Dont get me wrong here, the iphone app, Fish Tycoon is a very fun and addictive game, but just like some games out there, its not quite up the standard of one of the best games I’ve played on the iphone and there’s a few things the developers of this app could do to make it a truly excellent game for the iphone, in no particular order.
1. Add achievements to the game.
Ok, this one would be awesome. Achievements would work similar to the WoW achievements structure, each one giving, say $100 to complete, several Achievements for Fish Tycoon could be:
- All tanks filled with the same species of Fish
- Selling 1000 fish in the store
- Discovering all 200 species
- Buying all the ornamental items in the store
- Curing 1 fish
So as you can see, for the achievements there are many possibilities, at the moment the game is too focused on the idea that the epiphany is getting all the 7 magic fish, which takes an unbelievable amount of mindless breeding.
2. More than one type of equippable item in a slot.
So currently in Fish Tycoon you have 3 slots for stuff like potions, vitamins, treatments and eggs.
A serious design flaw (brought up by other people as well as me) is that when you buy the Ick treatment to treat 1 fish, it comes at a high price AND with three doses. If you use one dose and you have a fish that has a fungal problem, you would think, just buy the Fungal treatment and that will be equipped in one of the other slots that is left, well, you would be wrong. Your fungal treatment would replace your Ick treatment, even if you have two doses left. This is a serious design flaw in my opinion, I’ve more than once accidentally replaced a treatment and/or destroyed fish because it just wasn’t worth treating them. If you have a Fish with fungal and a fish with Ick problems and you want to cure them both, you need to buy a fungal treatment with 3 doses, treat the fish, replace the fungal with Ick, thereby wasting money and use the Ick to treat the other one.
This doesn’t make sense to me and this mechanism works the same with all equippable items, if you buy a chemical, it will replace another chemical if you’ve bought one.
What should happen is that the three slots you are given should allow you to equip anything in any slot.
3. Should be able to view your discovered magic fish species origin.
When you discover magic fish, you should be able to go back and find out how you bred the magic fish, to allow you to make it again easily, without having to write all the fish down. I accidentally sold a couple of magic fish I had and had no idea how I made them, so having the trophy is of no use, all I know from that is what effect it has in my tank, I can’t breed the fish again without going through a lot of pain and suffering (and, more importantly, breeding).
4. More tanks!
This I’m sure is a gripe of everyone using this game, only three tanks and 21 fish in each!
I think, 30 fish in each and five total tanks, two initially and 3 more to buy later, there just isn’t enough tanks to get the sort of output you need to discover all the fish.
5. The ability to find out why fish die.
Ok, this can be a learned or bought achievement called ‘autopsy’ but it would be really handy to be able to discover (when you starting out the game at least) why some fish just die for no apparent reason.
6. Better economy.
It seems as though some things are unusually expensive for what they are, for instance, the Ick treatment, to sure a fish, is $30 for three doses (or not, if you read reason number 2 above), where most fish won’t even sell for that, whats the point in buying the Ick treatment, just trash it and breed another one.
And the sunken ship ornament costs thousands, and what does it do? no one knows!
Also, more research levels for a cheaper price would be good and more general communication as to what items will do when in your tank would be really nice.
Ok, that’s all of them. There were going to be five but in the end, I really needed to say all of these, so 6 it was. I hope I’ve covered everything that people would want me to cover and I will definitely be letting the developers know.
I must also add that Ive not played it on any other platform, so I can’t comment on those or f there are any features I’ve mentioned are in there, please mention in the comments if you find Ive been too harsh, or not enough, or if there is anything else you would mention.