Megaquarium Reviews

Its fun for a few hours. Better get it on discount.

A fun management sim with good support for mouse and keyboard (if you take the time to reconfigure hotkeys). Decently challenging. Recommended. 8/10

feels kinda basic. not a lot of personality in the designs and music

A very simple game to pick up, it gets incredibly complex as you work up the ranks, which adds to the, at least for me, addiction of seeing more fishes swim into tanks, to my guests' delight. The lo-poly look also looks adorable and pleasant, and with all the DLCs, the music's variety is most welcome for the long play sessions I do.

I was surprised by how much i loved this game!!! And surprised by how much detail and research went into making the fish and their habitats accurate! Cozy grind. I do wish the building system was smoother. Thanks!!!

So I have played Megaquarium a lot and it has its good points. It's quite in depth of its fish care and there's a lot of variety. But the management aspects are super underbaked and the UI feels clunky as hell. As a management game fan, I can't really recommend it. If you wanna do pretty tanks and don't care supermuch about the management, you'll enjoy it. But I find it lacking overall.

Really fantastic and endlessly replayable if you're big into zoo and aquarium sims. When you exhaust the base game there are many good mods. The mechanics are easy to learn but can still present a challenge and many avenues of experimentation. I love this game.

Cute fish and art style. Easy to learn but still can be a challenge

I don't think this game is worth full price (25 USD) for two main reasons: the first is simple, and I'm just not sure there's enough content. I think on sale, it'd be a fair price, content-wise. The second reason is the UI. At first, things seem fine. But once you start scaling is when the overview and management tools available to you are seriously lacking. Here are some specifics, in no particular order: [list] [*] employee zones cannot overlap. [*] employees cannot be reordered in the staff list view. [*] assigning zones is an un-intuitive nightmare (it's like a multi-dueling-picklist). You also can't see staff stats while assigning them zones. You just have to remember their name. Admittedly, I haven't tried to rename them. [*] nitpick, but you can't choose a zone's color. [*] I have no idea the interval or trigger at which new hires become available. [*] pumps can be connected to tanks at a distance. If you move the pump, even if it's still in range of all tanks, it disconnects. Your mouse will be ready to connect to ONE tank, but after that, your mouse goes back into move mode (so you must exit, click on the pump, click on the unoccupied "Add Tank" button). I move pumps pretty often to Tetris all my machinery together, especially as fish grow or I move them. [*] Finding a tank where a fish is unwell. The "Ledger" gives an overview (and "overview" is a generous term) of fish in each tank. Click on a fish, open its info, great. Click on a tank.... nothing happens. Sure you can rename tanks, but that's not anymore helpful in finding which tank it is. [*] The "close everything" button does not, in fact, close everything. Build tabs remain open. [*] Build tabs don't reopen after placing an item. Really annoying to place something, open the build menu again, scroll down to where you want again, and repeat. [*] Really no guest overview. You can see how many guests have certain thoughts, but that's it. No percentages of guests that think things. No overview of how many guests need drink/food/toilet. You can pause the game and count the icons above the heads yourself, I guess. But even then, you won't know whether a guest is heading towards something or not, or if everything in range is occupied/already has someone heading to it. Satisfying guest needs is completely vibes based. [*] Maybe I'm blind, but I have not seen anything indicating how far through the day you are. This is pretty important, since fish feeding tasks respawn at the start of a day, and it's hard to tell if I'm well staffed or not until there's simply fish that didn't get fed. [/list]

The vanilla game is a lot of fun. The extensive collection of mods make it even better. Who hasn't wanted to have a mosasaur in their aquarium.