AquaNox

This game is all I expected and hoped for when I bought it. As a pure arcade game, its content lacks depth (no pun). But I was surprised by the quality and the modernity of its realization. It actually looks very beautiful on recent systems. Good shooter, good graphics, not too hard, highly playable even if you do not have a joystick. Menus are well designed, too. A reproach would be too much talking between the missions.

Playing this game reminded me a lot of the last time I played Call of Duty: I really wanted to have fun on the crazy shootouts, quirk dialog and cinematics, but 90% of the time I was utterly confused: -The audio mixing is...non existent?. Sounds don't have priority over others, so there will be multiple occasions of trying to listen to mission relevant dialog while ship noises, explosions and gun fire blarr in the same level. Or you could lower the voice and fxs, permanently, giving a constant sensation of actually being underwater. -It's really hard to cauge distances, which would be less of a problem if weapons didn't have different ranges and if the game gave that information on things other than what you are currently aiming at. Also, some weapons zoom further than your projectiles distance, why? Or rather, why I can only zoom with some weapons? I would get no significant advantage with that other than not squinting my eyeballs out when trying to hit something. -It's impossible to tell if a missile is actually gonna hit me: the alarm doesn't change depending on the distance, position or speed. When the alarm goes, it could be a pebble flying two blocks away or a nuke right under my nose. -Nonsense mission failures: "That ship that a character set to explode on a desolated location? Well, it exploded there, but it exploded because the enemy exploded it .1 seconds before it's self destruction." -Impossible extra objectives: Extra money for each ship you take down -> Turns out, the game takes control away from you when it considers the mission done for 20 seconds until the menu loads. -Tatical decisions don't matter: sacrificed yourself to protect a ship you gonna have to escort later? The ship is still gonna start the next part of the mission with battle damage! Love all the characters, as insane as they are, and I love this quirky, baren underwater wasteland, but not even the cheats would work to help me sit throught it. For once, I really want a novelization.

I played this and Aquanox 2 when I was a child, now as a grown up child it's still fun. It's an old game that still puts up some decent graphics and effects, the soundtrack is especially awesome and brings some more heat into the dogfights. Can't wait to finish it and jump into Aquanox 2 which was my absolute favorite since it this game but even better! - Controls The game is old which means it won't be able to handle modern, high DPI, gaming mice, hence it will be necessary to reduce your DPI for Aquanox to as low as possible in order to steer your boat. (100 DPI was good in my case) - Language Game comes with english audio (which is good btw) but if you want to have german audio you'll need to search for _Aquanox - Deutschpatch gog.exe_ (should be around 577 MB) - Submarine dogfights, alcohol, drugs, explicit language, industrial/techno soundtrack for a dime.

The so called "voice acting" in this game made me completely furious and made this game unplayable for me. It was horrendous. I was only able to get through two missions before turning the game off. The gameplay itself wasn't bad, and the atmosphere was nice, but I couldn't get past the atrocious voices. If every voice was replaced (and I mean EVERY), then I might consider playing this game again, but since there is no chance of that happening, this game will forever go unplayed, collecting digital dust on my GOG game shelf.

The actual game-play was fun in a "Mechwarrior/Decent but more hallow" way. I kept playing missions despite the fact that I thought it was all kind of lame, so they did something right. The voice acting, on the other hand, made me laugh out loud... and then eventually made me wish the game was text base.