Aquatico Reviews

Hi, it rather boring, slow steady, nothing special, was hoping for better end credit video, boring too. am sorry but needs something.

This is one of those games you wish you could give a thumbs "neutral". It's not bad. In fact on paper it has everything a city builder should. There are a handful of annoying mechanics like how the upkeep of your produced resources takes into accont what you spent that month on research, buildings, and building upgrades. More than that, though, my biggest complaints with this game are more abstract and have less to do with the mechanics themselves, and more to do with how they come together with the overall design to produce an engaging experience (they fall short in this regard). There isn't much motivating the player at any interval. In the short term, things like production shortages are obfuscated by bad mechanics, which makes these short term obstacles moot. You don't really know when you need more of something unless it's one of the resources run through pipelines. That was fun to balance, but sadly other resources don't get similar treatment and so you are left without much to manage in the short term, which leaves you gazing at medium and long term objectives that leave much to be desired. Sure, there's plenty of resources and production chains to manage in the middle of the game, but why? What benefit do I get from managing them? This question is ubiquitous throughout the experience. For example, this game has temperature mechanics, which presents a survival mechanic, as does another well known city builder, "frostpunk". Yet the treatment here is very different. You don't know when temperature changes are coming. They aren't broadcast in any meaningful way before or during. They're just "there". You don't know how long they'll last. You see the snowflake icons, and upgrade the insulation of your houses and then move on as quickly as you noticed the problem. Though there is a temperature mechanic, it might as well not be there. It doesn't add very much at all to the player experience. This really gets to the heart of the problem. The game doesn't tell you about what to expect if you keep playing, but even if it did, I suspect it would not do so in a creative and fun way. Instead it'd be more likely that the player would miss these cues altogether because of how forgettable they are. Why do I want to expand into ever increasing production chains and expand across the ocean floor? There is no sense of purpose here. Sure in the story there is a thematic reason for all this, but this is a videogame. I need something more than an impassionate voice telling me to keep going because I am contributing to this thing I have no direct experience with. Again, this story might as well not exist because the player doesn't interact with it in a meaningful way beyond completing the game's production chains. Give me a way to lose and maybe give me multiple paths to victory, if you'd be so bold. At least give me multiple ways to lose. As the player, if anything of the sort existed in the game, you'd never know it, and that's really the problem here. This all may sound really bad and you may wonder why I'd give it a thumbs up. It's because this game has much of what it needs to be a good game on paper, it just fails to come together in the end. I can't knock it too hard for that, it's still worth $8 on sale. The critical commentary owes moreso to the fact that it is an example of wasted potential. When you boot up Aquatico, you have every reason to get excited in anticipation of what is to come. It presents itself as the total package. Unfortunately, though the game may be as deep as the abyss which surrounds your colony, your adventure never feels as though it never hoes beyond the shallow reefs. 5/10