Vehicles shooters set underwater in a post-apocalyptic society? Now that’s something we haven’t seen in ages! Suffice to say, I was onboard. We haven’t seen a proper Aquanox game in roughly 17 years, and “vehicle” shooters are a little hard to come by these days. They weren’t exactly great, but I felt like the potential was there. The first couple of hours with Aquanox: Deep Descent excited me. It’s been a solid strategy, and heaven knows I’ve been craving some good, relatively solid AA games that haven’t been tailor built to consume hundreds of hours of my life in some desperate attempt to coax me into some some “recurring spending”. THQ Nordic has been hard at work resurrecting AA gaming, bringing once extinct franchises like Aquanox back to life. It’s not a particularly original story and the writing is ripe with tropes and cliches (it starts with you looking for a shady character named, of all things, Nemo), but it gets the job done between shooting bouts. Warring factions are everywhere, trust is in short supply, and random acts of violence are everywhere. In Deep Descent, the player wakes up from cryosleep to find themselves in the post-apocalyptic mess of an entirely aquatic world. After 20+ years, the world of Aqua is pretty ripe with backstory if players want to bother to look. It’s disappointing the series hasn’t upgraded this aspect of the design at all over the years to add more meaningful reasons to visit these hubs beyond just commerce and mission acquisition. Conversation sometimes offers response choices but is still mostly primitive and linear. Here you can upgrade, find side quests, and chat with the other crewmembers. Between missions, you’ll spend time at undersea bases and large carrier subs. Fighting is fun and intense, but not without some basic strategic elements that amp up the challenge. Mixing up a variety of guns and torpedoes with a strong focus on shield management, the combat is definitely closer to arcade-style action than simulation. The pace is slower, more methodical, and much closer range. Digital ExtrasĪs a submarine-based game, Aquanox doesn’t just feel like a space game with more bubbles. Part of that enjoyment is the different feel of the combat, which is the core focus of the game. There’s nothing new here, but it’s a well-tread path for a reason and the more I played Deep Descent, the more I found myself overlooking the problems and just enjoying the ride. Kill pirates, trade, rescue other submariners, etc. The game takes the usual space shooter template from Privateer, Elite, and Rebel Galaxy into the water, and it provides a lot of things to do if you just want to explore the world and enjoy the watery gameplay. You’ll constantly need to find side gigs outside the main story to earn more money for better ships, ship parts, and weapons. Call of the SeaĪquanox has some light trading, crafting, and upgrading systems to it. It was something carried over from the preview build we hoped would be fixed. It didn’t do this with the mouse and keyboard, but proved a constant annoyance otherwise. Unfortunately, the game attempts a situational dash move just mashed into this as well and on all the gamepads we tried, trying to move straight up or down resulted in suddenly and uncontrollably jetting in that direction until the sub smashed into something. The thumbstick buttons are by default assigned for moving straight up and down, which in itself seemed inconvenient. The most annoying glitch had to do with the cramped control pad controls. Getting stuck on invisible architecture, watching the front-facing guns just jerk and blink, and general, if minor, instabilities were commonplace while plumbing the oceanic depths. Ultimate Digital Kickstarter EditionĪquanox: Deep Descent is also buggy as hell. At this point, it’s safe to assume the overall B-grade nature of the game, including the voices, is almost intentional. You’ll hear the same canned and phoned-in enemy sound bites all through the game and even the main cast voices are, at best, B-movie level. Sound effects, ambients, and the score all get the job done, but this entire series has a history of impressively sketchy voice acting, and Deep Descent certainly follows that tradition. The rest of the presentation is a mixed bag as well. Graphics are good, but compared to, say, Subnautica, still have a generic look. As a result, the game doesn’t exactly visually distinguish itself beyond just being underwater. Aquanox Deep Descent Free Download Repacklabĭeep Descent looks like a quintessential Unreal demo game, with that familiar lighting and smoothness of textures.
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