Insaniquarium Deluxe

If I'd known fish crapped coins, I wouldn't have asked for a stick insect for my 10th birthday. Hindsight, eh? It's a wonderful thing.

Obviously, mobile games aren't always the most reliable guide to the ins and outs of marine biology, but Insaniquarium Deluxe seems fairly trustworthy.

The aim is to maintain a colourful home aquarium by fattening your fish up with pellets, and then using the money they dump to buy more fish, better food, and a host of other upgrades.

So far, so simple. You start with a couple of guppies swimming around, so you have to move your cursor around the tank dropping pellets – only one at a time, mind – to help them grow bigger.

If a fish doesn't get enough, it'll look a bit poorly, go white, and then die. Much like real life, except without the solemnity of a toilet-flush funeral.

At the start, the game revolves around collecting the coins that are, ahem, expelled from your fish, by moving the cursor over them as they fall to the bottom of the tank. Build up enough cash, and you can buy another guppy to add to the shoal, who in turn needs to be fed till he's as big as the other two.

To complete each level, you have to save up enough dosh to buy three pieces of an egg, which reveals a new 'extra' for your tank, and also takes you to the next level. The first extra is a snail, who wanders along the bottom of the tank grabbing coins for you. Later in the game, there are oysters, swordfish, seahorses and others, each offering their own benefits.

Getting a bit dull? Don't worry, Insaniquarium is all about constantly introducing new features and obstacles to ramp up the, well, insanity levels. So when you earn a certain amount of cash, you can start buying food upgrades to make your fish grow faster, and also boosting the number of pellets you're able to drop at once.

Better still are the carnivorous fish who, yes, gobble up your guppies one by one, but poo gems that are worth more money. So at this point, you need to keep buying new guppies in order to keep the carnivores alive, as they won't eat pellets. Insaniquarium revolves around this resource management, which has to be carried out at an increasingly frantic pace.

Then there's the aliens. Sorry, did we forget to mention them? Every so often one or more aliens appear and try to kill your fish. Why? Heaven knows, Mulder and Scully never investigated this phenomenon. When aliens attack, the cursor changes to a target, and you have to press the directional buttons to blast them clear of your precious fish.

By a few levels in, Insaniquarium is functioning at a crazy pace, with the screen crammed with fish, pellets, and extras, let alone the alien attacks. It's not restful, then. And while the novelty wears off sooner than you'd hope, while it lasts, this is a top-notch casual game. And still way better than a stick insect.