[saibot216]

So I wanted to try Archimedian Dynasty because it's the prequel to Aqua Nox, a game that had a pretty cool looking ad in PC Gamer way back when. I figured because it's the predecessor it won't be perfect, but shit, I didn't think it would be this bad. The scenarios are the only good part about it, otherwise I just didn't give two shits about the story because they dropped me in the middle of something and expected me to care along with the atrocious amounts of dialogue, it's like someone threw you into Seven Samurai halfway through, you're not going to care now, so why bother. I eventually just stopped caring about what people said and skipped conversations, from the conversations I did read, I gathered that the main character likes to kiss ass about his boss to random people and he gets picked up in the bars by all the men.
When you get into the scenarios, you'll discover your ship handles like a bicycle on oiled pavement, but that's to be expected because you're in water, if I stopped suddenly, I would be rather confused, but it's so hard to maneuver your ship around the cities that have been built underwater. It's pretty hard to multitask with this game, you press 'A' to move forward, 'Z' to reverse, then 'SPACE' to shoot, and the arrow keys to change your view on the X and Y coordinates, I've never had to much trouble trying to fly. My fingers were practically in a Pretzel on the keyboard, thank god there isn't a pilot's test I have to pass in this game or I'd be screwed.
The enemy AI are rather thick, like a bunch of tourists visiting the underwater cities stopping and turning around every once in awhile to shoot at you like they're pissed you're following them. The ship you pilot is the strongest thing I've ever piloted in my video gaming career. I crashed into buildings and other ships and got shot at numerous times and I was pretty fine, at the end of the mission where I had to kill an army attacking a city, my armor was only down to 75% and do you know how I killed most of my enemies? By shooting at them and then deciding, "fuck it!" and ramming into them. When the ships explode you see a silhouette of the pilot in the explosion, which was actually pretty neat, but then I thought, wait, the ship just exploded, how the fuck is the pilot still fully intact?
The sound effects are pretty cool because when you crash into something you get a loud concussive bang that genuinely sounds like your big ship just plowed into something. Every sound sounds like it's actually underwater, which is pretty awesome. The music is... well for the most part it isn't, but when it is it's pretty dull ambient music that kind of gets on my nerves and if electronic ambient music is getting on my nerves than you've done something wrong.
Overall, this game is just not good. I said the scenarios were the only good part about it and even those were hard to get into and then just boring. The story can go fuck itself and I honestly just didn't care what was being said in any sequence of dialogue because of the way the story was presented. The sound effects were pretty cool, but that was it. This game can go sleep with the fishes.