Megaquarium
Fishy things are afoot and for once it’s not the Machiavellian machinations of management pulling the strings, as Philippa Warr discovers!
Fishy things are afoot and for once it’s not the Machiavellian movements of management as Philippa Warr discovers…
This is a game of wonderful tinkering. Hours drift by as you expand your floorplan, placed new tanks, fiddled with pumps and filters, tweaked temperatures, and generally try to keep both fish and visitors happy.
The campaign missions gradually introduce you to the concepts and currencies involved. For example, there’s regular cash that you earn from entrance fees, sales of food and drink, and gift shop bits. But you also accrue Ecology Points and Science Points as the guests enjoy your exhibits. These are used to research new species and new technology, respectively. Prestige acts as an overall measure of how attractive your aquarium is. Gather enough and you’ll rank up, unlocking more bits for your aquarium.
Fishy requirements
Each creature has specific needs so there’s also a logic puzzle element to tank construction. Bullies will harass wimpy fish, and some fish get cross if they aren’t the only one of their species. Starfish won’t take food directly; instead, they need you to be feeding another creature in the tank and the starfish sneaks its nutrition indirectly by scavenging.
A few of the systems are a little hard to pick up. It took us until now to realise how to connect multiple tanks to a single pump. That’s important because pumps let you place unsightly tank equipment a short distance away, out of sight of guests. Making them serve multiple tanks means fewer clusters of equipment taking up valuable space.
It’d be handy to have menu options to sort fish by different categories, and a few quality of life tweaks wouldn’t go amiss. Not needing to delete a segment of wall manually when you want to place a door to a staffonly area is a big one. Being able to see how big a tank is on the tank info window would help with placing some of the active fish, who have minimum space needs for all that swimming. Cribbing from the recently released
Two Point Hospital (see LXF243) and using heatmaps to give an overview of the visitor experience would be useful in placing toilets and refreshment stands, too.
Oh, and figuring out the differences between difficulty settings required us booting up the same level in different modes and checking which numbers were different. As far as we can tell it’s a financial thing—staff cost more to hire and equipment and fish are more expensive. So difficulty is, it seems, just about having less of a financial cushion.
The cherry on the fish cake is that when you zoom in on a level far enough, the camera view switches from top down to actually being in the aquarium. Not only can you create the space, you can take a trip through it, as if you were a visitor, admiring your handiwork and delighting in that eel collection.