Enjoyable fishy management sim Megaquarium comes to consoles next month

Developer Twice Circled's enormously enjoyable fishy management tycoon game Megaquarium is heading to Xbox One, PS4, and Switch on 18th October.

If you've ever played a theme park sim, then Megaquarium, which originally released last year on PC, should be immediately familiar. As you'd expect, players begin with a plot of land which must be turned into a thriving tourist attraction, through careful layout design, diligent staff management, steady research, and a keen eye on funds.

The key difference, obviously, is that you won't be deploying white knuckle thrill rides to bring in the punters; rather, Megaquarium offers more sedate delights, challenging players to build an irresistible nautical wonderland, full of tanks full of water full of fish.

That leads to its most novel strategic wrinkle, in which players, alongside all the usual facility management, must consider how and where they deploy their aquatic specimens. Each creature - of which there are just shy of 100, including sharks, crustaceans, turtles, and jellyfish, - functions more or less as it would in its natural habitat.

As such, you'll need to think carefully about the composition of your tanks - light, water type, temperature, filters, co-habitants, and so on - unless you want half your expensive attractions dead through neglect or gobbled up by predators.

It alls adds up to a tycoon game with a pleasing amount of depth, with players able to explore both a ten level campaign, which essentially functions as an extended tutorial, and a more free-form sandbox mode where all that learning can be put into practice. It's all exceedingly charming too, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Megaquarium on PC.

Megaquarium will be available digitally via the Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox digital storefronts, when it arrives on 18th October.