The challenge mode of the game mimics the story mode of the game in terms of its actual stage progress but incorporates a slightly different gameplay requirement. You only need to rescue a single fish out of your starting 100 to progress past a stage in the challenge mode, but any fish lost along the way will be lost for good. This mode challenges players to make it through as many stages as possible using a single stockpile of 100 fish.
Your interaction with Aqua Panic’s world is pretty straight forward. Players will navigate a cross-hair around the environments and press the X button to activate either the environmental tool or selected tool in your possession. Before players start each stage, they are given the opportunity to move the camera around and inspect the level from top to bottom, designing their plan of attack. It is very helpful for players to do this and makes figuring out stages a lot easier than trying to do it on the fly with fish flowing and swimming about everywhere. Unfortunately, this feature only allows you to pan around the landscape of a level; it would have benefited the player a lot if the game would also allow players to zoom in and out to inspect variation sections of the level. Different stages provide you with different tools and players can cycle through them using the L and R buttons. It is a simple design that should work flawlessly, but it is unfortunately hampered by the graphical style and text resolution of the game. It is very difficult to decipher the number listed next to each of your tools regardless of the screen resolution that you are using; I have seen this issue come up in HD games running on SD televisions, but Aqua Panic seems to suffer from it regardless of the style of television that is in use.
Aside from that graphical issue, which is a pretty big one, the rest of the game looks bright and colorful through a majority of the game. The graphical style looks like something ripped right off of the airwaves of a Nickelodeon cartoon meaning that it is very bright and animated. I do find the color palette used in the first environment to be a little bland and thought that some of the colors of the background objects blended together a bit, but this wasn’t a problem in the later stages of the game. This made it had to differentiate some items in the background on occasion but wasn’t a major gamebreaker. It is too bad that the same quality cannot be said for the game’s soundtrack which is extremely simple and monotonous; I found myself eventually muting the television and listening to music during my gameplay sessions rather than listening to the repetitive clicks and sounds emitted by the game’s stages and characters. Every aspect of the sound design is just “plain”, which is sad considering how much personality was put into the graphical style.
Aqua Panic sounds like it has a solid premise, and it does, but unfortunately there are a few gameplay mechanics that hamper the overall experience. First off there is an issue of difficulty. The game starts you off at a decent pace, beginning with some extremely simple challenges and eventually ramps up to some ridiculously complicated ones; perhaps “ramps” isn’t a good word to use, it is more like launches you up to them. Aqua Panic takes about 18-20 stages to set the stage for all that you need to do, introducing the various tools and puzzle mechanics, and then it lets your hand go and turns the difficulty level up to 11. The game gets hard, and fast; some of the stages from the 20’s onward are downright frustrating and annoying. The game that you experience early on is a far cry from the difficult puzzler that you play later in the game. I am not complaining about the difficulty personally, because I love a challenge, but I could see this being extremely daunting for more casual gamers. Most gamers would expect a game to slowly increase its difficulty, not crank the level up within a matter of stages.
The other problem that I found within the game is its unreliable physics system. Some of the stages require players to utilize and manipulate objects in the environment, particularly eggs, to help shape a desired path for their fish. Unfortunately, the eggs don’t fall in the same manner every time. It is very hard to predict how an egg is going to shift or fall when you blow up the ground around it which causes unwanted restarts in many stages. If becomes very frustrating when you ruin your chances of completing a stage disappear due to something completely out of your control. Perfectionists will undoubtedly grow very frustrated as this issue rears its head more than a few times throughout the game.
I had a lot of funny playing Aqua Panic, in short spurts. Unfortunately the charm and overall enjoyment of the game wore off during prolonged gameplay sessions. Eko has a solid premise here, but unfortunately some of the things that were built on top of said premise don’t display the same quality. Aqua Panic is an enjoyable little puzzle game, but nothing that is going to keep you entertained in the future. Gamers could spend their money on a lot worse, but then again, you could also spend it on a lot better.
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company for review.
C | Aqua Panic is a solid puzzle game with a lot of heart, but unfortunately a few design flaws that hold it back. The solid and enjoyable premise is usurped by a couple of flaws that come very close to ruining the experience. At $9.99, it is a decent puzzler that I am sure many gamers will have fun with, but once you get your fix you probably won’t be coming back for more. |
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