Developed and published by Twice Circled, Megaquirium is an aquarium management sim where you develop and run your very own aquarium filled with beautiful fish and other aquatic animals. The game was originally released back in 2018 and since then, the developers have been making the game better and also released an expansion for the title. Architect’s Collection is the second expansion for Megaquirium and it brings brand-new content to the game. This is our review of Megaquirium: Architect’s Collection in which we build some bridges and fill a tank with a crab that decorates itself.
While the first expansion for Megaquirium, Freshwater Frenzy, was all about adding new breeds of animals to the game, the latest expansion Architect’s Collection for Megaquirium is all about making your aquariums beautiful and adding new options to decorating them or designing them. It also adds some new animals for you to show in your aquarium as well. Starting with the new animals, despite Freshwater Frenzy adding some of the coolest of animals to the game, the animals added in the Architect’s Collection are all about the show and making your aquarium stand out from the rest.
This means that the new animals are crazy with colors, really beautiful and unique. All of the animals are made to make your tanks stand out with colors such as the bright Decorator Crab or the Mantis Shrimp. Both of these are some of the prettiest animals that you can currently purchase in the game and if you are looking to make some tanks stand out, these two additions will help you attract the most amount of traffic to your aquarium. Apart from these two colorful additions, you also have other cool additions in your inventory as well such as the Ocean Sunfish which is one of the most unique fish in the ocean, or the giant Japanese Spider Crab.
The new DLC will let you create tanks from some of the most unique and prettiest of the animals currently found in the waters. Having some of the prettiest animals in the game would look good in equally good tanks as well. For this, the DLC brings new items that you can use to decorate your tanks. This time around, you get a lot of new items to decorate your aquarium floors as well and some of the decorations can also be placed outside the aquarium thus giving you the option of further decorating your aquarium with additional items.
For decorating outside your tanks, you get new bridges, tunnels, one-way entrances to control visitor flow, and new windows as well. Bridges and tunnels add a whole new dimension to your aquarium customization as they allow you to create various levels of immersion for your visitors. Bridges ensure that you can give your visitors places to go on top of the existing pathways while tunnels can be built underneath your tanks as well giving you a whole new perspective of how you want to build your aquarium and how you want to expand your existing places.
With the help of tunnels, I was able to give my visitors a shortcut to the food stalls which were on the other sides of the tanks so now instead of going all the way around the tanks in the middle, they were able to take a shortcut and get to the other side much more quickly. I am not much of a fan of bridges so most of my aquariums were filled with tunnels rather than bridges, but I am sure that tons of players will use them for their unique builds. Having more customization options is always good in a management sim as they are used in different ways anyway.
To make things, even more, custom, you can paint all the new facilities and items in the DLC to match your own theme of the aquarium. This kills the notion that sometimes you have to buy and place things that your customers want but you do not want to place them in your aquarium since they do not go with your theme. You can now just put them and later paint all over them to make them match your theme and you will not have to compromise on anything whether it is customer satisfaction or your personal aesthetics of your aquarium. The DLC brings 7 new colors for you to give you more options to play around with color schemes or to match your existing aquarium colors. A new Hermit Crab toy is also available which your visitors can buy from the gift shops.
Apart from these cool new additions, the DLC arrives with its brand-new update as well which brings some much-needed changes and fixes as well to the game as well. I will not be going into their details here since this will become a patch notes article, but this just shows that the developer Twice Circled is pretty serious about the game and is working to make it better even now. The new expansion has breathed fresh air into the game, and I am looking forward to seeing what the developers do next with the game.
Final Verdict:
Megaquirium: Architect’s Collection brings a much-needed addition to the game as it brings new animals, new items to the place, and new structural additions which really enhance the beauty of your aquarium. The DLC is not just new shiny items as tons of backend fixes and changes that arrived with the DLC as an update show that the developer is serious about making the game better and expanding upon it as well. At this point, Megaquirium Architect’s Collection easily offers you plenty of hours of fun simply because of its excellent gameplay mechanics and the newly introduced sandbox mode which is now even more expanded. While no new campaign scenarios in Architect’s Collection were a letdown, it still brings a lot of new things to explore and is a great addition to the game. Highly recommended if you own the base game.
Final Score: 9.0/10
