Tr0w87: Take the nostalgia goggle off. AD runs like complete shit, looks like shit, and has abysmal controls.
This is like listening to the people saying Mechwarrior 2 is the best game in that series, go back and play it and it's complete trash compared to 3 and 4.
Damianus_NT: No nostalgia googles here. I played Archimedean Dynasty for the first time in my life, just this month. And despite of it "running like shit" and the "abysmal controls", I had a lot of fun with the game. Moreover, I have recently listened to a podcast where two guys, an Aquanox fan and a total space-sim newbie played AD for the first time as well. And they both enjoyed it.
Well, anyone's (obviously) free to enjoy anything and, as an old player still enjoying fairly dated games from the 90s, I'm quite partial towards some older designs, but in this particular case, I have to agree with Tr0w87... and the few low stars reviews (from newcomers) that can be red on
Archimedean Dynasty's front page.
I do understand why that the game was widly considered to be great in its time, despite several objective flaws that most fans simply don't mention - hence my comment here. The atmosphere most players praise here, for example, is indeed one of its greatest assets. In between missions - long (with no ingame save system), varied, wildly different in difficulty too -, the visuals (a tad dated, but still enjoyable), the dialogs (reasonably well written for a video game) and the branching mission choices can keep you busy for a while. This last aspect was indeed toned down a bit in
Aquanox 1 - even though there are still a lot of optional missions very easy to miss - and almost cut in
Aquanox 2 - full of secondary objectives, but very low on optional missions. More so than the said visuals or the dialogs, whose style has evolved over the two other episodes :
Aquanox 1 adopted a slightly less dramatic one - more jokes flying around... -, while
Aquanox 2 increased the amount of (melo)dramatic tensions (with a love triangle, plenty of relational shifts and revelations, etc.). Massive Development also went through an impressive amount of research in its time to ensure a reasonnable amount of realism about several key points of the serie's universe and this can be felt throughout its whole course. Yes, even in the follow ups. Those simply dont insist as much about it through texts and evolved towards a more visual presentation - like most game series of the past did. The *.pdf encyclopedia offered with
Archimedean Dynasty contains even a few impressive chapters about real oceanographic knowledge... Very clever design.
Now, as said above, what most fans don't mention are gaping holes in the final product. Those complex hubs ? Sure, they're neat... during the first third of the game. Because Massive Development was very (overly) ambitious - there are postmortem articles about this -,
Archimedean Dynasty's quality steeply declines as its story unfolds. The number of interactions and secondary missions, the quality of the writing, etc. The second third is still not bad - just far below the previous standard -, but last third is simply awful. The last hub (even before the dreaded last serie of battles) is almost empty, the dialogs much shorter and (obviously) written in a pinch - I could write the last briefings the player receive for his 5 or 6 final missions under 15 minutes... All of them - and the characters... Ugh... Not that the game's characters are really interesting in the first place : they're fairly unidimensional (and are better fleshed out in the two other episodes), but during the later part, the writer dropped the act and didn't even take the time to change his characters' lines from one mission to another : they're... almost exactly the same in some cases - copied & pasted, with slight variations. Not that you'll probably care at that point, because...
... at that point, you'll have your hands full with a crescendo of other issues : the gameplay, (old school) hard but reasonnably enjoyable at first, more complex than in the two other games of the serie for sure - which, I guess, explains why they weren't received well by long time fans, as the developers were targeting new audiences -, become more and more plagued by bugs as time passes. Lots of bugs... A horde of bugs... Several missions, without fan made corrections, are potentially impossible to finish - it's just a matter of luck, experimenting with faulty scripts until you understand how to trigger the right ones - or deprived from secondary objectives and intented interactions. Of course, otherwise it wouldn't be cherished hard won memories, that's the point during which difficulty ramps up significantly. It doesn't help that you're stuck in a low pixelated resolution with very diminished visibility, even with the best detection system you'll find. Of course, one should take in account the game's (underwater) setting, but entertainment value is thin when understanding what's happening around you already equals to a Feat of Strengh. And that's with timed objectives, cargos or buildings to protect, against enemies which pass through walls, are hit... well... at random (occasional glitches) and might not appear at the expected place because of faulty scripts.
The last missions are notorious for being a nightmare : when you have - as a main objective - to destroy all opponents of a given wave and... just can't, because some of them got stuck in textures out of your sight (and reach !), after (of course) lenghty fights during which your allies (poorly coded and under equiped) don't do much, against beefed up enemies which are... simply a long pain to kill - not hard, just awfully long -, all that just to discover, after searching for the remaining foes during dozens of minutes, giving up - or eventually discovering them, as said, out of your reach -, and restarting again for the Xth time, you'll start to see the issue, believe me... I didn't quit, held my ground and managed to finish it, but I'll admit this : out of a thousand games I've played, it's probably one of the rare ones which I genuinely was happy to be rid of. The fact that the ending itself, true to the decline in quality, is also fairly generic doesn't help. The two other episodes are, here too, much better, way more consistent... and even quite unique - with last minute unexpected details.
To anyone new to the serie and planning on playing it, trust me : first read the 2 or 3 stars reviews of its main page - they're pretty accurate -, install the "Augmented Mod" - easy to find on internet - which corrects an enormous amount of bugs, and remember that the first part remains where the game shines. If you're not seriously hooked by it, you'll never manage to reach the end - or only at the cost of sheer masochism - and shouldn't be affraid of switching to more polished titles. In my opinion, even though (sadly) Massive Development's ulterior's choices didn't pay as much as expected, the studio was clearly, little by little, improving its skills, refining its concepts and production choices. I do, therefore, recommend to play
Aquanox 1 and
2 more than their ancestor. That is unless Nightdive or some other studio decides to salvage it through a remaster...
