Insaniquarium is what it is: A small, level-based game playable on a coffee break. Instead of starting from scratch each time, however (as one often does with many coffee break games), the game keeps track of your progress in the adventure mode. This leads to a mildly challenging, but incredibly absorbing game. Definitely the most fun I've had in 10 minute increments in a while. The gameplay is simple: Keep your fish alive by feeding them, and every so often they'll drop coins (with greater value the bigger they get). Catch the coins by clicking on them, and the money goes into your bank. With that money, you can buy more baby fish, more nutritious food (increasing the time between feedings), and other tank power ups. Fish die through starvation (after turning a sickly green for a few seconds), or through alien attack - and here we see the "insani-" prefix in the title coming to light. Every so often, an alien will pop out of nowhere and attack your fish. Your mouse then turns into your weapon and you must shoot the alien until it dies. Like everything else, your weapon, too, is upgradeable. If at any point all your fish are dead, you lose the level. (Fortunately, your pets can never die - although they can't really save your tank if nothing else is left, will they?) The goal of each level is to buy three pieces of egg shell to form a full egg. The only way to obtain enough money is to grow fish and collect the money from them. In the more advanced levels, the gameplay changes a bit: Carnivorous fish, living off of your tiny baby guppies, drop gems - worth 10 times the gold coins. So now your innocent aquarium is transformed into a fish-eat-fish dystopia. And it doesn't stop there - giant carnivorous fish eat the smaller ones, and they drop treasure chests (again, worth 10 times the gems). At the end of each level (after you've bought the egg pieces), you are rewarded with a new special pet. The powers of these pets range from protecting your fish from harm by alien to popping out babies every so often to slowing down the drop of coins. The catch is that you can only have three pets in your tank for each level. This leads to some of the more interesting strategic choices: Do you rely on the coin drops from the fish? Then you should include the turtle, who slows down drop rates, and the jellyfish, who picks up coins for you. Is twitch-gaming not your thing? Protect your fish using an angler, who ushers baby guppies away from aliens, and then employ the lobster, who helps fight the attackers. The strategic aspect of the game was particularly rewarding in the first 10 or so stages. After a little while, the pets rewarded don't have new powers, but just improved power - they catch coins faster, or they defend guppies better. It's around this time that the monotony sets in. With all of these options - guppies or carnivorous fish or guppy-birthing mommas - the game would soon turn into a complicated affair. To prevent this, in each level you're only given at most three fish options. In the beginning, you just buy guppies and feed them, collecting the coins. As you continue, it is clear once the higher-cost fish reveal themselves (you don't see the carnivorous fish option until a few minutes in so that your babies have grown and you have regained the money to buy more fish), how you're supposed to get the money. It is possible, although unbelievably tedious, to stubbornly stick to guppy coin drops until you've amassed enough to buy the egg shell parts. Not very much fun. And this is part of its downfall: Insaniquarium turns into a strictly scalable game. Everything - the weapon prices, the egg cost - cost more at each level. And everything that earns you money - the guppy, then the carnivorous fish both small and large - costs more than you can afford right away, but pays off more than what you buy right away. So you have to do it every time - buy the guppies, feed them for 3 or 4 minutes, and collect the coins. Then buy the fish-eaters, let them eat baby guppies that you have to buy for them, collect the gems. Then buy the large fish-eaters, collect their treasure chests, and buy for them the small fish-eaters to eat. Upgrade your weapon if you want insurance - the more big fish you lose to aliens, the farther back in the process you have to go. Ultimately, Insaniquarium was way more fun than I expected. But, as one would expect a huge burst of entertainment to do, it trickled out until it was a test of mouse-clicking ability and patience in the last several stages. Perhaps if I actually limited myself to playing during coffee breaks, the fun would last much longer. But, truthfully, it was too addicting to put down.
Insaniqaurium is extremely fun for the goal of the game (look after fish, just like a real fish tank) only you need to fight off monsters or feed the monster fish food until it explodes of over eating. In the game you ge... Read Full Review
This a very fun and exciting game that you will sit down and play once and a while, this game isn't like the others and is very unique. Not many people see what i see in this simple little game. So you are the owner of t... Read Full Review
