[quote name='Rollobobo']Hmmmm....would you say Hydro Thunder without the DLC is worth picking up at 400 points? I am a little intrigued, but part of me says to just save my spacebucks. Thoughts?[/QUOTE]
It's fun and pretty good looking. I definitely didn't sink a ton of time into it (maybe 5-7 hours) but there is easily another 5-10 hours that I could play if I wanted to, so the game has lots of content. It controls well and could definitely be defined as an arcade racer. There are speed boosts and turbo, but no weapons to attack the other racers. I think it's a fairly tough game, you'll spend time getting to know each track before you starting winning a lot of races.
It has a regular campaign mode, then it has "ring" and "gauntlet" modes where you have to drive through the rings and avoid things and beat gold/silver/bronze times. It also has another advanced campaign mode that has a lot more races, if I remember correctly. There are also 10 hidden tokens on each level that can be searched for and collected.
At this point I'd assume the online is pretty dead, but there's still a lot of content here if that's what you're looking for. It has interesting achievements, all the easy achievements are worth a lot of Gamerscore, and the difficult ones are only worth like 5 or 10 points.
Also, AVATAR AWARDS!!!
TL;DR - I'd definitely recommend it for 400 MSP, but it does have a lot of content and if you want the 200/200 (or 250/250) it's definitely gonna take some time.