I wanted to love this game. I was willing to overlook a lot and hoped the reviews mentioning unintuitive controls were something I could adjust to with time.
Alas, rotating and placing tank decor is an actual nightmare. Just placing a rock, the literal first task you do in the game, took me almost 20 minutes. I would wrangle it into position, then couldn't for the life of me figure out how to confirm and buy it. In trying different options and clicking different things, the rock would eventually be scrapped from existence and my hard-won rotation and sizing went down the drain.
There's no tutorial, no key mapping to check in Settings, and no tooltips (including in the Jobs Requirement modal which shows you that you DO need to place a rock, but with no further help on HOW). Instead, there's weird semi-transparent panels, like the one showing Left Click = Move, Middle = Zoom, Right Click = Rotate. Ok, cool?? But then you can't close it or get more help, you can only collapse the panel like a bad pop-up ad and continue clicking other random stuff hoping something works. Another panel lets you cycle through stuff like "Animals accommodation temperature"--which felt poorly translated and was not helpful when you just want to place a rock. Maybe introduce those options later when you have actual fish?
All this time, I'm clicking everywhere and hitting every key on my keyboard, and I can see my virtual bank balance hasn't changed from $190 so I know the rock was not purchased.
Finally, I tried plopping the rock without rotating or resizing. (By this time my expectations had descended from "Let's make pretty aquariums!" to "Let's get this over with") ...And it worked. Turns out, I'd tilted the rock so the top stuck out above the waterline a FRACTION too far (it looked good to me aesthetically and was similar to how I might put together a shallow tank IRL). But all you get is an orange outline and no explanation--does the orange outline simply mean an item that hasn't been purchased yet? Or an item outside of some very arbitrary bounds? No error message pops up, so it feels more like an unforgiving [and boring] puzzle while you're getting situated.
But it gets better from there, right?
...Unfortunately, also no.
After you place/purchase an item, a clone of the EXACT same item appears in your cursor. No pop-up tells you to hit Esc to drop it, so while I was trying Delete and right-clicking and a few other keys, I had this rock stuck in my hand and was just waving it around frantically. I couldn't select any other tool or do ANYTHING else until I found out how to drop the cursed rock.
Don't get me started on the plants. You can't sort them by type (floating, foreground, background) so it's pretty challenging to make a composition of any kind. You CAN magically shrink or grow them with E and Q—okay, fine, not going for perfect realism here. But the scaling doesn't work well. For example, there was some Japanese Dwarf Hair Grass described in the game as the "shortest aquatic grass", but even shrunk all the way down, it's huge and doesn't fit in the first tank even if the tank is otherwise empty. (FYI I have grown this exact grass in a 2-gallon and even 1-gallon tank, so the smallest size being too large to place anywhere was both comical and frustrating.) Meanwhile, Christmas Moss can be scaled up to look like a giant fern, which... isn't how moss works at all, but okay. It at least shrunk enough for me to place it.
Design choices feel similarly odd when adding fish. Fish size and the tank size they need are listed in the Store descriptions as though it's going to be meaningful, but you can't sort by it and it's functionally irrelevant. The game let me put a Bala Shark (needs like 150-gallon tank) into what looked like a 3-gallon.
It then flagged a "species conflict" when I then added a betta fish—so instead it let me buy a goldfish to the same tiny tank. A GOLDFISH. Buddy, you've got bigger problems than a "species conflict" here, so why not remove this unfinished mechanic entirely?
Ordinarily, I wouldn't expect realism in a game that seems to be about building cute tanks. And I wouldn't care: give me a fun sandbox and I'll play in it happily. But they set themselves up for the expectation by having what feels like a reality-based setting: everything is realistically rendered, there's an on-screen pH indicator, the descriptions about how rocks affect water chemistry are somewhat accurate and a real concern for aquarists, many of the plant species are ones I have painstakingly grown (or failed to grow) in real life, and the fish are real species of fish with semi-accurate notes about size, behavior, the environment they need to thrive, etc. Combined with the ability to add filters and other equipment--the game is declaring itself to be, perhaps not quite a life simulation, and a far cry from a hardcore aquarium sim, but based in the real world.
And then it shatters that expectation when you're supposed to accept that there's no aquatic grass groundcover in the world that can grow in a nano tank, but that same tank is also swell for a bala shark and a goldfish. The quirks of what works and what doesn't work in Aquarium Designer are SO specific and weird that instead of getting a creative tank-building sandbox game, you're getting an exercise in jumping through hoops to make the poorly fleshed out game mechanics happy.
To add insult to injury, much of the UI looks like licensed stock assets (especially every icon). The tanks can legitimately be SO pretty, and so much care has gone into the rock and plant textures and the fish animation--but then you interact with the game via the most garbage UI and it cheapens the entire experience.
I could easily forgive things like the really bland background music and even allowing ridiculous fish combos if they tightened up other aspects of user experience. But for this game + DLC to take of 30GB of hard drive space and almost feel unplayable? Nah. It's a pre-Alpha game that needed more time to cook. I really, really love the idea, and absolutely hate the execution.
On a personal note, I feel obligated to mention my feeling that this game could encourage inhumane animal husbandry practices in real life. If you get used to thinking a goldfish can be put in a tiny tank with no filter, and this "realistic" game confirms that misinformation, you're possibly more likely to do that in real life or see other people doing that and not realize it is literal animal abuse. Fish are not decor to add interest to your room. They are living beings that cannot come to you and meow or bark for help when they are in distress. The tank setup you create could supply--or deny--your aquarium critters the very oxygen they need to breathe. It could have been better if the developer had just made up fantasy species of plants and animals, or left out fish entirely and focused on aquascapes. Maybe with shrimp or a snail.
