must know
What is it? An undersea city builder with a strong focus on resource management
Expect to pay: $24.99 / £19.49
Developer: Digital Reef Games
Publisher: Overseer games
Judged by: RTX 2080, Intel i7-9700K, 16GB RAM
multiplayer? no
Link: Official site (opens in new tab)
Imagine looking out over the skyline of a bustling city and instead of seeing a flock of birds or a passenger plane, you see a pod of dolphins or a gliding submarine. This is Aquatico, where you build a city on the ocean floor after an asteroid strike renders the surface world uninhabitable. Instead of roads you build pipelines, instead of city buses you have submarines, and your farms grow oysters and seaweed instead of wheat and pumpkins.
Actually… you can also grow wheat and pumpkins in a submerged greenhouse. How about, instead of tornadoes and floods threatening your buildings, you get shark attacks? That’s better.
Despite Aquatico’s unusual setting, your city will grow and prosper based on many of the same elements found in city builders that take place on the surface. Mining for oil and rock, plastic and glass manufacturing, subsistence farming, buying and selling goods with other subsea hubs, and using turbines and solar collectors for power. But even after building a sprawling settlement under the sea, and with a large human population living in watertight domes, my time at Aquatico felt less like building a city and more like setting up a series of busy factories. Although pipelines connect everything, I never really developed a connection with the underwater city myself.
Nautical trial
Resource management is the real star of Aquatico, and there’s a lot to manage. The humble beginnings of harvesting sponges from the ocean floor lead to plastic factories producing everything from building materials to clothing. Oil can be pumped from the ocean floor, turned into fuel and piped to any building that needs it.
Turbines generate electricity from the strong ocean currents, and once an oxygen generator is built, humans join the colony alongside automated, hard-working drones. Rapid expansion must be tempered with the infrastructure to support it: build too much, too fast, and angry red exclamation marks will appear in the city indicating a lack of fuel or oxygen. I found it mostly a soothing and relaxing experience to take in the sparkling blue depths, but it’s brightened up by moments of alarm and panic when I didn’t plan ahead and encountered a shortage of fuel, electricity or air.
The growing city can also be very enjoyable to just sit back and watch. Human workers clatter across the seabed in mech-like diving suits, water drones hurtle through the water, grow and harvest crops and carry supplies in their tiny mechanical claws. Automated submarines move resources between depots, warehouses and the city center, as all kinds of marine life glide over and through the city, from clouds of giant jellyfish to enormous sperm whales.
Each building has a pleasant sci-fi look and subtle but enjoyable animations as they produce their resources and products. As a nice touch, you can also paint each individual building or assign a color scheme to buildings of the same type, which I found useful in helping me quickly find certain key factories once my town really started to expand and I started to lose track what was built where.
There are also plenty of other inventive and imaginative undersea influences, such as farms that grow fields of cucumbers (sea cucumbers, of course) and animal pens for raising tuna instead of cattle. And there’s a second level of construction, accessed by tapping the Tab key, where you build large domes for the growing human population. The domes slowly become neighborhoods with houses, shops, restaurants, schools and even pets are visible when you zoom in and peer through the enclosure. There is public transport in the form of ziplines, so people can move between domes without having to put on a wetsuit. One little detail I like about the ziplines: adults will sit in the seats, but kids will stand by the window, curiously watching the ocean go by.
Another bright spot is an expedition system that is a bit like Frostpunk’s. After building a special hub, I can supply a submarine with human explorers and supplies and send it offscreen to investigate SOS signals, abandoned colonies, or new sources of food and resources. The missions offer the thinnest of story threads, mostly coming down to a single choice (fight a pirate sub or try to be friendly?), but it’s nice to feel like my city is just one of many different undersea colonies.
Technical wreck
But I do have a problem with one of Aquatico’s systems in particular: the research tech tree. Instead of being arranged in a logical list of levels, everything is combined into one big, incredibly long scrollable menu. It’s hard to find where certain unlocks are in the massive tech tree, and they’re not always sensibly located.
I had to research jewelers and defense platforms before I could build the simplest fast food restaurant
For example, at one point my supply depots were filling up and an in-game tip suggested that I should build a warehouse, which I should research first. But just finding the magazine on the technical list took a lot of slow scrolling back and forth, and when I found it, I saw that researching schools was a requirement. To unlock schools I had to research glass, which required me to unlock quartz first… all this to build a warehouse that is just a bigger version of my existing depots. Thing is, the warehouse didn’t even need glass to be built in the first place, but I still had to research it first.
There are many examples of this in the tech tree. I had to unlock policies that tax engineers before I could build more advanced farms, and I had to research jewelry stores and defense platforms before I could build the simplest fast food restaurant. The result of this poorly organized system is often that I have to endure weeks of technical research at 8x speed – and spend a small fortune to do it – just to reach the item I want to unlock because it’s buried behind not related technology or policy.
There’s another issue with Aquatico that I can’t put my finger on, but after hours of playing I’ve built a great city that sadly never really feels like a city. It feels like a large network of factories connected by pipes.
My city is quite grand, but I never developed a real fondness for it.
Part of the problem is that the footprint of almost every factory and building is a perfect square, so my city looked like a big flat grid, preventing it from developing any real personality as a place. The human settlers are so separated from everything else, with neighborhoods confined to the second level square domes rather than being more organically integrated between industrial areas and farms. And frankly, straight pipelines with 90-degree turns just aren’t as fun to build as curvy roads and bridges and highways. My city is quite grand, but I never developed a real fondness for it.
Aquatico’s resource management systems are quite deep and there are many charming details and some inventive ideas in the submarine builder. But like the water it’s submerged in, my city felt cold. It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.