What is Aquatico?
14
Dec 22
What we know currently about this marine based city-builder.
Aquatico
The past decade or so has had a healthy uptick in city-builder strategy games and Aquatico at a glance seems more of the same, but there happens to be more going on below the depths than you’d initially think. Today we’ll take a look at what Digital Reef Games has cooking, and what to expect from the game’s release.
Despite the extremophile environment ala Frostpunk, it seems that Aquatico seems to have more in common with something like Surviving Mars; your end goal is building a sustainable, long-term civilisation under Earth’s oceans and labouring through the intense challenges that it brings. The building system seems to encourage large interconnected webs of pipes and slowly, but, surely building Aquaman’s metropolis of dreams, rather than a simple settlement to hold out in.
One of the more interesting features of the game is the different terrains that the seabed harbours. There’s the more obvious obstacles such as the “Abyss”, which are zones you can’t initially build on (although there are some construction options down the line), but also the game seems to be inching towards the optimisation aspect of city simulation — different types of terrain will be good for different buildings, and it’s going to be your job to find out what works best and trim the fat accordingly if you are to survive.
It is worth noting that at the time of writing, Aquatico does in fact have a playable demo available on Steam, which might give you a good taste of the game before its slated release on 19th of January of 2023.
