SWIMCITY

Create and manage an undersea metropolis in city builder AQUATICO

- Christopher Livingston

Imagine looking out over the skyline of a bustling city and instead of seeing a flock of birds or a passenger jet, you see a pod of dolphins or a gliding submarine. This is Aquatico, where you’re building a city on the ocean floor after an asteroid strike has rendered the surface world uninhabitable. Instead of roads, you’ll build pipelines, instead of city buses you’ll have submarines, and instead of tornadoes you’ll have to worry about shark attacks.

Despite Aquatico’s unusual setting, your city will grow and prosper based on many of the same elements found in city builders that take place on the surface. Mining for oil and stone, fabricating plastic and glass, farming for sustenance, and using turbines and solar collectors for power. Resource management is the real star of Aquatico, and there’s loads of it to manage. Swift expansion needs to be tempered with the infrastructure to support it: build too quickly and red exclamation points will appear around the city signifying a deficit of fuel or oxygen. I found it a mostly relaxing experience to build in the bubbly blue depths, but it’s livened up by moments of alarm and panic when I didn’t plan ahead.