Aquatico review: a soothing underwater city builder that neglects the dangers of the deep
There’s nothing like the ocean when it comes to perilous beauty. Every breathtaking thing down there, from jellyfish to giant squids to killer whales, either wants to kill you (see killer whales) or is so frigidly indifferent to human existence that it might as well want you dead. After all, you might be able to scare off a predator, but there’s no negotiating with an ocean current.
Aquatico promises city-building enthusiasts a deep dive into this nearly untapped environ (nearly untapped, I’ll get into that later) but while this game delivers on the ocean’s beauty, it’s disappointingly light on peril.
The version of Aquatico I had access to only has one difficulty mode: normal. Managing the game’s interlocking production chains provides a pleasing puzzle, but once I set up basic fuel and food supply systems, all sense of threat from the environment evaporated, leaving little reason to progress other than the fact that, well, I guess I’m supposed to because I’m playing a game.
Just to see where the line was, I actually put this to the test: I was able to sit on my fins doing absolutely nothing for an entire in-game year–including willfully denying my population access to a clinic despite numerous alerts gently suggesting I provide them healthcare–without any consequences at all. A survival game should definitely punish you for that, but, despite happiness being presented as a key metric for a city’s success in Aquatico, my workers’ satisfaction levels never dipped below 99/100 no matter how far I went out of my way to neglect them.
“Fortunately, Aquatico comes equipped with a built-in stress-relief system: a pristine ocean teeming with maritime life”
Much of the UI for displaying these levels alongside resources, job assignments, and other information is reminiscent of Banished, in that it could do with some streamlining. Stats on every single resource, job role, and building you might eventually have access to are presented all at once and the ability to open multiple windows only multiples the potential for overwhelm. On the other hand, some basic stats – like a simple food produced/consumed calculation – aren’t available, leaving players to do the math themselves. It’s useable, but often provides too much information without offering the info you’re actually looking for. The expedition process is similarly finicky but functional and can net you some cool resources like cider and uranium, though I never got around to using them.
Fortunately, Aquatico comes equipped with a built-in stress-relief system: a pristine ocean teeming with maritime life. While your base expands along the ocean floor, adding plastic production plants, sea cucumber farms, and air-filled domes packed with tiny homes, the seaweed sways and schools of manta rays flit by, seemingly unaffected by the introduction of unmitigated fossil fuel extraction to their environment. Those are some chill vibes. It’s like an aquarium screensaver on steroids. I couldn’t begin to tell you if Aquatico has a full soundtrack or is just playing the same zen-yet-optimistic tune on loop, but it’s a good time.
Watching majestic sea life swim by your city becomes a main pass time purely because Aquatico also has no campaigns, but it definitely needs them – and I know this because I’ve played this game before: It’s called Deep Sea Tycoon. DST, released in the early 2000s, is basically Aquatico with chunkier neon graphics, grating music, and a way simpler production system. It’s an all-around “worse” game but I poured way more hours into it as a kid than I ever will Aquatico because 1) my standards were obviously way lower back then and 2) its campaign missions gave players something to do.
Aquatico doesn’t. Despite starting you out with just four workers, the player’s relationship with your city’s residents isn’t personal enough to support the do-it-yourself storytelling of a game like RimWorld. If anything, the small scale of your city’s population sort of undermines Aquatico’s only narrative assertion–a dome housing a dozen or so unemployed people over a period of years isn’t really a city, it’s more of an incredibly resource-intensive deep sea bunker for a handful of idle elites. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally up for playing Deep Sea Bunker Simulator, but having players construct higher-density housing like apartments or suburb blocks instead of individual bubble homes might help create the sense of scale necessary to feel like you’re sea-mayor of a city and not just a culdesac.
Without narrative restraints on which resources are available or what goals your city should pursue (say, ecology versus mineral extraction versus discovering some deep sea mystery), there is only ever a single correct answer to the question of “what should I do next?” That answer is “unlock whatever the next branch on the research tree is and build that thing”–which is fine during your first play-through when you’re seeing all the technologies and their associated buildings with fresh eyes, but doesn’t provide much replay value. There are multiple maps you can choose from, but all that really offers is the opportunity to follow the same exact technology progression in a slightly different location.
“The most interesting aspect of Aquatico by far is the extent to which your city relies on automation”
There are some intriguing glimmers in the deep dark, however – the glow of an anglerfish’s lure, perhaps? The most interesting aspect of Aquatico by far is the extent to which your city relies on automation. Almost everything except a handful of more “artisanal” tasks like tailoring, doctoring, and, for some reason, shark fighting, is done by drones.
While many resource management games include automation as an unlockable perk that can free up some of your beleaguered human workers, in Aquatico the real struggle is finding something–anything!–for your humans to do. In the early game, drones haul your resources, harvest food, and operate your factories while your human workers stand idle, 100% satisfied just staring out into the ocean from inside of their reverse-fish bowl. HQ continues sending new recruits to assist with your “daily tasks,” but you barely have any because professions, like everything else, are buried deep in the research tree behind seemingly unrelated prerequisites.
Several years into the game, less than half of my population is even employed. Now, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that on a conceptual level. It’s exciting to imagine a solarpunk – or in this case, wavepunk – society in which automation has been effectively harnessed to free humans from dull and dangerous tasks while providing the basic resources necessary to support creative, fulfilling lives in thriving communities.
It isn’t really possible to realize that vision in Aquatico, though. All I want to do is build my pixel people an endless garden of lush prosperity full of dogs and sushi, but is paradise really worth anything if they’re just as happy pacing around a barren metal dome?
Maybe Aquatico is more satisfying on higher difficulty levels and maybe campaigns will be introduced in future updates (though I haven’t found anything from the developers indicating that is the case). All I can do, though, is review the game in front of me: it’s pretty but lifeless.
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Underwater Cities: New Discoveries Expansion Review
The front of the box shows a diver finding a mystical green opening to explore which sort of ties into the games theme of new discoveries (Figure 1). The back of the box shows all the new components and what they will add to the base game (Figure 2). The components match the quality of the base game though the colours of the back of the era cards is different for me, particularly era 1 and 2 and are very easy to tell apart. The artwork on the cards is all new and although there is some repetition of art it is nice to have more artwork (Figure 3). More building pieces are also included which is great as I seemed to often run out of 1 or 2 building types in a 4-player game based on setup. The major new component here are the triple layered player boards which are great, now if you nudge your board your pieces don’t fly everywhere, and you must work out where they are (upgraded buildings still move but this is much easier to fix) (Figure 4). The museum board is bland, and I think it was a real missed opportunity not to do something like the art on the cards to really make it pop (Figure 5). The components will fit in the base game box if you take out the original player boards just, but everything needs to be in bags and tightly packed.
Figure 2: Back of the box
Figure 3: New cards
For a gameplay summary of the base game see my previously published review. There are several different modules which you can mix and match included in the expansion. First, there are 52 new cards which can be added to the corresponding decks and there are some interesting new effects on these cards. These include being able to move structures around on your player board making it easier to get all 3 structures around one city and gaining rewards when using the always available card slot making it more attractive. Crucially there are more cards for specific structure types that aren’t farms which is a much-needed change in my opinion and really helps to boost heavy building strategies focusing on one building type that isn’t farms.
Figure 4: New player board
Figure 5: Museum board
There is also a quick start module included which allows you to skip the first round of the game turning into 9 rounds instead of 10. This can be used with the original game and all variants. Players are delt two new personal assistants which are asymmetric and are significantly more powerful than the base game assistants (Figure 6). These all offer a powerful action along with either a one time, production or ongoing benefit. Each player will choose one of these at the start of the game after picking one of the new starting resource tiles which replace the resources you used to receive at the start of the game (Figure 7). These are drafted in turn order and generally have 1 or 2 structures to place along with different resources.
Figure 6: New assistants
There is now a third type of metropolises, green, which are more powerful but offer similar effects to the blue metropolises (Figure 8). These can be used with the base game boards with you only being able to connect to them as your second metropolis and sit off your board until then. You can also play with the metropolis race variant where the number of players plus one blue and green metropolis tiles are placed next to the board and when a player connects to a metropolis site, they can take one of them and place it onto their board. Alternatively, if playing with the new highly asymmetric player boards (13 – 16) each player receives a choice of metropolis tiles defined by their player board discarding down to the appropriate number before the game starts. These new boards also offer some brand-new effects such as doubling the effect or even scoring condition of certain metropolis tiles. They also now offer a one-off benefit when completing the building sites around a specific city. Interestingly the cities on these boards have 3 building sites and 1 expansion site for all cities unlike the original asymmetric boards.
Figure 7: Starting resource tiles
Finally, there is the museum module which can only be used with certain player boards (9-12) where discovery tiles are placed at different locations. When you build a structure on these spaces you flip the discovery tile present, receive its reward and then place it onto the museum board with your receiving a reward based on what number discovery it is. There are 2 sides to the board which offer very different rewards, and these range from getting new metropolis tiles to gaining special cards set out at the start of the game for free, immediate victory points and production benefits. There is also a new solo mode where you play the same as before using the quick start variant and aiming to score 125 points on the highly asymmetric player boards. This is very challenging, even more so than the base game solo rules and has been much more of a struggle for me.
Figure 8: Green metropolis tiles
Theme and Game Length
The main element of the expansion revolves around making new discoveries underwater and presenting them in a museum with the rewards increases as you put more things into meaning more people will visit. It sort of works in an abstract way and the new assistants names make sense with their special abilities or action but the new cards and player boards other than that aren’t very thematic. The average playtime of the game remains the same since the game increases in weight with the new modules but the quick start variant removes a round which is great to keep the overall game length down which can get a little long with 4 players.
The expansion doesn’t add many new ways to score points other than the museum board which can give access to immediate points, points during production and even more end game scoring from cards or another brown metropolis. Some of the new end game scoring cards reward points for things that weren’t scored for in the base game such as upgraded tunnels which can help boost this strategy significantly and make it more viable. There are also some end game scoring cards that require you to have the majority of something, upgraded tunnels, laboratories or desalination plants and you will need to make sure you have more than your opponents to get the 12 points which is very good compared to some of the other scoring cards where you need to pay resources or being dependent on the number of structures built. This ties into one of the main additions of the expansion, indirect player interaction. There is now a draft at the start of the game for the assistants and quick start tiles, which would be nice to synergise together if possible. The new assistants are more powerful than the previous starting assistants and they can offer some guidance on what you should focus on, at least during the start of the game, and you can try to synergise this with the end game scoring cards as well as the cards you draw.
Figure 9: Museum board during the game
The museum board also adds some indirect interaction as you want to race to get the best bonuses for each discovery. The first discovery doesn’t matter as you will always just get 2 cards but being first the other 3 – 4 times will get you more choice enabling you to choose the bonus that is best for you as well as some potential bonus victory points. In order to maximise this board, you need to build certain structures in certain locations on your board which can again give you some guidance at the start of the game with where to place your cities. In my experience you should be looking to remove at least 3 of your discovery tiles if not all 5 if possible. The metropolis race variant is again another point of interaction as you race to have the best choice for the metropolis you connect.
Figure 10: Player board during the game
There are several new cards added to each deck and some have some new abilities like giving you bonuses when you use the always available slot which is very interesting and particularly useful at 4 players where spaces are very tight. Quite a few of the new cards also boost the strength of some of your structures other than farms which is great as this was a very powerful strategy in the base game and having more cards to boost other structures is great for replayability. Overall, with all the new cards, new personal assistants and the modules, which you can mix and match, the games replayability is improved significantly. Each game at the start now feels completely different thanks to new quick start variant which is great as this is usually quite a slow game to get going.
Figure 11: Player board during the game
The game increases in weight when using the new asymmetric boards as they are more complex and require more planning to optimise well. I think the museum player boards don’t increase the weight when compared to the original asymmetric boards included with the base game and the rewards on either side of the museum board are easy to understand. The new metropolis variants are good at giving people choices, but I would only recommend using them with players experienced with the base game, as you need to know which one is best at the time you connect a metropolis or which one to choose at the start of the game to tie in with your new personal assistant. The new personal assistants require some experience to fully maximise as well and are a significant step up from the base game assistants (which were the same for each player and very basic) and I would again only use these in a game with experienced players. The rulebook is very clear with excellent explanations of the new assistants, various modules and a nice summary on the back for the more complex asymmetric boards. The game takes a little longer to setup due to elements to draft at the start of the game (assistants, starting resources, metropolises) and the museum board needs elements adding to it.
Underwater Cities: New Discoveries is a great expansion to the base game that for me, was better than I expected. The main reason I wanted this expansion was the new boards and cards, both to help with replayability. However, I underestimated how much it would improve the multiplayer game with the metropolis race and museum modules. Before you only had 3 public goals to race for along with the end game scoring cards but now there are other bonuses you want before your opponents, and this adds some nice pressure to the game, and I will always play my 3 and 4 player games using the museum board. The quick start variant, including the new assistants, is great too giving each player a bit of direction as well as an asymmetric start and gives you the feeling your engine is going from the first round of the game rather than the second or third. If you enjoy the base game and want some more variety and more goals to race for in addition to the player board upgrades you should pick this up.
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- Underwater Cities
- Underwater Cities: New Discoveries
