Megaquarium Review

 Megaquarium Review

For a game that looks this cute I didn't expect it to be this overwhelming.

Megaquarium is a colorful and neat looking Aquarium Management game, you build and shape your own experience in it. the game consists of several chapters, each starts you off with a new place and challenges, you need to reach those requirements in order to complete it and progress to the next one. the challenges would be to either tank up, maintain a certain amount of prestige, grow certain fish to the max , build different tanks ...and much more. after finishing them you get to move on to the next level and start over, you can stay there and it will basically be "Sandbox" but you won’t get any more quests.

Building

It is not one of those "easy to understand hard to master" type of games, the basics are hard to understand in my experience. though I'm a fan of simulation/management games, this one is very complex, don't worry you end up getting used to it and understand what it all does eventually but I wish the tutorial gave me better explanation rather than having to figure out most of it myself.

You build a tank and fill it with fish, you then have to build water filters and heaters to maintain its temperature and water quality, you build those for each tank and you can adjust their positions thanks to water pumps, you can build paths to wherever you want, make paths for your staff only by adding "staff doors" which is a nice thing to have since they'll be the only ones with access to the machines from behind in order to fix them and what not, just like other simulation games you build bathrooms, food machines ...and all between those lines.

Fish

Obviously fish is a big part of this game due to it being an aquarium, although I have no idea what type of fish this and that is but the game puts that in mind by adding flags and notifications, I liked the variety of them and that you can unlock new ones, however it gets very confusing later on because this fish can eat this one, and this will die if it was put alone and this needs lights while this needs a cave, this one needs cool temp and this one doesn't...it ends up making you go all "screw this I will put each type of fish in one tank" To avoid conflicting which works but some fish can't survive with similar ones so you have to put one only ...it gets confusing and not being able to arrange them in the menu is annoying because I lose track of which are "aggressive" and what I placed already on which tank.

Staff

You hire staff members to feed the fish, clean, fix and pretty much maintain everything, you can set priorities to each staff member on what task to do and you can assign them zones so they stick with it, they can also level up and learn new skills or upgrade their current ones in order to perform faster and more efficiently, unlike most management games your staff members don't take breaks, as cruel as it is they really don't! they work all the time and you can hire a lot because they only take a small amount of money, I did dislike that I couldn't hire more than I needed because I had the money but I reached my limit for my store.

Prestige

This is a very important part of the game, it is how much you impressed the guests by keeping the place clean and adding a non-repeated fish tanks, it goes down if they get bored from seeing the same types of fish, or if they noticed the place being dirty or noticed some fish fighting the others, so you gotta constantly make sure that everything is going fine because the numbers need to go up in order to rank up and meet the requirements to reach the next level, which gets really difficult if the strategy you used in building wasn't great, you'd need to make very clear paths and make sure your guests are not able to see or access areas with heaters and filters because that is negative prestige points for you, not finding bathrooms or food or a bench to sit in is -minus, you have to be very creative in your build and make sure that the fish types do not conflict between them and need to priorities your staff members appropriately in order to maintain the quality of the place.

What I Liked

The system is so deep to the point where you can create so many types of aquariums, there really is no limit to what you can do, true when playing levels you are limited to a certain rank but when you reach the last one or playing sandbox you'd have everything unlocked and you can research to unlock more fish and equipment, I loved that you don't have to worry about your staff ever getting tired or bored or going on strike like other management games, how very easy it is to move the camera around and positioning it to the angle that you like in order to get better view of what you're building, the first person mode where you can walk around and see the game as a guest which reminded me of my PS1 days playing sim theme park.

What I didn't like

It became a chore more than a game to maintain that prestige level, it keeps going down so fast if you messed something or didn't place your fish properly, seeing it go down all the time was very annoying, I didn't like how I had to place a lot of heaters/filters for each tank, yes later on you get big ones but at first it’s annoying, it was such a task to keep tabs on fish types because some of them grow bigger and end up eating the other ones that are now considered "Small" for them, so many fishes die that way, the game is missing some "quality of life" features like an option to do "mark all as read" in your game messages among other things, I wanted to have a button to click on a task to make one staff member immediately go and do it but there isn't any, you have to put them in zones instead, that you couldn't open a "statistics" window to see the type of fish you have and the views on each, or your staff and their levels/zones, you have to open them each individually and that consumes a lot of time, when guests complain about a fish looking stressed you can’t click on it and get pointed to which tank, you have to find it yourself and that was all really exhausting to do.

خلاصه نقد
Megaquarium عنوانی منحصر‌به‌فرد در سبک عناوین مدیریتی است که با ترکیب درجه دشواری بالا و در عین حال لذت حاصل از ساخت و ساز، سیستمی را ایجاد نموده که با استفاده از آن شما قادر به ساخت هر نوع آکواریومی باشید. با وجود موسیقی ریتم تند و جلوه‌های بصری دوست داشتنی هرگز از انجام بازی خسته نخواهید شد و با توجه به حجم بالای محتوا و چیزهایی که توان ساخت آن را دارید، می‌توانید ساعت‌ها پای بازی زمان بگذارید و محدودیت‌های خود را کنار بزنید. مگاکواریوم عنوانی است که می‌تواند تا مدت‌ها سرگرم نماید.

بازدیدکنندگان محترم، بازی‌مگ مدتی است که تصمیم گرفته به صورت آزمایشی و با کمک نویسندگان توانای خارج از کشور اقدام به انتشار نقدهای انگلیسی نماید؛ اتفاقی که برای بار نخست در میان وب‌سایت های گیم ایرانی در حال انجام است. در حال حاضر نقدهای انگلیسی محدود به عناوین مستقل و کم شناخته شده می‌شود، بنابراین اگر تمایل به خواندن نقد این عناوین به زبان فارسی دارید لطفا در قسمت نظرات برای‌مان نظر بگذارید. اگر میزان استقبال بالا باشد در کنار نقدهای انگلیسی نسخه فارسی آن نیز قرار خواهد گرفت.