Aquanox 2: Revelation

Aquanox 2 : Revelation

Aquanox 2 is an underwater FPS style action adventure game from Massive Development. Taking on the role of William Drake this game actually takes place at the same time as the events of the first Aquanox title.

Aquanox 2 is set in a futuristic world where the human race has to live underwater. Drake works as a freight transport pilot, who wants to strike out for adventure when the family shipping business goes bust. In the first mission of the game your freighter is hijacked by pirates who take over the ship and send you out on errands to prove yourself. There is a full historical back story to Aquanox 2, which is explained through a long intro movie and various “interactive” cut-scenes.

Jackanory

The game can be played from the third person or first person perspective.

The first thing you’ll notice when playing this game is the amount of effort that has been put into developing a back story. The back story that has been laboriously developed, unfortunately, turns out to be rather too drawn out and tedious - a bit self-indulgent although the voice acting is fairly well done, but a bit cheesy. Between missions you are put in charge of a point and click style section, which allows you to speaker to various other characters. After speaking to each character in an almost dictated fashion (there’s some leniency as to what order you talk to people) you can go on another mission.

This is an extremely tedious operation, as you just have to click through several conversations to get back to the action. If the story was engrossing enough Aquanox 2 could be forgiven for having long cut scenes, but the point and click story progression would make even a good story tedious.

Parallelism

The fight scenes can be enjoyable but enemy AI can get repetative.

Aquanox 2 builds on the original by telling a parallel story. The new story uses fewer characters to maintain an easier to follow narrative but uses more realistic character models to tell the story. More missions and sub-missions have been used to try and keep up the interest of gamers, together with improved enemy AI. The graphics have also been beefed up using the “krass” engine.

The AI in Aquanox 2 is well implemented and intelligent. The enemies use reasonable strategies to try and beat you. The main strategy is to keep trying to drive past you faster than you can strafe so that you can’t aim straight and can’t turn to follow them and then mount an attack. The only problem with the AI is that it can be a bit repetitive. All of the enemies seem to be devoid of personality and all follow the same strategies. It does add to the difficulty and interest of the game, however.

Muddy Waters

The dark colours make hte game look bland.

The graphics on Aquanox 2 are pretty crisp although the underwater setting leads to a rather bland and dark colour palette. The “Krass” graphics engine looks pretty good nonetheless. The craft models are well detailed and the cities that you travel through are also well modelled. The game flows at a good frame rate, although it does feel slow even though the speedometer shows a healthy speed. This really shows when you try to strafe and it seems like your trying to navigate through treacle. This naturally makes the battles rather more difficult than they need to be, especially when you are used to the immediacy of a standard FPS.

When I was a lad all this was fields

The craft selection screen where you can choose to upgrade vehicles.

The audio track for this game is good at times. The voice acting is pretty good but there is a very good range of samples, which get played during missions. These range from trash talk by your team-mates through to advice on the mission, and they are different each time you play the mission, which helps to keep some variety in the soundtrack. It also helps to keep interest in the missions, as there can be large expanses of nothing as you move from section to section. This can make replaying them a rather tedious affair, so the varying samples add a welcome variation.

The game has a wide range of enemy crafts (fifty types in all) although the models all look quite similar and have similar characteristics. The player is put in charge of only four different craft throughout the game, though. This is a pretty limited way to play through thirty main missions and sub-missions. The missions provide a bit of variety in objectives, ranging from rescue and escorts to defence and security missions. They all have similar elements including trying to find your way along a dark seabed and large expanses without enemies to amuse yourself with.

Could do better

Static screens of text purvey the in-game story.

Aquanox 2 could definitely be improved for Aquanox 3. The story is weak and far too intrusive on the core of the game. Whilst I wouldn’t want the missions to become one big fight after another Aquanox 2 uses empty expanses and path finding too much to try and make the levels last longer and give a sense of realism. The graphics work well, although they are a bit too dark, and the ships are well animated and detailed but they move too slowly and are just too unresponsive. Aquanox 2 is too flawed to be a truly worthy purchase but contains good ideas that can be improved upon and maybe the next underwater FPS will improve matters.