Megaquarium is a game about managing, well, an aquarium. You will have to take care of your fish, ensure they've got the right enclosure (temperature, cleanliness, enrichment, food...) and most importantly ensure that whatever fish share a tank does not fucking eat each other.
You guys know it by now: when I start a management game, I go for the campaign first. A well-done campaign will give you a quick tutorial on how to do things, and then various scenarii with more or less challenges. And by god!! The campaign is good! You're guided quickly through the mechanics of the game, in a way that is both comprehensible and entertaining. Soon you get fancy new missions with restrictions such as "you can only have one fish of each type" "you're gonna be limited in the fish you can buy" "heating up water will cost extra but cooling it down will be easier" until the very last mission where you've got to make the titular megaquarium for a whale shark. It's good! It's fucking good!
Mind you, the campaign is good because the game design makes it very easy to give this impression; essentially, each bundle of technology & fish are separated by levels. You increase your level by having more prestigious fish. This means you get a real sense of progression as you go, and you always have something to look forward to, starting from basic small fish to cold water fish to big scary sharks. You guys know it's something I always appreciate.
Once you've completed the campaign, you can fuck around in creative mode, which is more customizeable than anything I've ever seen in a management game before. You can set the difficulty, how much fish you've got access to through research, how often do random events occur, and you can even entire the seed yourself to generate the map. This is cool af.
Aside from the gameplay... the graphics are cute (you can walk around your own exhibits if that's your thing,) the music is ok, what else could one need?
I don't normally talk about dlcs because I rarely ever buy them, but I did buy Freshwater Frenzy and I wanna add real quick that this one also fucks. If you liked the base game that dlc is very worth it, it brings up a bunch of really cool mechanics (ph control, breeding, and amphibian animals) so I was balling the whole time.
Anyways, Megaquarium, 10/10, absolutely a rec.