Aquatico

The resource management is deep, but the city itself never quite feels like a city.

This wavepunk survival game offers a serene sketch of life in a post-automation deep sea society. Unfortunately, it takes the concept of "automation" a little too far. Aquatico is so straightforward it basically plays itself.

Aquatico is a solid building strategy game set in an underwater world. The unique underwater setting offers a refreshing change of pace among the wide range of building strategy games, but the potential of this setting hasn’t been fully realized. In practice, it’s essentially the same concept as if you were building anywhere else. The game offers a very diverse range of infrastructure and an extensive, if chaotic, technology tree. Despite this, it’s a solid building strategy game that will find its audience.

The biggest mistake in game design is making a player feel totally disinterested on what's going on in front of their eyes - twice as big of a mistake in the actionless genre of city-builders, because unless given a strong incentive to do what needs to be done, it all feels like tedious, boring work. In Aquatico no one will feel as if they are helping a group of people survive the end of the world. You are basically a project manager of the slowest, least demanding project, where almost everything is done without much input on your behalf.

The balancing problems make Aquatico fall below what was expected. Still, it is an acceptable game for those who want to get started in the genre.

Aquatico is a city-builder that barely tries to innovate anything, and anything new is immediately overshadowed by how bland and mediocre the rest of it is.