Earth had a good run. It orbited the sun happily for 5 billion years and produced some pretty cool looking dinosaurs there for a while. But the party is over: Over the past few centuries, a rapidly spreading species of primate has begun to dig gunk out of the ground and set it on fire, and it’s only a matter of time before the planet becomes more or less uninhabitable.
Typically in science fiction, when their home goes all the way to hell, the remnants of humanity look for an entirely new planet to colonize, but in Aquatic you use submarines instead of missiles to restart civilization. With the Earth’s surface desolate and uninhabitable, it’s your job to create a thriving metropolis on the seabed in this underwater survival city builder, due out later this year.
A free demo of Aquatico appeared on Steam today, developed by Digital Reef Games and published by Overseer Games (which Cartridge, another fun survival city builder). I spent some time on the demo to create my own version of Andrew Ryan’s Rapture, this time without giggling vampire kids and magical powers sold from vending machines. And I’m happy to say that Aquatico, even in demo form, feels like a pretty substantial city builder. Just click around the menus for the first time, there’s an impressive number of buildings to unlock and a tech boom that continues for centuries.
I started with a few basic production buildings to pump oil from the seabed and turn it into fuel, I put in a few oxygen generators so my small handful of people could fill their wetsuits with air, and I planted a number of submarine turbines that use the water to generate electricity. to generate. Resources such as oil and fuel all have to be connected to a pipeline that runs through the city, and the early stages of the game also rely on sending underwater drones to scour the reefs for sponges to produce plastic (the favorite snack of the game). sea) that can be used for everything from building new structures to making clothes.
It’s a little weird to think about going shopping for clothes while living at the bottom of the ocean, but once you start building domes, it makes more sense. Not only do your human survivors rummage through airlocks in tight cans, but can have houses built under huge watertight domes, and those tiny bubble neighborhoods can have markets, health clinics, and schools, just like the surface world did.
sunken city
And frankly, despite being under the waves, Aquatico still functions much like city builders on the surface. I was delighted to find that I could still build farms, and I am currently growing crops of sea cucumbers and kelp under the watchful robotic eyes of my submarine drones, which plant, harvest and then market the goods. You can raise livestock like tuna in pens and also harvest them just like a water cowboy. And your burgers won’t be squatting in a cramped metal tank spooning cold fish into their mouths: you can build fine restaurants under the domes for a sophisticated dining experience. Sushi is on the menu.
Of course, there’s a lot of risk if you’re rumbling 100,000 miles under the sea. There’s nothing more disturbing than seeing a warning icon appear over one of your human inhabitants, especially when they’re roaming the seabed. You don’t want to run out of oxygen, of course, but the ocean depths are extremely cold, so any shortage of heating fuel means your people will freeze to death. And with new citizens regularly emerging from the surface, you have to let all those resources flow and growing or a small shortage can turn into a major disaster.
Like the best urban planners, it’s also nice to take a few minutes to sit back and watch what’s happening in Aquatico. There are some nice animations as the different production buildings produce resources, and it’s nice to see my human citizens walking around in their domes or trudging across the seabed in mech-esque wetsuits. A mechanized submarine moves excess resources from my base to storage, and schools of fish, sea turtles, and even sharks regularly swim by.
It’s all very nice to see in action. That singing crab was right: it really is better where it is wetter.
I’m looking forward to playing more: despite the fact that there’s quite a bit of building going on in opening hour, the map I’m playing on looks huge and I barely have any of it covered with my city. And while I’ve unlocked submarine expeditions, they’re not available in the demo and I’m curious how they will work. There are also government and social policies that can be adopted that I have barely begun to examine. I’ve only seen Aquatico a little bit, but I like what I’ve seen so far.
One thing I do wonder though: with oil drilling and plastic production and pipelines stretching across the map, is civilization making the same mistakes all over again, this time in the ocean instead of next to it? I think we’ll find out when Aquatico launches later this year.
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