I picked up Aquanox back for cheap years back when my computer wasn't actually powerful enough to run it with all the effects turned on, fired up an instant action mission, got my rear end handed to me on a platter, and proceeded to ignore it for years.
Recently I revisited the game on my much more powerful computer with all the effects turned up to max, and it's a very beautiful and interesting world to blow things up in. Some of the missions are just insanely hard to do properly, like the one where you're trying to neutralize army boats attacking a broadcast station, without destroying them. The problem is that disabled ships still show up in the radar as hostile blips and it makes situational awareness a problem when the entire radar is showing you a sea of red and you can't find the active targets fast enough to keep them from blowing the vessel you're escorting to kingdom come.
Also the wingmate AI is pretty laughably bad. And I'd love the option to do more exploration of the various zones without the "Mission Complete" lockout of my controls, which it does without any particular rhyme or reason (some missions it instantly does that, others don't end until you manually engage your drives, and those aren't always just because you're running away from something either).
But boy is it ever pretty.
