powerful pieces of equipment are shaped so that they either cannot fit into light vehicles or light vehicles cannot contain many of them.

Vehicles have a single external weapon slot and the choice of weapon only affects the price and not the internal space. Some of the larger vehicles actually double-up whatever weapon you choose, making it much more powerful.

Vehicles are given a shortcut to activate or issue orders to them, taking the numerical row (1 to 0), with the carrier activated by the ` key. Vehicles can also be grouped together using the ctrl-number combination familiar to real time stratergy.

Limitations

The game was generally well reviewed, but its major problem is a lack of replay value. There is no "skirmish" or multiplayer modes, only a campaign mode. In addition, there is no difficulty settings in this mode. Thus, once the player has finished the campaign mode there is very little to entice them to play the game again. The campaign is considerable in length and, for the most part, enjoyable but it is quite disappointing to find it as the only option. No material is "unlocked" by completing the game either.

Story

Earth 2032, twenty years ago the last war on Earth was fought, a battle not bettween nations but between the corrupt establishment and the people. The old guard fell and war was ended. For twenty years the world has been rebuilt as a utopia of plenty "who's grasp exceeds the moon and stands on the cusp of greatness". That is until now.

From nowhere missiles begin landing worldwide killing tens of thousands. The location of the launch sites is discovered and a special ops team sent in to shut it down. They vanish... In desperation the order is given to reactivate the Antaeus program a series of warships able to create any weapon using their onboard nanotech "creation engine". (The series never states who created them but it's possible they were created by the old guard and then defected to the people). Twenty years ago they were all destroyed. All but two left on the seabed in case they were ever needed again. One fails to come online but the other the Antaeus herself comes online. Onboard are a series of chips "soulcatchers" containing downloaded minds of dead solders. The ship builds one human around one chip, you. The others will be used to pilot the weapons it creates, weapons for a war in a world that has forgotton how to fight.

But all is not good, because the people firing the missiles are the left overs of the old guard fighting with thousands of troops and weapons they hid away when they knew the war was lost. They outnumber you ten to one, and there is worse because they have created something else. Something worse, something alien, something evil...