Megaquarium Review (Game, 2018)
Disclosure: I received a free keycode from developers Twice Circled for this review of Megaquarium. Screenshots for the review also come from Twice Circled.
Megaquarium is a simulation game where you run an aquarium. It’s a cross between a theme park manager and a micromanaging simulation/strategy game and I’m all for it. You get as much depth out of the game as you want to get out of the game and that’s the joy of a great simulation game.
Want to just build and enjoy the sites of an aquarium? Sandbox mode is for you.
There are two modes in Megaquarium. For those who just want to relax, explore, and build an aquarium with rules rather than restrictions, there’s the sandbox mode. You control all the variables at the start: your starting rank (which determines the availability of species, equipment, merchandise, etc.), fish availability (how much and how many will come up), randomize availability (whether or not the fish/equipment that appear are random), side objectives (do you want extra quests for supplies, status, and achievements?), trades (do you want to receive offers to trade fish you raise for fish you don’t have?), merchants (do you want offers to buy fish outright from merchants?), and difficulty level. It’s a lot of information to take in. Megaquarium wisely offers you three default setups in addition to customizing all of that. Once you’re in, you do whatever you want with your aquarium with no lasting consequence. Since you don’t have to hit any objectives, it doesn’t matter what lives, what dies, and what eats what in the long term scheme of things.
The second mode is the more challenging option. Campaign mode gives you 10 stages in increasing order of difficulty. Stage one and two are the tutorial, introducing all the major dynamics of the game. New features are introduced at each level—different filters, advanced heating and cooling systems, new varieties of species, guest interactions and sales, and the trades and merchants. You level up by earning prestige, which comes from the perceived quality of sea-life in your aquarium
The difficulty comes from specific missions. You might be asked to build a certain size tank with a certain combination of species that can be difficult to balance. You might have to rebuild and expand on an aquarium that has fallen into disrepair. Those aren’t too hard. You might also be told to only expand an aquarium using a limited supply of cold water species, build an aquarium to a very high prestige level mainly through trades and merchants, or expand on an aquarium where the owners only allow you to purchase large species fish that can and will try to eat anything slightly smaller than them.
Those interactions are where the depth comes from in Megaquarium in either gameplay mode. Each species has a series of elements you have to balance to keep them healthy and alive. They eat specific food. They need a certain combination of plants, rock, and shelter in the tank to interact with. They need a certain temperature and quality of water to survive. They can also only be housed in certain combinations.
Look at the variety of species. Now look at the variety of icons underneath each species. These are all the variables you need to account for when filling the tanks at your aquarium.
Larger species can eat smaller species, and that’s made very clear in the descriptions under a giant yellow warning triangle with an explanation when you hover over it. Even that’s not straight forward. Some species will go after anything under a certain size; other species might just need to not be housed with coral, crustaceans, or certain breeds of fish. Then there are species that are small but are treated as double or more their size when calculating the predator versus prey relationship. Some need to be kept in schools while some have to be the only of their kind in a tank. There are even species that can only be housed in special tanks.
Megaquarium is filled with nuance you have to pick up as you go, which is always a pleasant surprise in a simulation game. Feeding is one of them. You can hire a limited number of employees to work in your aquarium. They have different specialties, such as feeding, cleaning, repairing equipment, or running a gift shop. Not every employee will be able to feed the fish.
Further, there are many different kinds of food for the variety of creatures in the game. Your tank might have an extremely large prestige with a wide variety of species happily coexisting, but if a large and deep tank filled with bulls-eye (difficult to feed) species has many different food sources in it, there just might not be enough staff and time in a day to feed every creature in a tank. You have to keep on top of the variety in a tank to make sure your fish are healthy and going to survive. Otherwise, your prestige takes a permanent hit for each creature that dies in your aquarium.
The building mechanics are basic theme park simulator and that’s for the best. If you’ve ever played The Sims or a Roller Coaster Tycoon game, you’ll know how to move, rotate, and zoom across the screen even without the tutorial. The build and delete tools are very forgiving and the game, mercifully, pops up a big warning screen if you click on a tank with living creatures in it. You have to choose to sell off a filled tank. Everything else gets deleted in one click with the bulldozer.
Here are few things to know about this review of Megaquarium. I’ve been trying to review this game since the embargo lifted last week. Every time I walk away from a completed draft to let it settle, I open up Steam and see a new update for Megaquarium. These have consistently been large patches for an indie simulation game that fix every major issue I have with the game before I even get to report it or publish it in a review. Glitches in missions that lock you from progressing? Gone. Optimization issues when the aquarium has to get large to complete a mission? Significantly improved and actively being worked on. The ability to lose creatures you need in a trade to complete a mission if you don’t place them immediately or try to move them? Corrected. Twice Circled, the developers, are actively working to make Megaquarium the best game they can. They are active on the Steam forums and responding to questions and bug reports. That’s all I can ask for.
Simulation games are hard to program. They are, even outside of the sandbox mode where anything goes, hard to predict player interactions with. My strategy in a game like this is to avoid nuance as long as possible when it comes to minutia interactive elements. That means that my stage one aquarium may be 10 times the size of the original layout by the time I’m done—each species with their own tank and maybe a second or third if I know it’s safe. I then start moving things around and brute forcing whatever scoring system is necessary to achieve my goals with the game paused. Warnings pop up instantly if something is horribly wrong so you can just hot potato that creature from tank to tank until you find the right combination. No one can predict every possible playstyle while building this kind of game. Twice Circled have been responding pretty much in real time to every game breaking bug and error that has been reported to them and that’s a lot of work in a simulation game. I’ve had developers basically tell me to quit their game before when I face a game breaking error because I’m not playing the right way; Twice Circle is taking that challenge head on and making their game better every time.
The technical areas of aquarium maintenance—designing tanks, feeding creatures, maintaining precise heat and filtration—are excellent in Megaquarium. I’d personally love that level of nuance for customer service elements—gift shops, talks, food, bathrooms, etc.—though that’s my preference.
From a preference standpoint, I wish there was more depth and variety with the vending/gift shop element of the game. There’s a limited spread of options and, other than the restock elements like stuffed toys or guide books, there’s no real consequence or benefit to doing anything other than the bare minimum—vending machines, a toilet, and trash can every x amount of squares and you’re set. That being said, seeing the spread of how far away a hungry guest will respond to a chocolate vending machine is very helpful information. I just want more variety and strategy. I’m greedy.
The employee zoning tool is a bit of mess as well. It works in the moment. You create a zone in an employee page and click and drag tiles to set where that employee will be working. If your aquarium grows beyond your initial zoning, good luck. There’s no separate zoning tool. To delete areas of a zone, you have to drag and click within the established range; otherwise, it just creates a larger zone. Further, you have to go zone by zone, employee by employee, to see where the existing zones are located individually. Other simulation games have a separate zoning tab that is color coded or filters to choose employees by zones. Megaquarium does not offer this, but zones are also the only safe way to ensure more complicated tanks have all their needs met every day. They work well enough if you can stay on top of that interface.
UPDATE: 12/15: The new winter update actually addressed. The staff management tells you what zone each employee is assigned to and what task they are doing. That’s all I wanted.
Those are my only real negative critiques at this point and they’re more genre preferences than outright flaws. Megaquarium is everything I could ask for in a specialized theme park simulator game. If I want to be a try hard, I can build elaborate tanks with perfectly balanced ecosystems and try to score more prestige than I ever have before. If I want to shut my brain off and just relax while building a park, I can keep things super simple, stick to species I like, and worry more about which floor color and decorations I want for my pirate room containing a single tank with nothing but coral and starfish. Any simulation fan will find a game they want to play in Megaquarium.
Megaquarium is currently available for PC, Mac, and Linux. If you purchase it through my Humble Bundle partner link, both the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and I get a small percentage back on the purchase.
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