Aquarium Designer Review











Marine Architecting-An Aquarium Designer Review

In a diversion from the past two weeks of non-stop action games, I decided to take a break this week with something more relaxed in Aquarium Designer. Previously I was a huge fan of these more casual type games like House Flipper, so let's see if Aquarium Designer can scratch that itch. 

Aquatic Ambience

Aquarium Designer revolves around completing all different types of Aquariums based off of jobs sent to you through your email. The main campaign will see you complete around 30 different missions, all with their own unique requirements and special secondary objectives for more flare. My personal favorite missions revolved around a client who wanted you to make the aquarium quickly, putting a time limit on your build and pushing you to make quick moves in the menus. In addition to the campaign, you can also freely create your own tanks, with the option to have them get dirty and deteriorate in real time if you fail to take care of them. 


That polish seeps into almost all aspects of the game. The UI is extremely responsive and easy to use, placing and resizing objects within the 3D aquariums is a breeze (an extreme surprise), and all the information you need is well described in all the games menus (outside of a few strangely vague secondary objective descriptions). If you have an idea for an Aquarium, the game will not but strange obstacles in your way to stop that idea from visualizing. Hell, it even has a very fine tool for adjusting the topography of the sand at the bottom of your tank, allowing you to create hills and valleys for more visual opportunities.  

It's also pristinely optimized, running at an uncapped framerate with great lighting and visuals. The models used for all the various fish were vibrant, alongside some great choices for underwater plants and decorations that make every build really stand out. 

The only real problem I found with Aquarium Designer was its honest lack of content. Whereas House Flipper had a campaign and subsequent DLCs that lead to over 20 hours of content, this title barely took me more than an hour to beat-even with going for all the side objectives. I hope the developers continually add missions or release an expansion, as I was just blatantly disappointed with how the campaign seems to abruptly end. It's a shame because these devs absolutely nailed the foundation of their game, but just failed to hit on adding enough things to use that foundation on.

Verdict

Aquarium Designer is nearly flawless in its main mechanics, and fits that niche of calming simulator games to a T, but genuinely lacks enough levels to fully warrant a score representative of its polish. For now, I'd say wait on it for DLC or a massive update. 

8/10-Incredible, But Sorely Lacking Content

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