AquaNox

For starters, a piece of important advice: CHANGE YOUR MOUsE REPORT RATE. Many modern gaming mice report 500 to 1000 times per second, and this is too fast - motion will be jerky to nonexistent as information is dropped. I've heard reports of values as high as 250 working, but I set mine to 200 and minimum DPI, and that worked very nicely. Visuals: The game looks good - decent geometry and detailed textures prevent it from showing its age too much, and it's perfectly happy to do 1920x1200. Weapon effects look nice and are varied enough to distinguish at a glance. In a heavy firefight, you can lose sight of a distant target in all the flash, especially if you're throwing a torrent of glowing bolts from a Plasma Gatling - for me, this was a bonus, emphasizing the hectic nature of a crowded 3D battle. Enemies and allies are visually distinct, with each faction employing ships sharing their own unique style - and some of the ships look pretty cool! Controls: Gameplay is a mixed bag. The concept of free 3D motion in an environment that has a definite floor and ceiling (unlike open space) is rather neat (and provides an opportunity for interesting visuals), but the execution could have been better. You have 5 degrees of freedom in movement, but unlike most space-based 5DOF games (such as DarkStar One), the dropped element is roll. You can yaw (you actually bank left and right, but automatically come back to upright when you stop turning), pitch, strafe horizontally or vertically, and accelerate/reverse. This arrangement guarantees that the seafloor stays on the floor, and the vertical strafe is tremendously useful in some situations . . . but it also creates one of the most irritiating limitations of the system -- there is a fixed vertical axis through which you cannot pitch. If a target passes above or below you and you've been pitching up or down to track it, once you reach vertical you have to spin around to continue to track. The other unpleasant limitation is that many missions have a very low (and invisible) ceiling. Thousands of meters of vertical space from which to launch surprise 3D flanking attacks, and you can't use it. It was a real joy to have that vertical freedom in the one mission that involves escorting a rising buoy, but normally the low ceiling limits your firing angles (really irritating when trying to hit small targets on top of several nasty enemies), traps you behind just-barely-too-high mountains (usually not a huge issue unless exploring outside the main mission area), and turns what could have been a game of true-3D tactics into something where battles and defenses are dominated by 2D positioning, more constrained than even a terrestrial flight sim. Story/Acting: The story is fairly typical fare, predictable but sufficient (if you can ignore the ridiculously bad science driving several plot elements). The writing is merely mediocre, although the monologues for the movies are over-long, overwrought, and underestimate the player's intelligence. The protagonist mostly re-hashes recent events in a slow near-monotone, offers some stultifyingly obvious "insights", then delivers a faux-philosophical wannabe-warrior-poet musing. Over time, this becomes less irritating, although I'm not sure whether it's due to getting used to it, or the writers running out of time and padding the speeches less heavily. The voice acting, however, ranges from bad to terrible, with a healthy sprinkling of rage-inducingly painful. The most grating element is Lt. Bonham, with her whiny voice, strangely off-tempo delivery, obsession with grade-school fun science facts (not all of them correct), and tendency to ramble. It's bad enough in the "talk" sections in port, but those are skippable / can be read with headphones off; the worst bit is that she talks during missions. It's a bad sign when my reaction to failing a mission is not "dangit, all that wasted effort!" but "Oh NO, I have to listen to my wingman again!!" instead. Difficulty: Initially, the unusual controls may be an issue, but they're fine once you get used to them - the only real problems I had were the slow ascent, low ceiling, and occasionally the vertical pitch limit mentioned above. Those used to flight sims will lament the lack of a lead indicator. Long missions with distinct, cutscene-separated sections can be frustrating to re-do from the start when you fail, but I mostly found it to be a nice challenge that enhanced the tension of later stages. Where an unexpected Scalar Howitzer to the face might just prompt you to return to a save from two minutes ago in some games, here it creates an adrenaline rush as you struggle to stay alive and complete the suddenly-desperate mission. The final mission did become frustrating, but finally beating it at high difficulty gave a nice feeling of accomplishment. At higher difficulties, strategy matters, and you need to think about tactics in the harder missions (hint: you *can* consistently hit Headshax with guided missiles if you do it right; look at what allows them to go into that failing orbit). Fortunately, you can change the difficulty level any time in port. As with many games, some missions make certain ships invincible so that you can't derail the story. Fortunately, you'll realize rather quickly and can avoid them. More frustratingly, there are a couple occasions when a ship you know you want to destroy is marked non-hostile; if you're not paying attention, killing it fails the mission. Just watch the color! Levels, Strategy, and Other Elements: A customizable Single-Player instant fight would be nice, but the 4 included arena fights are at least interesting, particularly the you-vs-an-army "Asylum" (hint: you can retreat and recover as much as you like, it's neither timed nor an escort mission). The game does get points for crowded, hectic battles, including the final level and the 3-area defense against the crawler assault late in the game. I found the latter unfortunately easy even on max difficulty, but it was still fun. It also earns points for genuinely varied weapons: the EMP gun is a bit forced (useful only in missions requiring non-lethal assault), but all the weapons have a useful tactical role at some point. You can trade in your guns, hardware, and ships at purchase price, so you can change load-out every mission, to anything you can afford. In addition to providing some fun variety, that choice can matter a lot, particularly your missile mix. The Verdict: Overall, the game has a neat concept, looks good, has decent controls with a few limitations, gives you freedom to try and switch between all affordable load-outs, and provides weapons varied enough to suit a variety of tactics; this would earn it 4 stars, but numerous irritating flaws drag it down to a three - the voice acting, the tactics-limiting low ceilings, a couple situations in which missiles should not fail but do, and the frustration with multi-part missions, although I'm of two minds on the last one because I usually liked the challenge. I feel a bit bad giving it a 3, but it just hasn't earned that 4. Still, I'll buy AquaNox 2 if it goes on sale.

I bought this game about two years ago and finally decided to give it a whirl this week. The gameplay can be summed up thusly- You talk to NPCs who give you backstory and a mission, get shuttled to a location for a brief mission, and then shoot at what you're told to shoot at. Mission ends, you get credits to upgrade. Repeat. There's no exploration, no RPG elements. Just dialogue, then combat. Bummer.

AquaNox is a fun game if you're looking for something like Freespace underwater, and it has a fairly interesting setting and characters, but generally lacklustre voice-acting and some annoying mechanics keep this from being more than a forgettable time-waster. STORY 3/5: AquaNox roughly translates to "Night of the Water," which pretty much describes the whole setting. It's a post-apocalyptic story set in a series of underwater cities that managed to survive a nuclear apocalypse which devastated the surface. The atmosphere of these places is a kind of cyberpunk land, full of advanced nanotechnology and biological sciences, with a dash of noir thanks mostly to the voice-actor who plays your character, Flint, who does a passable Sam Spade impression. If this sounds good to you so far, I should warn you that that's where the good stuff ends. Problems with the plot include: 1. It deals with so many factions working towards different goals. 2. This is actually a sequel to an older game, Archimedean Dynasty, and you never really learn the full plot of that game through Aquanox, so a lot of the plot continuity will fly right over your head if you don't know what a "Biont" is before you start. 3. The story is unfocused. What faction you're fighting for or against changes with every mission, which doesn't really help your understanding of any one part of the story. 4. The end cutscene in particular raises far, far more questions then it answers. 5. You never get to see the INSIDES of any of the places you visit. The game's setting and plot come only from the character's voices that you cannot turn off no matter how much you want to. As such, you can expect every cutscene and most conversations to be exposition dumps. GAMEPLAY 4/5: I must admit, someone put some thought into making underwater combat cool. Currents affect your submarine and the speed of any projectiles you launch. You can make torpedoes move faster by firing them while moving forward at top speed. There's a wide variety of vehicles and weapons for you to experiment with. However, not all is well. For one thing, your ability to move vertically is limited by the ocean floor and an invisible ceiling, more often than not, so unlike Freespace you do not have much room to maneuver. Also, targeting ANY enemy with ANYTHING can be rough if the target is in motion sideways to you, and combat at long range is an exercise in patience. You don't have any radar system to tell you where enemies are, changing weapons is inconvenient, torpedoes are easily diverted from their courses and move slowly (meaning you can really only fire them from point-blank), and occasionally you'll be thrown a mission where you're not allowed to kill anyone, which is annoying mostly because all the EMP weapons suck. Overall, though, shooting things with lasers underwater is fun. GRAPHICS 3/5: The graphics are nothing to write home about. They're not bad, but they're not so impressive that I feel motivated to write anything more about them. SOUNDS 2/5: The voice acting is one of the first things the game shows you, and the voice acting in the early parts of the game is especially bad. The Humphrey Bogart-esque fellow doing Flint's voice isn't bad, and some other characters like Harper are fun to listen to, but generally the voices vary from being uninteresting to downright awful. The sounds of gun/plasma/torpedo/laser fire all sound like they could have come from other games. The music is nice, though, which is why this category doesn't get a 1. OVERALL 3/5: This game is worth about what they're selling it for, and no more. It is by no means a great game unto itself or one of the better games on GOG, but it's good enough to waste a day or two on if you have money to burn.

Technical points first: graphics hold very well, art style is competent, voice acting more hit or miss. Overall atmospheric with good production values. The gameplay is what makes or breaks it, it's old style and not easy to reference. This is an action game, similar to a FPS in that most of the game is pointing, firing, choosing weapons as needed. It is also like a flight simulator in that you are flying a ship (underwater) and the control scheme flows from that genre. If you have a certain age you know games like Wing Commander, and this is similar: narrative driven linear missions. I found enemies, weapons and missions sufficiently varied. Escort missions can frustrate, but a couple replays and figuring the choreography sufficed to progress. The story has elements of cliche, but unusual setting helps.