quanox 2: Revelation is the third of Massive Development's games set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has moved under the seas, only to find even greater dangers. This game is set in same time that the hero of Aquanox, Emerald "Dead Eye" Flint, was undertaking his quest to save humanity. Instead of the veteran Capt. Flint, the hero here is William Drake, an inexperienced freighter pilot. Drake dreams of a life of adventure, but he instead has a monotonous existence ferrying cargo back and forth between the same two underwater cities. His dreams finally come true, however, when he answers a mysterious distress call.
Drake's quest for a lost, mythical, dangerous artifact called the Star of the Deep Sea takes place over 50 missions. There are seek-and-destroy missions (an amazing number of pirates haunt the waters), escort missions and defense missions. A robust AI drives the enemy ships, as it does the up to four wingmen that Drake will have on some missions. Enemies bob and weave among the sprawling terrain of the sea bottom.
To survive all these encounters, Drake can choose from four different ships. Each starts out very basic, but Drake can upgrade them as the game moves along. Some of these upgrade parts can be purchased, but most come from the wreckage of defeated ships. The spoils are divided up among the living winners at the end of multiship missions. The most important upgrades are the weapons, and there are 20 different ones: slug throwers, beams and torpedos all available to Drake. He will need most of them, as there 50 different types of enemy craft.
Daring dogfights in the ocean depths
Just as every action game is a descendent of Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, so every dogfight game is an ancestor of Descent. The setting is different, the graphics are vastly better, and the fighting ships are submarines, but at its core Aquanox 2 is about the player flying his or her ship through 3-D mazes while blasting increasingly dangerous enemies. In itself, this fact is neither good nor bad, but it is important in deciding if a player will enjoy playing A2:R. People who don't like dogfighting, whether it is in airplanes or spaceships or submarines, won't like this game.
On the other hand, players who love dogfight games will have fun with A2:R. The controls give piloting the subs more of a helicopter feel since the craft can stop suddenly, spin in place and even back up, but the subs can also twirl and loop like a combat jet. The fact that the slug-throwing and beam weapons behave as if the water of the ocean depths were no more dense than the vacuum of space doesn't lend the game any realism, but it does cut down the length of the learning curve for gamers used to space-based dogfight games. Restrictions on what depth the submarines can operate at, set by each mission, force the player to pilot around the sea floor terrain rather than simply sailing over it, and bring back memories of the underwater portions of many action games.
All of the combat in the game is much better than the between-mission action, which is a sort of minimalist RPG meant to drive the story. Drake stops at and wanders through various undersea cities, harbors and stations, seeking parts, repairs, missions and information to carry the story forward. There is no animation to this downtime. The player clicks on pictures to open other pictures that open pictures of the NPCs and start the dialogues.
In the two years since the first Aquanox, I haven't gotten any better at dogfighting games, so I didn't enjoy the sequel as much as people who love the challenge of 3-D combat will.
— Eric
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