Aquanox Deep Descent

A sad prequel to a great legacy... Both technically and artistically behind it's predecessors: - Dialog feels like it was written by an edgy 14 year old and characters are very obnoxious - Map and minimap are basically useless and worse than in "Schleichfahrt"/Archimedean Dynasty" (1996) - Game is very buggy (easy to get stuck in walls, sometimes cinematics are not skippable even if it states so, could not start a side quest because the game played the wrong dialog when talking to the NPC) - Enemy AI is very poor - Game UX is terrible in general (no way to easily compare ships, weapons, etc.) - Game rewards exploring but makes exploring terrible (no map marker, map doesn't show where gates lead, no world map) - Story is very shallow and is basically just a series of misdirections, crosses and double-crosses - Sometimes enemies will just respawn in the same location after a short amount of time (even right on top of you), making combat fell pointless and taking agency from the player

In the previous Aquanox games, enemies spawned out of sight and made their way to you. This makes sense. In this game they spawn in firing range all around you in 3D space and immediately stick torpedoes in you. The game is slow to the point of being boring, gone the fast paced, techno music powered fun of Aquanox. Now your enemies will materialize from thin air/water like ninjas and kill you. Your ship is so slow I was able to chat on my phone while moving from gate to mission. The ships themselves and basically everything else lacks the interesting visual design of the previous games. I paid like 3 bucks for this and it wasn't even worth it, I don't want to play this game anymore. Don't buy this, go play the previous two games instead.

Vorweg einmal ich habe jetzt alle 4 Teile der Reihe durchgezogen (Schleichfahrt / Aquanox / Aquanox 2 und Aquanox DD) Aquanox DD ist leider nur akzeptabel und ist wirklich in fast allen Aspekten schlechter als seine Vorgänger. Die einzigen Punkte die ich Positiv sehe sind Grafik und die Waffenauswahl die zugenommen hat für mehr Vielfalt. Grundsätzlich: Es Stehen einem mehrere Schiffe und Waffen zur verfügung die verbessert werden können. Rohstoffe müssen Gesammelt werden und man muss irgendwie an Geld kommen und es gibt eine Story.... mehr oder weniger. Wirklich negativ zu betrachten ist die Geschichte und dessen Erzählung sowie die Gespräche mit den NPC und dessen sprach gebrauch. Der Charm der Reihe wurde hier leider komplett außen vor gelassen und die Story der 3 vorigen Teilen wurde mit den Füßen getreten. Sie machte 0 Sinn und wurde lediglich im Abspann nach dem durchspielen kurz angesprochen um dann wieder mit einem Cliffhänger die Community im Regen stehen zu lassen.... insofern das möglich ist in 8000 Meter Tiefe.

SUPER!!

I really wanted to like this... but i cant... The writing and story feels like really bad fanfiction. No characters are likable and their motivations make zero sense other then "Plot goes this way now, just because" Gameplay wise. There is some good, But it sadly gets over shadowed by so much of the bad. It feels janky and half baked. With ideas that make no sense to have in the game. Like spending half your time sniffing the bottom for salvage. Sound design goes from really good to really bad so fast it gave me whiplash at times. The ambient soundtrack is actually one of the only solid good things i can standby. Until the combat music starts and then we are back to, wwWHY!?

От Aquanox здесь только название и подводность. 1. Здесь не открытые арены, как в Aquanox , это коридорный шутер на батискафах. Соответственно весь геймплей другой. Вместо бешеных гонок, тут либо стрелять изза укрытий, либо меситься на узком пространстве как в обычном шутане. В Сириус Сэм больше пространства для маневра, чем здесь. Изза этой коридорности третье измерение практически не нужно. Финты по оси Z здесь делать пратически негде. Поэтому нет драйва как в оригинале и отличий от обычных шутеров тоже. 2. Мало кораблей. 3. Плохо нарисовано. Почему то разработчики оригинала озаботились сделать 3D карту в обоих частях, а местные не осилили. 4. Звук не сильно подводный. В оригинале ты всегда понимал что ты под водой. Здесь нет. 5. Есть баги, периодически вылетает. На Линукс под Протон 8 не завелась, вылетает сразу с ошибкой. В отличии от оригинала опять же. Пришлось пройти на винде. Резюме: Это не Aquanox - не стоит брать, елси вы его искали.

Waited for a discount to try it out, finished the story out of spite at the end. Story is amazingly bad, all the subs feel extremely slow and unresponsive, weapons range from boring to repetitive, and the crafting system is completely useless and unnecesary. I just want to play Aquanox 1 and 2 now, hell I would even play all the escort missions from both those games before playing this hot garbage again. 1/10 don't buy it.

Ich kann mich den zahlreichen negativen Stimmen zum Spiel leider nur anschließen. Das Spiel ist auf allen Ebenen enttäuschend und ich habe es nur der Nostalgie halber trotzdem durchgespielt. Vom Gameplay, über Story, Lootsystem bis zu Grafik und Sound ist leider nichts als wirklich gelungen zu bezeichnen. Mir fällt als Liebhaber von Aquanox 2 leider kein Punkt ein, mit dem das Spiel punkten könnte und verweise auf die zum Teil sehr ausführlichen anderen Rezensionen.

This game is tragic, if it were not a game set before Archimedean Dynasty in the Aqua setting it would probably not get a redthumb review from me. If one were to imagine the game almost completely unaltered except with direct references to the old Aqua setting changed to legally distinct ones, it would be an alright 6dof shooter game one would not be too upset about buying on sale. Deep Discount. To get the parts that I didn't hate out of the way: -The basic mechanics of combat are Alright, even if they're let down by encounter design and the whole repair kit/shield battery system -The high amount of caves did at least provide some tactical situations where you don't use breaker or shard -No complaints about the graphics -I played through and finished this game. Despite loving AD and playing through it dozens of times over the last 30 years I have never been able to stomach a playthrough of Aquanox. This is not high praise, but sufficient enjoyment was achieved to get me to the end and annoy me enough to leave this review. My main complaint about the story in this is under no circumstances should you have paid for the license to use the Aqua setting. Taken by itself, the story isn't amazing but it basically works. But you did not have the courage to let it stand on its own, instead of something inspired by Aquanox you had to come in and mess with Archimedean Dynasty. Why? Brand recognition? As much as the game tries to wink wink about AD it is as if the story had no regard to the events of that game. The shoehorning in of Dead Eye was to the detriment of this game. In the hook for potential sequels the new player characters are essentially killed off. Why do this at all? Either the MC of this game should have been Dead Eye starting his career with 3 friends or the future games should have been the Cryos as mercs. Also, how is he older than Neopolis? But there is so much more! Why are the factions the way they are? Who even are the 'Indo-Pacific Federation'? Are they the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese? Could they even be Australian? We have no such problem with the Atlantic Feder-uhh, Alliance. They're NATO under the sea. If you look at the oceans on something like google maps the factions of Aqua as Massive depicted it make a lot of sense. They were all places that have deep sea to escape to. Lacking the ability to reach other oceans in a timely manner, each developed a new, distinct culture that is a fusion of the countries that started those particular deep sea colonies. East Asia, settling the Pacific, would face a huge continent sized reef trying to transit to the Indian Ocean. There is a reason why Australia is a mysterious place in AD where no one goes, the Tasman Sea is shallow. They'd have to go right around it into the southern ocean. The original Clans Union and the Shogunate had to deal with the Timor sea being a radioactive hellzone. But all this world building is thrown out because seas rising and the POM layer being a magical electical fence 40m deep instead. Also magical gates let you traverse an ocean in minutes. The result is Aqua is a few stations that send small fighter fleets to raid some strategic... caves? The idea of man-made gates being much shorter range than Senthic gates is immediately discarded as we go from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea to Mariana's Trench via Egypt with a few hops between caves. Who led the united effort to construct these gates everywhere that couldn't keep this tiny world united? There is nothing in this story that is improved by being legally in Aqua as an entry of the Aquanox series! Without the license a lot of this would be sloppy, but forgivable. What was done to the Bionts is literal Character Assassination. They aren't even known until near the end of AD, and they certainly weren't occupying prime deep sea territory. They had absolutely no desire to assimilate anyone like a Borg. Survion embodied the hive mind but did not personify it. It was a critical point in a big complex that got destroyed with a bomb. It was easy for the writers to keep them around in Aquanox. How do the Bionts come back twice from the death of Manta? We will never know, because Deep Arrow are clearly not getting to do a whole series. Perhaps it is better to imagine what contrivances they had waiting for players. The Senthics completely change the setting. Anyone that has played through AD would probably remember the combat music that samples one of the cutscenes, drilling this into you: "The surface a nuclear wasteland, the last survivors fled to the depths of the oceans, to deep sea stations harvesting the final gifts of the Earth. They took with them the storied history of Man, and sank into darkness for centuries. After the dark times, for the last time, Man rose again to a new life, the only life left on a dead world. A world that is our own creation. We called it: Aqua." The setting was not 'Scientists that were basically NERV from NGE upset The Elder Things from The Mountains of Madness. They scoured billions of people from the surface of Earth to teach us to be less mean to each other.' What a waste.