Colorful Aquarium

Do you like colorful fish? Are you too poor to buy an aquarium and too lazy to clean it? Then Colorful Aquarium is for you! Well, maybe.

If I could say one nice thing about lianxing Zhu’s app, it would be that it has pretty good graphics! It really does. The water at the top of the aquarium looks great, the fish look cool and they swim around and occasionally dart here and there, and if you shake your iPhone the plants will sway back and forth. Well done.

Ok, I’ll say another nice thing about this app… the interface for adding objects (fish and plants) is decent. Swipe your finger up to pull the fish menu out of the bottom of the screen, swipe down to pull the plants out of the top. Very simple, and the little “help” animations are good, too.

But that’s it! I’m out of nice things to say because there’s nothing else going on in this app. Add plants. Add fish. Yawn.

So what else is this app supposed to do? It’s an aquarium, right? And you just look at aquariums, right?

Yeah, I know… but for $3 there’s gotta be something else to do here. Add piranha to terrorize Nemo & Co.? Add some weird fish tank toys for them to swim around in? Add a “blacklight” mode so you can see the fish glowing neon blue? I dunno!!!! What I *do* know is that in the App Store economy you need to do more than make nice-looking fish for $3.

At the very least let the iPod music play while the fish are swimming! Yeah, unfortunately this app will shut your tunes off. You do get to scroll the aquarium left and right because apparently this fish tank is wider than most, but that thrill wears off quickly.

I admire the effort and might even like this app at $.99, but I really think this virtual aquarium needs more to justify the current pricetag. But hey!! At least the developer put in a couple extra codes so it can be tried out by two lucky fish lovers.

Yep this aquarium is colorful alright

(insert interesting caption here cuz I ain't got one)