Aquanox Deep Descent

I have never played the original Aquanox or the Archimedean Dynasty games so I can look at the game without nostalgia tinting my glasses pink. If what you're after is some fun shoot-em up arcade action with a beautiful underwater aesthetic and a catchy soundtrack then I believe this will fit right up your alley.

I've been following this game since the Kickstarter. Can't say I've played the last two titles as religiously as everyone else but it lived up to my expectations and I'm overall fairly pleased. The fps part of the game is refined to the max and the UI tells me everything I need. The atmosphere of the levels is on point, it easily makes me feel claustrophobic and conveys the feeling of being in an underwater sub perfectly. Overall; I don't have any gripes with the game, its a fun experience worth every penny.

I hope this hidden gem gets enough attention, if it got your interest, you should just try it

[Aquanox Deep Descent: Jacques-Yves Cousteau simulator. And, surprisingly, real Jacques-Yves Cousteau is more fascinating] Pain. That is the only feeling I experienced while playing this game. Every aspect of Aquanox is excruciatingly painful, from gameplay, especially combat-wise, to plot. In fact, I have not found a single feature that this game could be commended for. First, game mechanics. To better understand what this game feels like, try to imagine an incredibly boring and, at the same time, unreasonably difficult side mission in an otherwise good game. Like searching for minerals in Mako-truck in Mass Effect 1. Now, imagine that someone played this side mission and said to themselves: “Wow! That is so perfectly useless and anticlimactic! I should make a whole game out of it!” As a result, Aquanox Deep Descent was born. Nominally, the game positions itself as a shooter but it is anything but. “Doom” series are exemplar shooters: apart from the fact that there is fire everywhere, they are fast and captivating. On the other hand, watery Aquanox is a complete opposite of those: the game is slow and depressing. In addition to lame combat-regime, the submarine interface is extremely inconvenient. I mean, for real deep-sea explorers such an interface might be perfect. However, for a player it is extremely annoying to do a 360-turn every time they need to find the objective or strain their eyes to discern the remaining level of oxygen. Then, Aquanox has a plot. Or, well, it is said that the game has a plot. In fact, the story is a combination of endless loose ends that, even if they are tied up in the end, do not spur the player to beat the game. For example, the surface of the Earth was destroyed. How? Why? Who is responsible? What is more, while at the very beginning of the game, I was interested in such questions; 5 hours into the game the only problem that bothered me was “how do I not die of boredom?”. Besides, the main characters of the game are as stale as the plot. First, there are four of them. Having multiple protagonists is not a bad idea of itself (remember “Heavy Rain”), but in that case, they need to be equally well-developed. Conversely, in Aquanox, the main characters are not interesting at all. I did not know their past but I cannot say I cared about their future. Plus, the dialogues in the game are so pompous, pretentious and, at the same time, mostly meaningless that I do not want the characters to speak ever again. Like, a person asks the ship captain (sic!) if the fauna is dangerous, but the latter answers with a pathetically meaningful intonation: “It is different from what you experienced before. You will see…” I am off to a dangerous mission, you drama queen! I need an appropriate brief! To recap, painful gameplay and the atmosphere of pompous boredom are major flaws of Aquanox Deep Descent. There are numerous smaller shortcomings but the ones mentioned are already enough for me to advise not to play this game. After a 5-hours walkthrough, I could not force myself to go further. 3 out of 10

This is an action game with terrible combat and poor writing. Okay for a 2010 independent title, but not a 2020 game with a famous name attached.