Aquarium (PC) > Reviews > Something Fishy

Author's product rating:   

Playability & Enjoyment	I did not enjoy playing this game
Originality	Not bad - some good ideas
Graphics	Weak - I am not impressed
Sound	Not bad - needs improving
Difficulty & Complexity	Very complicated and extremely difficult

Advantages:	The only game so far that attempts to re - create fishkeeping on this scale
Disadvantages:	Too much guesswork and little logic, Poorly written

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I keep tropical fish as a hobby, so when I came across Aquarium (a management sim where you run your own public aquarium), I thought I couldn't go far wrong. How wrong can I be?

This game has been cobbled together using the Theme Hospital engine which should have been a plus, but the programmers just didn't do anything with it's potential.

The rest of the game seems to have been just thrown together in order to quickly get the game on the shelves.

Due to the rudimentary graphics, the system requirements are low. A p166 with 64mb ram, 160mb hard disk, 4 speed cdrom drive and windows 95 and up. A sound card is useful but you will switch the sound off after the first half hour of playing the game.

The whole point of the game is to build fish tanks and stock them with fish that the public then pay you for the privelige of viewing your handywork.

There are two game types: Free play and Scenario. With scenario, you play the free game but with a number of goals to achieve to win. These are shorter games as there is no time limit on free play and can go forever. As both types are similar, I will describe the free play game as all the scenario points are covered in free play anyway.

You start off by choosing the country you would like to set your aquarium up in. Then give it a name. The country you pick dictates the type of fish you can get in the early going.

When you start the game, you find yourself looking at an empty building. You have to right click to bring up the toolbar, which then appears, blotting out the game area so you can't see the background. Luckily, the game pauses, but the toolbar works like a tree, with new windows opening each time you select an option. If you then need to look back at the aquarium to make a decision, and it seems to be the case almost all the time, you need to make about 5 or 6 clicks to go back to the game screen. The programmers obviously thought that they were doing the gamer a favour by removing the permanent toolbar, but in the attempt, they have made possibly one of the worst control interfaces I have seen in a long time.

The various options are: Build, Fishery check(where you monitor fishes health and quarantine new specimins), Remove, Obtain fish (either purchase them, or go on fishing trips), Hire staff, Management (finance screen), Status (your score), Dolphin (you can buy and train dolphins to do tricks), Tank screen (allows you to watch the fish swimming in their tanks), System (save, load, quit, etc).

The various tanks you can build can only house certain types of fish, you have to carry out research to obtain new designs. Unfortunately, you even have to do research to get a chair! Why you can't just go to Ikea I don't know.

Once you have a few tanks and open the doors to the public, you have to hire staff in the form of: Cleaners to wipe the handprints off the tanks (although a glitch on my system means that the marks don't dissappear, even though they have just been cleaned), maintenance men to go in the tanks to clean inside and finally doctors to keep your fish healthy. The staff have no AI as far as I could tell, and even when I pick a cleaner up and put him right next to some litter, he will just wander off and leave it.

You can also get guides and put up direction signs, but they have little effect.

Basically much of your time will be spent tidying up and checking on the health of your fish, coupled every few years with having to call in an engineer to overhaul pumps and filters for the aquarium.

Obtaining fish is very hit and miss. If you go to the purchase option, you will be presented with a selection of fish that rarely changes. The other option is to catch them yourself. This is incredibly expensive, and you generally only catch one valuable fish if you are lucky. The problem is that it will probably not fit into the setup you have, so it spends most of it's life in the quarantine tank.

The main problem with this is that the whole process of finding fish, housing them and keeping the whole setup balanced has a "shot in the dark" feel to it, despite a fairly comprehensive manual.

As far as finances go, you are losing money at the start, and up to now (seven months on), I haven't managed to make a profit for one single gameplay month.

Although you will say it is due to my poor ability in this game, I found that no matter what strategy I adopted, I found that my aquarium was going bust after three years in business. (that is three artificial years, not real time).

You start with a fairly limited budget. So you build some tanks and put some fish in. Then the people come in, but after a couple of visits they are bored but there is no money for new attractions.

I won't beat about the bush, if you can afford the money to buy this game, you will be well advised to buy Theme Park or Rollercoaster Tycoon.

This game is just too poorly put together to warrant you paying your hard earned cash for.

I picked the games longevity as a month. You will have to be persistant to reach this, but I gave it a while to see if the game could grow on me.