Reviewed: November 2, 2003
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
JoWood Productions

Developer
Massive Development

Released: August 19, 2003
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature

5
6
6
5
6.6

System Requirements

A few years later Massive Development delivered Aquanox, the next evolution in underwater combat and now after many long years of waiting (for those of you who have actually been waiting) Aquanox 2: Revelation is upon us. Aquanox 2 strives to be more than an expansion or even a sequel to the original. It is an independent story full of adventures and deadly surprises. AquaNox 2: Revelation is the search for one of Aqua's biggest secrets, a legendary and much wanted treasure from the time when mankind still lived on the earth's surface.

The game takes place in 2666 running alongside the events of the original game but following the adventurers of William Drake, a young heir of a rundown merchants' dynasty. You will get to lead this unlikely hero through his numerous experiences and adventures in Aqua, a world without skies.

Drake only has little experience with Aqua's rough reality. He faithfully transports goods from Galapagos to the northern aquatoria of the Tornado Zone. His life is monotonous, but in his imagination young Drake becomes a genuine mercenary. He wants to be like them: all these brave, daring and free mercenaries, Ronin and freebooters.

For the next 50+ missions you will go on escort missions, assault run, cargo deliveries, etc. and if you are thinking this sounds just like every other space combat game ever made you are probably right. Even the concept of playing underwater doesn’t even give this game model enough innovation to suck you in for the required 20+ hours of gameplay.

The first thing to talk about is control or rather a lack thereof. We’ve all come to expect a certain “creative license” with space games and the lack of inertia-free space, but Aquanox 2 throws in an overly sensitive and highly unresponsive control system (no – that’s not a contradiction). In some vain attempt to recreate the physics of underwater travel there is a built in delay in the response of your craft when making fast directional changes. This ultimately leads to you over-steering then over-correcting then over-counter-correcting making it damn near impossible to target anything with a weapon that doesn’t lock on.

You do have the option to disable this physics model, but then your ship/cockpit/view shifts around so bloody fast you still have trouble targeting anything with any type of accuracy. Ultimately, you end up playing the game making very slow and calculated moves, which takes a lot of the fun and excitement out of the experience. Even switching to any of numerous joysticks we tested with the game just never “felt” right.

Even so, you will eventually get the hang of the control scheme and learn to compensate for the lag and ultra-sensitive input, but until you do the game is extremely hard. Conversely, once you do master the controls the game becomes overly simplistic and nothing presents too much of a challenge. Expect the most fun about 6-8 hours into the game just as you are getting comfortable (but not proficient) with the controls.

The levels are dark and muddy and extremely large so it’s quite easy to get lost. Frequent Nav markers keep you from totally losing your mind but the indicator always points to the direct line of travel and thanks to buildings, mountains, canyons, etc. you are almost always forced to take some elaborate path to get to your next waypoint. This makes short missions that much longer which I’m sure was the intent.

The overall presentation is interesting. The menus use a graphical interface with rollover hotspots. Clicking on these opens a video insert of that area with more hotspots and perhaps some animated activity. You can use these menus to navigate around bases, or the various parts of your ship including the docking area where you can fully customize and upgrade your growing collection of subs.

About halfway through the game (perhaps sooner) most of you will start to see the pattern of bouncing between menus, brief story narrative, short uninspired mission, then back to menus to do it all over again. The story is surprisingly boring considering the interesting premise and there is an overabundance of dialog that ranges from trite to boring. Often you lose focus of the primary goal of the game and find yourself completing missions just to move on to the next one.

The underwater combat is marred by the less-than-thrilling pace of the game. Too often you find yourself hiding behind a rock or other structure peeking out to fire off a missile then hiding to avoid an incoming one. There is no intense dog fighting, fancy maneuvers, or anything else you would expect from an action-packed combat game. Everything is just too sluggish in the world of water.

This time around the game is much darker, perhaps to invoke the darker mood of the game, and there are a lot less vibrant colors. Unless you are playing the game in a dark room at night you might have trouble seeing some things. It might make the game more real but it’s not very fun to look at and I can’t recall a single “wow” moment. Even the ship models were uninspired.

For the most part you really can’t tell you are underwater. There is a distorted shimmering effect on some objects which causes the terrain model to morph sporadically, almost as if there is some silent seismic upheaval going on all the time. If you get close to the surface you can see beams of sunlight streaking through the ocean but there is a disturbing lack of fish, bubbles, or anything else you would expect to see. It reminded me of flying through space without any stars.

The explosions are really cool with bubbles and shockwaves and lots of fire even though I have to question the concept of fiery explosions underwater. Guns have muzzle flash and torpedoes streak through the water with swirling trails. The HUD is non-invasive and sticks to the borders of the screen with transparent overlays. The aforementioned menu interface is clever, albeit simple, but certainly no substitute for full-blown cutscenes.

The rest of the sound package also leaves your memory when you exit to the desktop. What few sound effects that are present are decent and certainly fit the underwater ambience and game design. The limitation of the game design is the only thing holding the sound back.

Voice acting ranges from average to laughably bad. I realize this is an import title and there may have been some localization going on but it sounds like the designers grabbed some people out of accounting or the shipping department and said, “Here, read these lines”. There are a few instances of excellence but these are overshadowed by what is mainly a below-average presentation of an inflated and uninspired script that will have you advancing through the story to get to the next mission.

As far as PC combat shooters go, there is a surprising lack of them these days. Everyone seems to be taking the RTS or fleet battle design route leaving nothing for the Wing Commander and Freespace veterans to enjoy. StarLancer was the last big shooter I can remember playing on my PC – even Freelancer and Independence War 2 took a lot of the fun out of the genre and turned it into a “thinking man’s” game.

Aquanox 2: Revelation is hardly a worthy successor to the original underwater games that put Massive Development on the map. Despite numerous delays leading up to its release the game still seems a bit rushed and just not that well designed. Unless you are really hard up for a combat game or a big fan of the original I’d skip this and save your cash for whatever the future holds for this “sleeping” genre.