Fish Tycoon Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

A very detailed port of the PC virtual aquarium

'Tycoon' games have been around for ages but Fish Tycoon is the most in-depth game we have seen in the genre.

You can treat the game as a simple virtual pet game. Take time to look after your fish, do a little bit of breeding and make sure they are fed and well looked after. The game is versatile enough to let you do this but you will be missing out on a totally different type of game. The game is geared towards solving a mystical puzzle where you have to try and breed 7 magical fish and end the cod wars or something. Obviously, the exact species is not known so must cross bred as many fish as possible and this is all done within your small aquarium tank.

There is a small tutorial to explain what is actually a complicated menu system and structure. The in-game help does offer a few hints if you didn't catch all aspects of the tutorial first time round. Essentially, you have a main tank, an isolation tank (for breeding) and a sales tank. You need to successfully manage all three tanks if you want feed, breed and sell your fish. Breeding and selling are the most important aspects. You can buy many different supplies ranging from the little models for your fish tank to genetic fish research. You obviously make money from selling your fish but even this has a few permutations. You need to invest in marketing strategies to ensure customers actually visit your shop. You also need to try and breed expensive species otherwise it may take a while to build up the necessary monies.

The game is played in real time which has its good and bad points. On the one hand, you can impregnate your fish, turn your mobile off for the night and by morning you will have a few babies to look after (gestation actually only takes 20-30 minutes). The game style doesn't suit long plays. There isn't that much to do apart from breeding the fish and then selling them and if you were to play the game for a whole hour, most of that time would be spent waiting around for the new born fish. The options does contain a choice of game speeds but super super fast would have been good.

The graphics are as good as you can expect for a java game on our ageing N70 and the controls are pretty simple once you have worked out what you are trying to do. Fish Tycoon is enjoyable to play and as with most virtual pet games they aren't reviewer friendly - which usually means they will be consumer friendly. To progress far through the game, and get a big pot of money, will probably take weeks or months of short 10 minute plays here and there. This is not going to be a game that you can finish by relentlessly playing over a weekend. Is that a bad thing? Never for a mobile game.