Developed by FreeMind and published by Ultimate Games S.A. for the Nintendo Switch, Aquarist is an aquarium management simulator where you step in the shoes of an aspiring aquarist who goes from creating and maintaining a small aquarium in his house to managing a whole commercial aquarium with sharks in it. The Nintendo Switch release of Aquarist is of the same title which is currently available in Early Access on Steam. This review goes over the technical bits of the Nintendo Switch release along with how the game actually is. This is our review of Aquarist in which we build our own first aquarium and look after huge sharks in a commercial aquarium.
Aquarist offers you two different game modes to play the game in. The main game mode is the Story mode which allows you to live the life of a young boy who aspires to become the greatest aquarist while there is also a designer mode which is the free mode of the game. If you are looking for a sandbox mode where you can just go crazy without any monetary or time limits, you can head into the Designer mode and design the aquarium of your dreams. There is no money limit and time limit or any sort of quest task for you to worry about in this mode. If you are aiming for a directional approach and prefer completing missions, you can aim for the main mode of the game which is the story mode of the game. Here, you will start from zero and work your way toward becoming the biggest aquarist in your city.
The missions start really simple as your father gifts you an aquarium on your birthday and you start creating your very first aquarium. After learning the basics of the game, you eventually remake your father’s aquarium and from there, you move out of the house and start making and maintaining aquariums for your friends, neighbors, and ultimately random people as well. The whole game is about creating and maintaining different aquariums so you can expect to do each and every task manually in the game. You start with empty glass shells and start putting in the sand and then move on to decorations, heating, aquatic plants, and ultimately fish. Every task in the game is done manually and there are no shortcuts. For dirty aquariums, you have to clean them up first, followed by changing their water using buckets and finally using water to clean everything inside them such as filters, heaters, and thermometers. You will also be moving fish around using nets a lot since every time you will need to work on an aquarium, if it already has fish in it, you will be shifting them to other locations.
All of the in-game shopping is done by opening the market by pressing the button Y and placing the order there. One of the strangest mechanics of the game is that after you have purchased something, the item just appears randomly around you. It is mostly on a shelf but that is so random that it actually looks weird. You then have to go to the item and pick it up, perform your function and then just dump the item at another random location. There is a quick selection bar at the lower part of the screen, but it is so buggy, and the items keep appearing in your hands on their own even when you did not select them, that it becomes a pain to have items there. The game could have done really well with a proper inventory system because most of the time, the items that you need for jobs are the same but even after purchasing it once for a job, you have to purchase them again for newer jobs since you dropped them during the previous job.
After buying and putting in the basics for an aquarium, your next task is to put down fish and then try to reach their needs. Selecting the fish gives you an overview of what the fish want in their aquarium, and you can then work towards meeting their needs. The needs of the fish range from having a certain quantity of décor items, flora, and even other fish since some fish prefer solo living while some fish prefer living in groups. Temperature also plays a vital role in keeping the fish alive because if these basic needs are not met, the fish will eventually die as well. After you have met their needs, the fish will start breeding and you can sell the older ones for profit. This is the crux of mostly all of the jobs involved in the game. The location is new every time but overall, the tasks needed for them remain pretty much the same.
Coming to the gameplay of Aquarist on the Nintendo Switch, it seriously lacks in terms of refinement. You move around with the left joystick and aim around with the right joystick, but the sensitivity of aiming is so much that it becomes really hard to pinpoint smaller things like moving fish to select them for inspection. You continuously have to try again if you want to select something as the cursor is really small as well and even the slightest push of the joystick moves it so much that you miss whatever you were trying to aim for. Selection is always a hit-and-miss in the game. The same goes for placing down items in the aquariums as placing down items in the desired place becomes a challenging task only because of the controls.
Same goes for the graphics of Aquarist as the game seriously lacks when it comes to visual design. On paper, a game like Aquarist demands a lot of power from the hardware because animating a lot of flora in water along with tons of fish is no simple task and this is where the Nintendo Switch release of Aquarist falls short in terms of visual design. This problem is so evident that some of the smaller fish become nearly invisible in the tanks and the character models change to lower quality while you are walking toward them. The draw distance where the quality kicks in is so low that the character faces become disoriented even when you are near them and moving a single step closer to them makes a huge difference in their texture quality.
Aquarist tries to deliver a decent aquarium-making experience however neither the game nor the platform works in the game’s favor. The low draw distance is the biggest issue with the game but that somehow also works in its favor because as soon as you move a little away, the fish all go away from your view making the frames somewhat bearable. The poor visual performance combined with controls that suit a mouse and keyboard rather than the joysticks of the console fails to impress even with its decent amount of content. I liked the fact that Aquarist gives you a healthy selection of both fresh and saltwater fish to look after along with a decent collection of decorative items, sea flora, and tons of other items to place in your aquariums but sadly the poor optimization and controls are bringing all of it down with them. The PC version of Aquarist is currently in Early Access so it will receive additional updates for it however we have to see how much the Nintendo Switch release will be fixed with updates.
Final Verdict:
Aquarist makes a decent attempt at being a purist game for aquarium lovers however the hardware is the biggest problem in this particular release. The Nintendo Switch is just not powerful enough to deliver the visual prowess or the backend processing power this game requires in order to showcase the real strength of this title. The clunky controls are another issue for Nintendo’s hybrid console, and it makes it really hard for you to perform certain tasks in the game without trying again and again. This combination of poor visuals and clunky controls really makes it hard to enjoy the game even if you love setting up and maintaining aquariums. With its decent amount of content and customization options, Aquarist is a simulator that is really held back by the hardware and even more so with poor optimization for the platform. You can give Aquarist a shot at your own risk on the Nintendo Switch because I would rather stick to the PC release of the game.
Final Score: 6.0/10
