An underwater vehicular combat sim, created by now-defunct German developer Massive Development (not to be confused with Swedish studio Massive Entertainment). The game is a direct sequel to their earlier title Archimedean Dynasty (a.k.a. Silent Running, which takes place in the same fictional universe a few years prior.
In the future, due to World War III and an antimatter meteorite, civilisation will be forced to emigrate and live in underwater stations in the depth of the ocean.
The first game was released in 2001 and placed you in the role of Emerald "Deadeye" Flint, a mercenary fighting a race of cyborgs called the Bionts (picking up from where you left off in Archimedean Dynasty). 2003's sequel, Aquanox 2: The Revelation, gives you the role of William Drake, a young (and initially quite naive) man whose cargo freighter gets hijacked by a bunch of pirates, led by a treasure-obsessed man named Amitab, who then shanghais him into fighting for them.
The franchise stayed dormant for a decade, as Massive Development was shut down by their parent company, JoWood in 2005. JoWood themselves was later bought up by Nordic Games (now THQ Nordic), who at Gamescom 2013 announced that they are working on a reboot of the franchise. That reboot turned out to be Aquanox: Deep Descent, funded
on Kickstarter in September 2015 and released in October 2020.
Aquanox provides examples of :
- Advertised Extra: May Ling's role in Aquanox 2's plot is smaller than her central prominence in all the game's promotional material would suggest.
- After the End: The series takes place centuries after World War III has reduced the surface to an irradiated wasteland, with humanity surviving in underwater habitats dotted across the world divided between several major factions.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: William can find Hank Bellows, the pirate who caused him all the trouble with Amitab's crew, hiding around nearby while he escorts Dr. Finch to Machina Antarctica. Hank will recognize William if you engage him, as well as the fact that he has much better equipment now and still wants payback, so he tries to plead with William not to shoot him to pieces and that he could prove useful later on. You get an extra reward if you simply stun his sub with EMP weaponry.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different : The switch from Flint to Will Drake in the last game of the trilogy.
- Apocalypse How: Scope: planetary. Severity: societal disruption...
- Artistic License – Physics: Critically damaged ships suffer explosive decompression, which would make sense in space... Except that under miles of ocean, they should implode instead.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Vendetta Sniper gun can be used to shoot through people's cockpits for an instant kill when it's zoomed in... but it does very little damage if it hits anywhere else, has a long reload cycle, and cockpits can be REALLY hard to hit on a moving vehicle, especially when you're being shot at and have to stay in motion yourself.
- The Battlestar: Aquanox has two unique super-carriers, the Crawler's Magma Eater and Iwan King's Creole Girl.
- Beam Spam: Gatling Laser, Gatling Plasma.
- Big Bad: Aquanox 2 has Queen Strega, the vicious leader of the Order Mercenaries who wants to prevent the lost treasure known as the "Angel's Tears" from being found at all costs and is also William's Evil Aunt.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Aquanox has rogue Federation military commander Commodore Sool and the Crawler leader Samuel Korhonen. Sool is a crypto-fascist who wants to take over the Federation and reclaim the surface, while Korhonen is a megalomaniacal madman who basically wants to eat everyone. Although they're working together, each plans to eliminate the other once the Federation and Flint have been dealt with.
- Casanova Wannabe: Stoney Fox from Aquanox 2 fancies himself quite the ladies man and always looks forward to getting some scores whenever the Harvester makes port. According to everyone else, the ladies usually run away from him. When he outright admits that none of the ladies he always looks forward to exist and that he knows nobody is waiting for him outside the crew, it's a clear sign that Amitab's death and the grim situation really affect him.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Early on in Aquanox 2, among the many strange people you'll meet in Atacama City is a lavender-haired woman named Gwen. She seems nice enough, but she seems to have some familiarity with the equally mysterious Nat, Amitab's Number Two. She's his estranged ex-wife and the Big Bad.
- Climactic Battle Resurrection: The battle for Neopolis, which features lots of characters from throughout the game.
- Continuity Nod: Done repeatedly throughout Aquanox, which keeps referring to the events of Archimedean Dynasty, and also through Aquanox 2, which refers to events of Aquanox and its prequel.
- Convection, Schmonvection: One mission in the second game takes place at a mid-ocean ridge. The heat does not damage your submarine unless you get right next to the lava. The water around the ridge is also remarkably calm, while in reality it should be in constant violent churn as the water heated by lava rises up and cooler water flows in from the sides.
- Cool Sub: Many of the subs in the series are dedicated killing machines with the coolness factor to match. Big or small, fast or slow and tanky, there's a wide variety of them.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Vanderwaal used to be this, until he lost control of EnTrOx.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Deep Descent reveals that the Bionts are the result of a pre-War scientist using nanites to attempt to achieve immortality, in hopes of living long enough to achieve the enlightenment required to negotiate with the Precursors. Instead she gradually lost her humanity and became the Bionts, bent on either assimilating or eliminating all other lifeforms.
- Darker and Edgier: When compared to Archimedean Dynasty (which was already pretty gritty to begin with).
- Disappeared Dad: William Drake's father, Alonzo Drakenote , disappeared without a word after William's mother Emma was killed by pirates. He was later told that his father had died, but he himself isn't quite sure. He was killed four years before the events of the game by the Order Mercenaries while looking for the "Angel's Tears", namely by Lt. Hamlet, whom William meets in Atacama City.
- Disney Death: Two thirds into Aquanox 2, Angelina is seemingly killed by Queen Strega during one of her attacks on the Harvester. She remains this way until the middle of the Final Boss battle, where she suddenly arrives to aid Drake in his showdown with Strega. Turns out she had used the opportunity to pull a Faking the Dead, both to gain an edge over Strega at a critical moment, but also because the prophecy stated that only a man with great sorrow in his heart could find the "Angel's Tears". This way that part of the prophecy could be fulfilled without her having to actually die.
- Drives Like Crazy: One side mission in Aquanox 2 has you escorting Freeman, one of Stoney's friends, who stole one of the subs of the first game's protagonist Emerald Flint. Problem is that he hasn't quite gotten the hang of the controls yet and drives around like he's drunk as a result. His in-game movement reflects this, making quite a lot of unnecessary swerves and turns.
- Dystopia: Though mostly prosperous and highly technologically advanced, the society of Aqua is also extremely corrupt and decadent.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Late in Aquanox 2, the stress of his years-long obsession with finding the "Angel's Tears" takes a toll on Amitab just as they get close to some actual clues as to its whereabouts, leading to him getting smash drunk in the cantina of the Harvester, yelling about how they are all idiots and will never live to see it. He snaps out of it by the time they reach the old hideout of Captain Juan Garcia Lopez, where the map to the treasure is supposedly held.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Old Ones/Squids, their apparent leader Forneus, all Bionts, and whatever Drake's Creature is (the plot isn't completely clear, though it seems to be mentioned as something "worse than the Bionts").
- The End of the World as We Know It: The surface has been rendered uninhabitable and the oceans are covered with an impenetrable layer of highly radioactive dead organic matter which makes travel to the surface impossible. What's left of mankind lives purely Under the Sea.
- Enemy Mine:
- Archimedean Dynasty's finale sees El Topo manage to unify the Atlantic Federation, Shogunate, and Clans Union for an all-out attack on the Survion, the Bionts' city-sized central brain.
- Aquanox's finale has the Atlantic Federation, Entrox Corporation, Tornado Zone pirates, and even the Bionts all joining forces against the Crawlers and the Squids. Flint remarks that joining forces with the Bionts is an incredible Idiot Ball move.
- Escort Mission: An alarming number of them, although most are tolerable once you figure out what you're supposed to do.
- Eviler than Thou: The Old Ones/Squids pull this on all the other villain factions when they show up in Aquanox's final act. The Bionts end up pulling one on the Squids in the game's ending.
- Fallen Hero: Admiral Cox becomes an antagonist and leads a coup against the Federation government after a crypto-fascist far right political party gets voted into power. He gets an Alas, Poor Villain.
- Forbidden Zone: The surface world, "where the pressure is so low that explosive decompression is inevitable." Besides a few idealists and cultists, no one gives any serious thought to trying to recolonize the landmasses of Earth, even though it's been centuries since the wars and successive disasters that ruined it.
- Future Slang: "Light" is a common greeting in the underwater world, possibly because there's so little of it.
- Gainax Ending: Aquanox and Aquanox II both feature end cutscenes with a lot of exposition and very little explanation, and suggestions of a possible future story or sequel that has not materialized.
- Gatling Good: Vendetta Gatling, among others. See Beam Spam.
- Game-Breaking Bug: The last level of Aquanox is broken and often renders the game Unwinnable, due to the final boss failing to appear at the end of the mission. This is mostly caused by installing the final 1.7 patch instead of the earlier 1.5 patch, but sometimes happens even with the 1.5 version of the game.
- Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke : The biont monsters.
- Greater-Scope Villain: In Aquanox 2, Drake ultimately learns he's destined to prepare humanity for a battle against an enemy even greater than the Bionts, though exactly who that is is left completely vague, as the game doesn't seem to be precisely describing either the Squids or the Senthic.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Late in Aquanox 2, Amitab gives his life to save Nat and Animal during an attack by the Order Mercenaries. He dies giving Drake the fifth and most important of the four things he said could never come back to you: A spoken word, a fired torpedo, the past, a missed opportunity... and your life.
- Hot Sub-on-Sub Action: The series is practically built around this. There is no shortage of subs in Aqua and even more people itching for an excuse to blow each other to bits in them.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Even the apparent good guys of Aqua are morally ambiguous at best.
- Human Resources: The Crawlers are cannibals, and it's revealed that the Bionts capture humans and break them down into base proteins to fuel their bio-organic parts.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The Crawlers, again. It's their most infamous trait, though apparently they only ever eat their victims and not each other.
- It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Nat says this verbatim during a raid on one of the Order Mercenary bases in Neopolis, after you just shut off all defenses and Stoney and Animal entered the base. Of course, it almost immediately stops being quiet when enemy reinforcements arrive.
- Interrupted Suicide: Nat reveals that he caught William's father with a gun in his mouth shortly after the death of his wife Emma. He was able to stop him and convince him to continue their mission, which eventually got him killed anyways.
- Join or Die: Initially, one of the Big Bad's Co-Dragons in Aquanox 2 accidentally exposed his involvement with the mysterious attack on the Harvester earlier in the game by offering Drake a We Can Rule Together. He later extends this offer to Drake again and promises that they will leave the rest of his crew alone if he complies, but also makes it clear that refusal will lead to Drake and the others being massacred. The Big Bad herself gives this offer again later on in the game, but doesn't even bother to be nice about it at this point.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: A drunken Hank Bellows lures William into what he expects to be an easy ambush, but when it becomes clear that his victim knows how to defend himself, Bellows quickly decides to turn tail and run.
- Landmarking the Hidden Base: At one point, you attack a base centered around the Statue of Liberty.
- Lost Superweapon: The Federation's Brainfire Project turns out to be an attempt to gain control of one of the remaining pre-war orbital satellite lasers.
- Macross Missile Massacre: The Hydra gun essentially spews out a continuous stream of small, short-ranged, lightweight, target-seeking torpedoes.
- MegaCorp: EnTrOx Corporation. Its three main products/services are right there in the name: energy, transportation, and oxygen (well, a mix of helium, as oxygen is toxic at that pressure, but EnTrHe wouldn't sound as cool). They hold the region of the Caribbean Sea effectively as their own sovereign nation.
- Mighty Glacier: The Mighty Maggie from Aquanox 2 is the slowest ship you can pilot, but it has also the most armor/health rating out of all of them, as well as plenty of room for all kinds of torpedoes.
- Mission Control: Being the captain of the Harvester (after taking it over at the start), Amitab serves as this in Aquanox 2. Nat takes over after Amitab's death.
- Outside-Context Problem: The Old Ones/Squids serve this role in Aquanox, similar to the Bionts in Archimedean Dynasty.
- Outliving One's Offspring: The son of Nat and Queen Strega in Aquanox 2 was part of the Order Mercenaries Strega formed to find the "Angel's Tears". She was not only fanatically devoted to finding it, but she also demanded that same zeal in her followers, her son included. This eventually led to their son's death when she allied with the Bionts and ordered him to bring the attack plan of the alliance to Survion prior to the Final Battle in Archimedian Dynasty, where the Bionts then killed him because they knew he was simply misinformed and not a true ally. Nat has never forgiven her for this.
- Parental Substitute: Nat and Fuzzyhead practically raised Angelina in Aquanox 2, since she had to leave her parents and go with Nat when she was still young.
- Pinball Protagonist: William Drake doesn't really take the initiative to choose his own course or even ask hard questions about the course of others. Whenever he does make any decisions on his own, they are nearly always ill-informed.
- Police Are Useless: Yup. Aqua is more or less lawless outside of the habitats, and known murderers are often seen walking around inside those habitats without any problems. The police subs that patrol the areas around the habs are often mysteriously not present so that Flint can take jobs that they are supposed to do, and they die by the sub-load whenever you take a mission that pits you against them. On the rare occasions where they are present and supporting you, they still won't actually do very much.
- Precursors: Deep Descent reveals that an underwater race known as the Senthic, living under Antarctica, predate humanity and have technology so advanced they might as well be gods. They're responsible for the radioactive plankton layer cutting Aqua off from the Earth's surface, as punishment for mankind destroying the planet. They're also inadvertently responsible for the creation of the Bionts, as a pre-War scientist who knew of their existence used nanites to become the Bionts in order to live long enough to achieve the enlightenment that would be necessary to negotiate with them.
- Prequel: The ending of Deep Descent reveals that it's one to Archimedean Dynasty and the original Aquanox games, taking place some period before Flint's time. You can even meet Flint as a child aboard Nemo's ship.
- Pretentious Pronunciation: Flint always refers to his stolen sub "Succubus" as "Zoo-koo-bahs".
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Neither Flint nor Drake seem overly troubled by the huge numbers of people they kill, no matter who they are, and no one ever takes them to task for it either. Occasionally, someone will voice a sentence of complaint, but it never becomes a part of the plot.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: The subs piloted by the Order Mercenaries have a primarily black and grey color scheme with red lights. They are also the personal army of the vicious Big Bad of Aquanox 2.
- Remember the New Guy?: Inverted with the Bionts; Archimedean Dynasty makes it clear they're an Outside-Context Problem that no one has ever heard of, while Deep Descent shows the Bionts were already a known threat a couple of decades before the events of Archimedean Dynasty (though their existence may have been classified by the powers that be).
- Retcon: There's a throwaway line in the ending to Deep Descent in which Deadeye Flint dismisses the tales of his adventures as dramatized holo-film productions that were Very Loosely Based on a True Story, in which many of the faction names were even changed to avoid pissing them off. This is possibly an attempt to reconcile any continuity differences between the original 3 games and Deep Descent.
- Sadistic Choice: Legendary pirate captain Juan Garcia Lopez is said to have once plundered a civilian transport ship, flooded it halfway and then gave the people on board a choice: kill each other or everyone dies; those who survive he will let live. Faced with a choice like that, friends killed friends in desperation, siblings killed siblings and one mother supposedly killed her seven year old child. It is left unclear if any of them did survive. After all, who would still want to live after doing something like that?
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Halfway through the second game, May Ling goes full Woman Scorned on Drake during a partrol mission due to perceiving him as having chosen Angelina over her, unleashing her entire arsenal with intent to kill. After severely damaging her subnote , May Ling calls everybody on the crew insane and leaves on the spot. She ambushes you much later during a raid on the Neopolis museum of modern art, still intent on killing William for rejecting her. There's no running this time however; your only option is to end her.
- Sea Mine: There are levels dedicated to these. Worst of all are levels where you must do an Escort Mission for a ship that is incapable of doing its own minesweeping.
- Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!:
- Flint and co. do good work for better credits.
- Amitab's pirate crew give speeches about this trope to Drake whenever he complains about their actions, or their continual abuse of him.
- The Stoic / Deadpan Snarker: Flint (in contrast to Archimedean Dynasty, where he was more of a cheerful Lovable Rogue).
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: Halfway through the first game Admiral Cox turns rogue against the Atlantic Federation and Commodore Sool takes his place in giving orders on the AF side. Cox had consistently been portrayed as a Father to His Men Reasonable Authority Figure and a father figure to Flint personally, while Sool radiates a smug sense of superiority and thinly veiled contempt every time you speak to him. The story has Flint follow Sool's lead to fight against Cox with surprisingly little question. As is to be fully expected, Cox turns out to have had very good reasons for his actions, and Sool was not to be trusted.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Hank Bellows only appears a few times throughout Aquanox 2, but him faking a distress call to lure Drake away from the Harvester for an ambush at the very start of the game gives Amitab and the others the opportunity to hijack it without opposition. One can only imagine how things could've turned out if Drake had been present to defend his home.
- Submarine Girl: Sally is both this and the Computer Voice of Flint's sub.
- Speak Ill of the Dead: Queen Strega belittles Angelina after she had just killed her during an attack on the Harvester in Aquanox 2, laughing about her having died following the destiny talks of her moronic ex-husband. Drake tries to give her a Shut Up, Hannibal!, but she just insults him back and keeps talking.
- Submarine Pirates: The world of Aqua has them. In fact, the main plot of Aquanox 2: Revelation is kicked off when your character's home sub is hijacked by pirates while he is away, and he is forced to deal with them from then on (one of them later turns out to be his uncle).
- Sub Story: A futuristic take on it.
- The Nothing After Death: Nat believes that there is nothing waiting for those who die, just a Cessation of Existence, which is quite a contrast to his usual belief in a greater power. He recinds this before going to face his ex-wife in a Duel to the Death, saying that the thought of the others waiting for him is a comforting one now that he's so close to the end.
- Title Drop: In the first game, one conversation with a rather philosophical person will have him refer to the bad state of the world as "Aquanox, the watery night".
- Took a Level in Kindness: Animal is an ex-Crawler who usually keeps to himself in the garbage chute of the Harvester and is by far the most hostile member of the crew when Drake is forced to join, usually just telling him to shut up and go away when he tries to make conversation. Later on in the game, Animal gradually opens up to him and becomes a trusted companion. After practically leaping to help Drake save Angelina from some Crawlers, he outright leaves the garbage chute and thanks Drake for it.
- Travelling at the Speed of Plot: The "dipole drive" serves like the underwater equivalent of a hyperdrive, teleporting enemies away and out of reach when they need to leave the stage, or yourself at the end of a mission. You can't actually use it during the mission, even if you want to hurry up.
- Truce Zone: Combat inside of habitats is apparently strickly taboo, and various thugs and rivals will often meet you inside of bars to trash talk you, before the two of you head outside to your subs to fight it out. At one point towards the end of the first Aquanox, you can find the two most wanted men on the planet (pretty much the setting's equivalents of Hitler and Osama Bin Laden) strolling casually around in a city park waiting to talk to you.
- The Unfought: You never actually fight a proper duel against Big Bad Samuel Korhonen or his Ace Custom sub; although he participates in some of the end-game firefights, he warps away after a very short period of time. At the end he gets eaten by the final boss in a cutscene.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable:
- In one version of the first game, the final part of the final mission is bugged.
- Downplayed compared to the above example, but the mission "The Race" in Aquanox 2 has you engage in a friendly race against Stoney Fox, another crewmate of Amitab. His sub has superior speed to yours, so the only way of winning the race is to shoot him with EMP weapons to briefly stun him so you can get some distance, at which point he will try to return the favor. The problem is that Stoney will have a significant head start if you skip the beginning cutscene, making it impossible for your guns to actually reach him. You don't actually need to win the race to finish the mission, but you get an extra reward if you do.
- Unknown Relative: Nat is actually Nataniel de Granada and brother of Alonzo de Granada, William Drake's father. William didn't know him at first, but eventually pieces his identity together on his own. This also makes the Big Bad his Evil Aunt, who got his cousin Gabriel killed when she betrayed their Secret Society.
- Used Future: An underwater version - but a lot of the subs still look really awesome.
- The Usual Adversaries: The Crawlers, a deep-dwelling civilization of cannibals hostile towards all of the other human civilizations.
- Villain Decay: The Bionts, the Big Bad faction of Archimedean Dynasty, have been reduced to a weak group of Remnants who serve as the enemies in the game's first Act. Their ships are noticeably weaker and slower than they were in Archimedean Dynasty; justified in that the remaining Bionts in Aqua are stray units leftover from the destruction of their civilization in the first game, who have not been maintained or repaired for more than a year.
- Villainous Breakdown: When Hamlet begins his attack on the Harvester, he's a complete Smug Snake about it and continuously belittles Drake while they fight. However, as his sub gets more damaged he noticably loses much of his bravado until he's reduced to begging for his life. Drake ignores his pleas.
- Villainous Gold Tooth: Atahualpa Jones has a prominent one. It is a bit easier to see in Aquanox 2, though he's really more shifty than outright evil.
- The Wall Around the World: A highly radioactive layer of dead organic matter completely covers the oceans near the surface, preventing any attempts to travel to the surface world.
- Water Is Air: The small, one-man subs maneuver very much like aircraft. The game tries to Hand Wave this by claiming that supercavitation technology allows subs to do exactly that. Supercavitation is a Real Life technology that creates an air bubble around the craft to reduce the drag and speed it up. The technology is currently being used to build some super-fast Russian torpedoes. In fact, DARPA is supposedly working on a way to create fast-moving mini-subs for quick underwater transportation using his method. However, currently, DARPA isn't even sure that a submersible craft can even turn when using supercavitation, much less maneuver like a fighter jet.
- Western Terrorists: One of the problems facing the world of Aqua are "Terror Tourists", bored Federation youths who travel to poorer non-Federation areas and randomly blow up habitats and property for giggles.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: William Drake, at first. He's so naïve that it borders on Too Dumb to Live, as he tends to trust random strangers with way too much information way too quickly, something that he is both ridiculed for and warned about by almost everyone around him. He gets better in this regard.
- Would Not Shoot a Good Guy: Admiral Cox's rebel forces primarily fight with non-lethal EMP weaponry, which disable enemy subs instead of destroying them. The player is encouraged to return the favor, but there's no real gameplay or plot punishment for just straight-up killing them instead.
- Yandere: May Ling, a.k.a. "MayDay". She goes absolutely nuts when she merely thinks Drake has chosen Angelina over her.
- You Killed My Father:
- Inverted. Lt. Hamlet tries to provoke William Drake by telling him that he was the one who killed William's Disappeared Dad prior to their showdown, but it doesn't have that much of an effect since William already challenged him to a Duel to the Death.
- Played Straight with a missable Side Quest that can lead to William figuring out that Captain Redbeard is responsible for killing his mother. By attacking some hidden transports in Neopolis, Drake can challenge Redbeard and finally take revenge.
