Aquatico (PC) Review

Oh-oh! It seems that humans, got way too busy trying to annihilate each other, and they somehow lost track of what goes on in the solar system. So - oops! - a big heavy rock hit this beautiful pale dot while these moronic apes weren't looking, forcing said apes to go deep underwater in order to survive the hellish landscape that Earth had become. After a brief tutorial where players are given the basics (semi-adequately), the sea-mayor (that is you), is tasked with handling how the handling of this deep-sea neighbourhood will be handled. Expect the typical city-building stuff: gather resources, build structures, research new technologies, explore and expand. It would be logical to expect some challenges as well, but Aquatico kind of forgot to include any…

This plays well. It controls and looks fine, and it is generally easy to understand how things are done. Are there any flaws? Yes, but they are kind of minor ones. While it provides the means to micromanage your little fish tank with all sorts of buttons and levers it could do with a little bit of UI streamlining. One more issue is how samey everything looks, with the art style, dull blue colour palette, and lack of contrast and decent lighting effects making it hard to distinguish one thing over the other, even with the available option to recolour each separate type of building. Another flaw is how… robotic and lifeless the narrative aspect is, with everything, from the writing, the voice acting, and even the few character portraits, giving of a strong AI-crafted vibe.

All the aforementioned problems pale in comparison to the big one, though, which is that there aren't any notable threats down here. As an example, it took about two hours for a shark attack to occur, and after it ended, there were zero casualties despite the absence of any decent defence turrets. The lack of threats doesn't necessarily mean just enemies, though - there's simply nothing to make the trip any difficult in general. You can literally stop taking care of the base for a whole in-game year, and the human populace will remain happy, while your drones automatically gather resources.

Any consequence for not playing smartly? None besides taking longer to reach the end - and that's the only thing to look forward to here: completing the game. In other words, the main "task" boils down to researching every available tech, building all types of structures, and then producing/delivering the necessary materials that will help in aiding a major project far away from the player's city, where humans are building a mega-structure that aims to turn every other sea-base obsolete. Long story short, it's hard to care about anything. You do things just to do things, with the biggest challenge being the necessary wait for resource X to be gathered in order to produce the next thing in line.