Aquanox is back! You may remember that the original Aquanox (released in 2001) was one of the first games that took advantage of some of the advanced graphical features in the newest graphic accelerator cards. I remember that the game looked highly impressive, especially with GeForce3. For those of you not familiar with the Aquanox series, it's similar to other first-person shooters on the market but with the interesting twist - it's set under water.

Aquanox 2 takes place shortly after the first game. To be exact, Aquanox 2 is set in the year 2666, just as the previous installment was, in the time when the surface of the Earth is impossible to live on and the whole world is known as Aqua. But the game's background story doesn't directly tie into that of AquaNox. A young guy inherits a transport ship called "Harvester", the last remains of a once huge trade company. He goes on an adventure to find it and soon finds himself in a story that he wouldn't have even dreamt of a week before...The story in Aquanox 2 unfolds in various locales, from the deck of your ship to the Atlantic and Western Pacific Ocean.

Basically, the game is divided in two major parts, the time you spend in underwater bases where you meet people, get information, buy and sell weapons, take on new missions, and the action part of the game that takes place in small, fast submarines during which you have no deep interaction with NPCs. Aquanox 2 features 30 missions varying between battle scenes, stealth missions and under water races. The missions themselves play rather like Wing Commander levels, only here everything is set under the water. On most of the levels you have primary goals which have to be completed, and there are also some secondary quests (bonuses) that you can do if you have time, good equipment and the will to. The bonuses are a good way to earn extra money. In the dock, you can buy and sell supplies at merchants and to prep your ship for battle. Most of the missions take 10 minutes to complete and their difficulty can range anywhere from fairly easy to insanely hard in a few cases.

Aquanox 2 might be entertaining, if you're in the right mood, but I felt rather disappointed. I recommend this game only if you are hardcore fan of the original Aquanox. Definitely try this playable demo (266MB) and decide yourself.

System Requirements:

Minimum: Pentium/Athlon 750MHz, 128 MB (256 MB on 2000/NT/XP) RAM, DirectX 8 compatible 32MB gfx card, DirectX 8 compatible sfx board, 1GB HDD space
Recommended: Pentium/Athlon 1 GHz, 256MB RAM, DirectX 8 compatible 64MB gfx card, DirectX 8 compatible sfx board, 1GB HDD space