Suppose you look out over a busy city skyline and instead of flocks of birds and airliners, you see a school of dolphins and a gliding submarine. After an asteroid impact renders the terrestrial world uninhabitable, you build your city on the ocean floor. Instead of roads, you build pipelines; instead of city buses, you use submarines; instead of wheat and pumpkins, your farms grow oysters and seaweed.

Actually... Wheat and pumpkins can also be grown in submerged greenhouses. How about "instead of tornadoes and floods threatening buildings, sharks attack them.

Despite Aquatico's unusual setting, your city will grow and prosper based on many of the same elements found in surface-based city builders. These include mining for oil and stone, processing plastics and glass, farming for sustenance, trading goods with other undersea hubs, and using turbines and solar collectors for power. But even as we built vast undersea settlements and populated the watertight domes with many humans, my time spent at Aquatico felt more like assembling a series of busy factories than building a city. Even though pipelines connected everything, I never felt connected to the undersea city myself.

Resource management is the real star of Aquatico, and there is a mountain of resources to manage. From humble beginnings of extracting sponges from the seafloor, plastic factories are created to produce everything from construction materials to clothing. Oil is pumped from the seabed, processed into fuel, and sent to any building that needs it.

Turbines will generate electricity from strong ocean currents, and once oxygen generators are built, humans will join the colony with automated, hard-working drones. Rapid expansion must be harmonized with the supporting infrastructure. If construction is too fast or too soon, angry red exclamation marks will appear around the city, signifying a lack of fuel or oxygen. While building in the bubbling blue depths is usually a soothing and relaxing experience, there are moments of alarm and panic when one does not plan ahead and runs out of fuel, electricity, or air.

The growing city is a lot of fun to just sit and watch for a bit. Human workers tramp the ocean floor in mech-like scuba suits, aquatic drones sprint through the water, growing and harvesting crops and carrying supplies in tiny mechanical claws. Automated submarines move resources between storage depots, warehouses, and city centers while a variety of sea creatures, from giant jellyfish clouds to giant sperm whales, glide over and through the city.

Each building has a sci-fi look, and the animations for producing resources and products are subtle but fun. As a nice touch, you can paint individual buildings and assign color schemes to buildings of the same type, which I found helpful in quickly locating certain important factories when your city really starts to spread out and you're not sure where everything is being built.

There are many other creative and imaginative underwater touches, such as a farm that produces sea cucumber fields and a barn that raises tuna instead of cattle. In addition, the second level of construction, accessible by tapping the Tab key, involves building a large dome for the ever-increasing number of humans. The dome gradually becomes an area with houses, stores, restaurants, and schools, and if you zoom in and look inside the enclosure, you can even see your pets. Public transportation in the form of cable cars will allow people to travel between the domes without having to put on a scuba suit. Adults sit in the seats, while children stand by the windows and watch the passing sea in wonder.

Another bright spot is an exploration system a bit like Frostpunk. After building a special hub, a submarine can be loaded with human explorers and supplies and sent off-screen to investigate SOS signals, abandoned colonies, or new sources of food and resources. These missions are the thinnest of narrative threads, usually reduced to a single choice (fight the pirate submarine or treat it amicably), but it is nice to feel that your city is just one of many different undersea colonies.

However, I have a particular gripe with one of Aquatico's systems. It's the research and technology tree. Instead of a logical hierarchical list, everything is grouped into one big, ridiculously long scrollable menu. It is difficult to find where in the huge technology tree a particular unlock is located, and besides, they are not always in sensible positions.

For example, one time the supply depot was full and an in-game hint suggested building a warehouse. However, I had to scroll back and forth just to find the warehouse on the technology list. To unlock the school, I needed to research glass, and to unlock quartz, I needed to research quartz. Although glass was not needed to build the warehouse in the first place, one was still forced to research glass first.

The technology tree is full of such examples. I had to lift a policy that taxed engineers before I could build more advanced farms, and I had to research jewelry stores and defense platforms before I could build the most basic fast food restaurants. As a result of this badly organized system, I often have to spend small amounts of money to get to the items I want to unlock, having to go through weeks of engineering research at 8x speed to get to them.

Aquatico has another slightly more difficult problem, but after many hours of play, I have built a tremendous city. It feels like a big network of factories connected by pipes.

One of the problems is that the footprint of almost every factory and building is a perfect square, so my city is like a big flat board, which prevents it from developing any real character as a place. Human settlements are cut off from everything else, and instead of industrial areas and farms being organically integrated, neighborhoods are confined to a square dome on the second floor. Frankly, straight pipelines with 90-degree bends are not as fun to build as winding roads, bridges, and highways. My city is pretty spectacular, but I never really liked it. [Aquatico's resource management system is quite deep, and there are many fascinating details and creative ideas for underwater builders. But like submerged water, my city felt cold. A nice place to visit, but not one I would want to live in.