Aqua Real Screensaver Review

Yes, it looks cool, better then just your average wallpaper or screensaver, but is this 3D screensaver worth $18?

I first saw this on a friends computer, and it looked far more interesting then my bland wallpaper, so I purchased it. When I ran it for the first time, I played around with it a little before I eventually found out how to do something except click, as there was no help function.

As far as colours go, this game is half good and half bad. The reef is exceptional, as it is real pictures edited in (there are a few different reefs to choose from). The background and foreground colours however are very false, and takeaway from the beauty, they do change, morphing well from colour to colour, but it is still plain. One good thing however is that the foreground colour reflects on the reef and fish. The fish are very well animated, with believable motion and vibrant colours. There are 5 different species (size); Peppermint Angelfish (medium), Heavybeak Parrotfish (medium), Longfin Bannerfish (medium), Elegant Firefish (small) and South Seas Devil Damsels (three very small).

The bubbling sound is quite nice and realistic, but very repetitive.
One thing that was nice is that as well as being a screensaver, you can have it on your desktop, a nice addition.
You right click on the screensaver for options and it comes up with four options, either hand, food, settings or exit.

What you can do;

Hand (is the mouse, not drawn realistically, thumb and index finger extended): You can click on anything, which animates the index finger inwards, but the only time anything happens is when you click on a fish, the results are varied when this happens, sometimes the fish will turn, sometimes they don't interact, sometimes they swim away.

Food: You can click anywhere on the screen and 3 brown dots will pop up around where you click, which slowly descend to the floor. The food attracts the fishes, but the animation of the fish eating the food looks real only half the time, sometimes the food disappears a centimeter away from the fishes mouth.

Settings: This is really what makes this screensaver worthwhile; You can customize the amount of fish, with a maximum of 5, (or extra if you select the SS Devil Damsels, which come with 3 for every one selected). There is also a random fish selection, so for example 2/5 or 5/5 of the fish could be randomly selected.
The background and foreground colours can be altered to absolutely any shade you want and in the order you want, and you can choose the time it takes before the background or foreground changes (From 5 seconds to an hour).
Then, you can customize the aquarium in the following ways: You can add a stationary frog that does not do anything but croaks occasionally. You can adjust the amount of bubbles, their location, whether they rise or bobble, and you can have a bubble curtain (bubbles coming from everywhere). One bad thing I did notice was if you put 0 bubbles, the bubbling sound still continues, unless you turn all aquarium sound off.
As far as music goes, you can choose your own songs, which is a nice addition.
There are also a few other settings e.g. when to minimize, exit etc.

All in all however after you've had it for a day, you will get very tired of it. It is extremely repetitive and by no means mimics the calming and interesting activity of watching fish in a REAL aquarium.