need to know
what is that? An undersea city builder with a focus on resource management
expect to pay: $24.99/£19.49
developer: Digital Leaf Game
the publisher: Overseer Game
review date: RTX 2080, Intel i7-9700K, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official site (opens in new tab)
Overlooking the bustling city skyline, instead of flocks of birds and jetliners, you’ll see pods of dolphins and gliding submarines. This is Aquatico, building an undersea city after an asteroid impact renders the surface world uninhabitable. Build pipelines instead of roads, submarines instead of city buses, farms grow oysters and seaweed instead of wheat and pumpkins.
actually… you can Wheat and pumpkins are also grown in underwater greenhouses. What about: Shark attacks instead of tornadoes and floods threatening buildings?
Despite Aquatico’s unusual setting, your city grows and thrives based on many of the same elements found in city-building that takes place on the ground. Mining for oil and stone, manufacturing plastic and glass, farming for aquaculture, trading goods with other subsea hubs, and using turbines and solar collectors for power. , and even after the flooded domes were populated, my time at Aquatico felt more like assembling a row of busy factories than building a city. I myself have never really developed a connection with an underwater city.
sailing test
Resource management is the true star of Aquatico, there are many things that need to be managed. The humble beginnings of collecting sponges from the ocean floor have spawned plastic factories that produce everything from building materials to clothing. Oil is pumped from the seabed, processed into fuel, and piped to all the buildings that need it.
Turbines generate power from strong ocean currents, and once oxygen generators are built, humans join the colony along with automated, hard-working drones. Rapid expansion must be mitigated by the infrastructure that supports it. If you build too much or too fast, angry red exclamation marks will appear around the city indicating a lack of fuel or oxygen. I’ve found building into the bubbly blue depths to be a healing and relaxing experience for the most part, but not by the moments of alarm and panic when I run out of fuel, electricity, or air without planning ahead. It will invigorate you.
A growing city is a lot of fun to just sit and watch. A human worker wears his mech-like scuba suit and traverses across the ocean floor, while aquatic drones scurry through the water, growing and harvesting crops, and hauling supplies in tiny mechanical claws. Automated submarines move resources between warehouses, warehouses, and city centers, with all sorts of marine life gliding over the city, from giant jellyfish clouds to giant sperm whales.
Each building has a charming sci-fi look and subtle but fun animations as you churn out resources and products. You can also paint individual buildings and assign color schemes to buildings of the same type, which is nice. I’ve found this to be useful for finding certain important factories quickly when cities really start to spread out and you don’t know what. where it was built
There are plenty of other original and imaginative undersea touches, such as farms growing fields of cucumbers (and sea cucumbers, of course) and animal pens for raising tuna instead of cows. And then there’s his second-level construction, accessed by tapping the Tab key, to build a large dome for the growing population. The dome slowly becomes a neighborhood with houses, shops, restaurants, schools, and even pets when you zoom in and peer into the enclosure. There is public transportation called cable cars, so you can travel between domes without wearing a scuba suit. One of my favorite details about the cable car is that while the adults sit in their seats, the children stand by the windows and watch the ocean go by in wonder.
Another bright spot is the expedition system, which looks a bit like Frostpunk’s. After building a special hub, I would stock the submarine with human explorers and supplies and send it offscreen to investigate SOS signals, abandoned colonies, or new sources of food and resources. I can. Missions provide the thinnest thread of the narrative thread and usually boil down to one choice (fight pirate submarines or try to be friendly), but they’re all about how my city has many different undersea colonies. It’s wonderful to feel like you’re just one part of the world.
tech wreck
However, one of Aquatico’s systems in particular, the research tech tree, is frustrating. Instead of being arranged in a logical hierarchical list, everything is combined into one big and incredibly long scrollable menu. Finding where a particular unlock sits in a large tech tree can be difficult and not always in a sensible place.
Before I could build the most basic fast food restaurant, I had to research a jewelry store and a defensive platform
For example, at one point my supply depot filled up and an in-game hint suggested building a warehouse. I had to research it first. However, just finding the warehouse in the tech list made scrolling back and forth very slow, and when I found it, I found that researching the school was a prerequisite. , you had to research glass, and you had to unlock quartz first… all this to build a warehouse, a larger version of the existing depot. Even though it didn’t even require glass to build, it still forced me to study it first.
The tech tree is full of examples of this. Before we could build more advanced farms, we had to lift the policy of taxing engineers. Also, before building the most basic fast food restaurant, I had to research a jewelry store and a defensive platform. As a result of this disorganized system, weeks of technical research must be done eight times as fast for him, and he often has to spend a small amount of cash to do it.
There is one more problem with Aquatico, which is a little harder to figure out, but after hours of playing, I ended up building an amazing city that unfortunately doesn’t feel like a city at all. It’s like a big network of factories connected by pipes.
My city is pretty grand, but I’ve never developed a real love for it.
Part of the problem is that nearly all factories and building footprints are perfectly square, making my city look like a large flat lattice and preventing it from developing a true personality as a place. Rather than being more organically integrated among industrial areas and farms, the human settlers are highly isolated from all others, in an area confined to a square dome on the second floor. . Frankly, straight pipelines with 90 degree bends are not as fun to build as winding roads, bridges and highways. My city is pretty grand, but I’ve never developed a real love for it.
Aquatico’s resource management system is very deep, with many fascinating details and some original ideas for subsea builders. But my city felt cold, like I was drenched in water. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
