Posted March 31, 2010
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.
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.