Aquadelic GT is a boat racing game in the style of a kart racer – easy to learn, but challenging to master. Enjoy piloting boats with stunning physics. Whilst one is stable in every situation another can be hard to control at speed. There are multiple paint-jobs for each boat, so you can choose one you like. It is also possible to control bigger vessels like yachts and cargo ships for relaxing leisure cruises. And one more thing... Use torpedoes, rockets, mines and even jumping frogs to smash your opponents.
Bought this a few months ago on gamersgate, and I absolutely love it.
The actual racing element is much like a kart racer, and is pretty entertaining, but can be punishing towards to beginning of the game. The other challenge types are varied and refreshing, but limited in number. The big draw for me is the free exploration offered by the game's environments.
Despite being a few years old, this game still looks largely amazing up in the higher settings ranges. Some of the character models still look ridiculous, and some of the textures flicker from time to time, but on the whole, the game looks great. The soundtrack is a fantastic licensed collection of disco, dance, latin, and beach music that suits the game to perfection.
The game DOES support LAN play between computers on your network, but unfortunately this only includes races, there's no option to simply explore the islands with your friend, short of starting a race and just completely ignoring the gates. I also can't say if this is the case everywhere, but on my personal network, the LAN game was so unstable we couldn't see what the other person was doing accurately.
In terms of the game engine, the developers very clearly spent a great deal of time build a custom engine to simluate boat physics, because the boats feel FANTASTIC. There are a few 'interesting' things that can happen when you get into using the weapons and things, but overall the game physics are nearly perfect, which is remarkable in itself for this type of game.
I see what people are saying about the lack of support for a gamepad (annoying, yes, but it's an old game), and this can be pretty easily remedied by a free program called 'Joy2key' which allows you to map controller inputs to keyboard inputs. Here's a download of the personal configuration that I use when playing, if you're interested in saving time.
All in all, I highly recommend this game, I've had a lot of fun with it.
JOY2KEY configuration: Ge.tt