Aquanox 2: Revelation
Like Aquanox, the first, Aquanox 2: Revelation ended up in my steam library via the Humble Nordic 2 Bundle. It came out in 2003, apparently. Having already dumped more time on it’s predecessor than was sensible, I was never likely to give Revelation much of a go. As it turned out, I’ve clocked up a whopping seventy minutes, a whole ten minutes over the self-imposed acceptable threshold, conveniently not calculating here the number of minutes spent alt-tabbed or menu-idling. Here’s what I learned.
Much like it’s predecessor, Revelation begins with a hilariously long intro video. The mood is much more sombre, which is a shame because one of the saving graces of Aquanox was that I never felt it wanted me to take it too seriously.
The visuals are, incredibly, even less appealing. Or as my girlfriend observed “they’ve changed the tint from green to brown”.
The voice-acting is more professional this time around, but the dialogue is comparatively lacking in character and impetus.
The new protagonist, a wide-eyed emo kid, is somehow even more irritating than the gruff chaotic-neutral cowboy of the original.
The between-mission UI is pointlessly convoluted, making the player click through a heap of incidental dialogue in various rooms on board a ship in order to access the bit of dialogue which will trigger the next mission. At least in the predecessor all the available dialogue and ship-building options were laid out in one streamlined menu.
The game has introduced a geographical map which at least provides some context to where in the ocean all this vast story takes place (probably the single improvement I can see over the first game).
The first mission made me follow four navigation points through a dreary canyon before getting me to go all the way back again. Nope, this still isn’t fun.
Anyway at some point I alt-tabbed to find the news breaking on twitter that David Bowie had died. Fuck that, we’re done here.
Next = Aquaria. Presumably unrelated. Cool.