Aquanox 2: Revelation

AquaNox 2: Revelation is a 2003 underwater action game developed by Massive Development and published by JoWooD in Europe and Encore Software in North America, where it arrived August 22, 2003. It holds a Metacritic score of 59 across one of the widest critical spreads of its year — PC Gamer’s 87 against Computer Gaming World’s 20 — and a user score (7.7) that has aged kinder than the critics did. It’s the third game in the drowned-world saga that began with Archimedean Dynasty, the last one Massive Development would finish before closing in 2005, and the one that set aside series hero Flint for a new protagonist: William Drake, last heir of a ruined industrialist dynasty, press-ganged into a mercenary commando crew.

Its reputation splits along the same line as the whole post-1996 series: gorgeous, fast, and shallow — and this time with a story reviewers found harder to forgive.

Technical Specifications

William Drake and the Crew

Drake inherits nothing but a name and a debt; stripped of his family’s holdings, he falls in with a crew of mercenaries and pirates whose ship becomes the game’s hub, and whose company drives a campaign of salvage, raids, and faction skirmishes across Aqua. The crew-banter structure is the sequel’s biggest narrative swing — a found-family-on-a-pirate-sub premise with expanded dialogue between missions — and its most-criticized element: reviewers called the conversations “poorly-written and ultimately pointless,” while PC Gamer, at the opposite pole, praised the adult, gritty tone as exactly what the setting needed. Both were describing the same script.

Four Gunships, Same Water

Mechanically it refines AquaNox rather than rethinking it: four distinct playable gunships with their own handling and hardpoints, a broader weapon catalog, and the updated krass engine delivering what G4 called “a new high water mark in graphics.” The complaints were equally continuous with its predecessor — a short campaign, invisible walls hemming in the supposedly open ocean, and mission design Computer Gaming World savaged as “a boring series of follow-the-leader and circle-strafing style stages.” The 59 sits where the series’ trajectory pointed: each entry prettier and faster, each further from the sim that started it.

The End of Massive

A console remake, AquaNox: The Angel’s Tears for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, was built and then cancelled after failing Sony’s quality assurance; Massive Development closed in 2005, and the Aqua universe went dark for fifteen years until a Kickstarter brought it back as Deep Descent. Revelation is thus the quiet ending of the original studio’s run — and, for the fans who stayed, the game whose crew and ship they still cite when asked what a proper AquaNox revival should feel like.

Where to Play It Today

AquaNox 2: Revelation is on Steam and GOG for a few dollars, typically bundled with the first AquaNox, with widescreen and compatibility fixes documented on PCGamingWiki and WSGF. Completionists should play it third, after the games above; everyone else can fairly treat it as a graphics-card time capsule with a pirate crew attached.