Fish Tycoon is a mix of virtual pet, simulation, puzzle and management in one.
Fish Tycoon is a mix of virtual pet, simulation, puzzle and management. It's like having a living aquarium in digital form, with a series of upgrades to purchase, secret species to discover, and a store to run.
The premise of the game is to breed and grow fish and recreate the lost species from the Island of Isola, playing with genetics while attempting to cross-breed different species to create new and more exotic (yet more fragile) fish.
You begin by having a few baby fish and some unhatched fish eggs. When your fish mature, you can move them one at a time to the isolation tank. Moving another fish into it while one is already there causes the fish to become pregnant.
There are two tanks at first, a "regular" fish tank and a "for sale" tank. You can purchase an extra tank for storing more fish. All of them have limited capacity though (20 fish per tank), so don't go crazy breeding or population becomes a problem, causing a lot of fish to die. Fish won't die of old age (and by the way, their age is shown in hours), so it's all about their environment.
Caring for your fish involves quite a few factors. The water conditions, the rarity of the fish, the quality of food, the diseases that may appear, all of these affect your fish's health. Through research you can achieve better tank conditions and more nutricious food. By purchasing supplies you can give your fish the medicine they need (make sure you read the descriptions), feed them, or obtain useful plants that will help take care of them.
To make money for all these upgrades you need to sell the fish you breed, and this is where the tycoon part comes in. You can manage each species' price by placing them in the isolation tank and view the species stats, but if you price them too high, your customers won’t be pleased (easy to see on the thought balloons). A good idea is to raise it by a few bucks and see how it goes.
Don't spend all your money on upgrades either, or you won’t have enough for cures if and when you need them!
The best thing about Fish Tycoon is that it keeps working while you're not playing it. Also to note, this isn't the kind of game you play for hours in a row! You can change the speed whenever you want, then come back some hours later to see how your fish are doing. Leave it running over night (but not in the fastest mode, or you might end up with a bunch of starving or very sick fish) and come back in the morning to find your eggs hatched and your baby fish fully grown! It gets better as you start finding new species, and that's where the puzzle factor comes in since you never know what you're getting from cross-breeding this and that fish. If you really want to get into it, you should write down any species combinations you make and their respective results, and since there are about 400 species, it won’t be that easy finding the seven magic fish.
In case you can't access your fish for a long period of time you have the option to freeze time. However, this process doesn't apply to the fish store, it won’t be active unless you're actually viewing it.
This casual type of gameplay makes Fish Tycoon a good thing to have at work. A few minutes of fish managing during your break can be quite entertaining, and you can use any of your fish tanks as screensaver.
My only little quirk is with the store, really. I would like it if it could run in the background (even if you Alt+Tab time stops), and comparing to the graphics in the tanks, the store and characters could have used some improvement.
Bottom line: Fish Tycoon is an extremely educational piece of software. It teaches about business and advertising, genetics, and pet responsibility, making it a good game for kids.
You can give Fish Tycoon a test run by downloading the trial at the official site and have all of the fun – but none of the mess – of a real living aquarium.
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