AquaNox

I old enought to have played first Archimedian Dynasty, which is unfortunately way way above this inderect sequel. I suppose this isnt bad - but the contrast between the two is HUGE.

Aquanox was a big letdown for me - I was expected a simple, fun, Descent-like 6DoF underwater shooter, instead I got a game where 70% of the gameplay is doing nothing, but listening to random people talking about uninteresting crap. Is this game wants to be an adventure game with a lot of talking and a deep lore, or a shooter? Well, it fails in both regards. The writing is bad, and takes itself WAY too seriously. I could not care two swimming shits about the story and the characters, although I tried really hard. The cherry on top is the voice acting - it's just atrocious. I'm dead serious, it's so bad, that the game would have been better without any voice at all. The other 30% of the game is the actual gameplay, but the missions are either 5 minutes short, boring as hell, or a chaotic mess where I fail them because of some inexplicable reason. Between missions you can spend your credits at new ships, upgrades and weapons. There is no penalty when selling your stuff, so you can experiment with different combinations. I like it. The graphics looks good for the time - the engine was even used as a benchmark for DirectX 8.0 graphics cards back in the day. But I really don't like the music - it doesn't fit the gameplay at all. The controls are very sensitive and kinda jittery. It's hard to hit anyone with your weapons without moving in front of the enemy's face. Most of the weapons suck because of this. But hey, there are torpedos! ...which get reflected like 90% of the time. So they are a waste too. You cannot change any options mid-game. If you want to - for example - adjust your sensitivity a little, first you have to quit to the "hub", save your game, then quit to the main menu. Annoying. Oh, and if you go to the main menu first, not the hub, kiss your progress goodbye, because there are no autosaves. I had to learn it in the hard way. No mid-mission saves either (this is especially "fun" in the last mission). I recommend playing any Descent game instead of this.

I tried to give this game a chance many times over the years. Together with Aquanox 1 it was my very first purchase on GOG but I never really got past the first few missions. I'll be posting the same review for both games because they're extremely similar to each other, both in gameplay, as well as with how the single player campaign is constructed. The first thing that struck me about them is how much goddamned dialogue you have to sit through in between each mission. Sometimes it felt like it could go on for 10-15 minutes at a time, which is a huge issue if the missions themselves are extremely brief. It also wouldn't be such a hassle if it wasn't for the fact that the story isn't terribly interesting and the voice acting is just... bad. If you feel like you just want to click through all this yapping then playing the game feels all the more pointless, to be honest. And the missions? Well, they range from bland and formulaic to just tedious and confusing. As I mentioned, many of them are very short so the overall impression the game is giving me is utter boredom. When I fire up a shooter, I just wanna shoot stuff, and there's not much of that going on in this game, at least within the first few hours of the campaign. Finally, I'm just not feeling it when it comes to controls and combat. It doesn't really feel like you're steering a submarine, it's more like flying a spaceship and shooting other spaceships, except there's some plankton floating around instead of space dust. Rather disappointing. Overall, neither of these games were very satisfying to me and despite my best efforts, I just couldn't get into them.

I have [;ayed this game for years and I still love it! Gog.com Is an AWESOME site

Every time i replay this classic game(at least for me it is, played it in childhood) i cannot help myself but think that man who wrote scenario or those responsible for voiceover are a "little" into NAZI ideology and their false stereotypes, i dont want to offend anyone, but how else could you interpret all Russian(supposedly by names) characters having either asian looks or asian voice. Those who played it may remember names like Olga(Russian name derived from Nordic Helga) Sislaja, Iwan King(Ivan traditional Russian name) and several others. What do you think am i just mad or the scenarist is a fucking nazi??