Stellaris: Aquatics Species Pack Review Summary

This species pack DLC offers beautiful ship designs and excellent origins but suffers from a buggy dragon origin, inconsistent aquatic theme, and feels overpriced for the content.

Best species pack DLC: Players consistently rate this DLC as one of the best species packs and a top-tier DLC overall, praising its high quality and substantial content.

Beautiful ship designs: The ship designs are widely praised as beautiful, cool, and the best-looking among all DLCs, with new ship and structure designs receiving high marks.

Excellent origins: Both origins are praised as fantastic, exciting, and useful, with Ocean Paradise specifically noted for enabling a tall playstyle.

Strong Aquatic trait: The Aquatic trait is described as super good and versatile, particularly effective in water environments.

Great trailer sea shanty: The sea shanty in the trailer is highlighted as a fantastic and memorable element.

Buggy dragon origin: The Here Be Dragons origin is frequently bugged, with issues like limited dragon interactions, resource drain, and inconsistencies. While the dragon is strong, the origin is considered meh and better for roleplay than raw bonuses.

Overpriced for content: Many players feel the DLC is overpriced for the amount of content provided, with specific complaints about the cost relative to features like origins, traits, and civics. Recommendations to wait for a sale are common.

Inconsistent aquatic theme: The aquatic theme is inconsistent, with creatures appearing more amphibious, no underwater backgrounds, and species shown on islands. The concept feels like a mish-mash of underwater and seafaring ideas, causing ludonarrative dissonance.

Buggy and broken: The game is reported as buggy, with issues like crashes when selecting gender, glitches with the deluge machine, and ruined playthroughs. Some consider it broken beyond repair.

DLC feels outdated: The DLC is seen as not aging well, with the game in a half-finished state and older features needing rework. It fails to revolutionize mechanics or re-spark interest.

Cosmetic DLC adds aquatic assets: The DLC adds cosmetic content including species portraits based on real aquatic animals, a unique shipset with underwater environments, a pirate advisor voice, seafaring name lists, and sea-space shanty music. It also includes new city backgrounds and government rooms.

Here Be Dragons origin adds dragon: The Here Be Dragons origin starts with a friendly space dragon leviathan guarding the capital, with events for hatching and feeding. In the lategame, it allows building baby dragons and unlocks dragonscale armor, with psionic ascension enabling dragon dialogue and fleet construction.

Hydrocentric perk enables ocean terraforming: The Hydrocentric ascension perk allows terraforming planets into oceanic worlds, increasing planet size via ice mining stations, and provides a discount on terraforming. It also unlocks the Deluge colossus weapon and flood habitats, but requires the Aquatic trait.

Aquatic trait buffs wet worlds: The Aquatic trait improves habitability and resource output on wet worlds but imposes penalties on non-wet planets, limiting expansion without terraforming. It can be applied to any species and affects colonization and planet usage.

Deluge Machine floods planets: The Deluge Machine colossus weapon can convert any habitable planet into an ocean world, including gaia, relic, and ecumenopoli, but only works on habitable planets. It can also wipe a world clean and terraform it in one shot.

Gender selection crash bug: Selecting an undetermined gender option triggers a game crash, preventing players from progressing past character creation.

Rendering bug with triangles: A 3D model rendering bug causes triangles and flashing light levels, which disrupts visual clarity and immersion.

Highly recommended for fans: A large number of players highly recommend this DLC, especially for Stellaris fans. They praise it as one of the best species packs or expansions, adding great value and fun.

Wait for a sale: Many reviewers advise waiting for a sale, typically 50% off, before purchasing this DLC. They feel the content is not worth the full price.

Community fair range: $4.99 - $9.99.

Players find fun immediately by diving into empire and species customization with the new aquatic features, with no reported friction or delay.

Story-First Roleplayer: Focuses on empire customization, roleplaying origins and civics, prefers diplomatic or narrative-driven gameplay over pure optimization. Motivation: Creating unique narratives and immersive space-fantasy stories through custom empires and origins. Stance: sale.

Tall Empire Optimizer: Prefers few but highly developed planets, prioritizes planetary modifiers, district slots, and building tall rather than wide. Motivation: Maximizing planetary efficiency and specialization through tall, high-density development. Stance: sale.

Disappointed Veteran: Reviews the DLC critically, often compares to base game history, and prefers deep, systemic additions over cosmetic or one-off features. Motivation: Seeking meaningful content updates that respect their long-term investment and loyalty to the franchise. Stance: no buy.

Steam Deck: The game has reported stability and launcher issues that may require tinkering on Steam Deck, such as crashes during character creation and launcher DLC mismatches. While not widespread, these problems prevent a seamless out-of-box experience.

Monetization: The reviews focus on the DLC's price-to-value ratio, calling it overpriced but worthwhile on sale. There is no evidence of microtransactions, pay-to-win mechanics, gacha, loot boxes, or any in-game purchases beyond the one-time DLC. The complaints are about base DLC pricing, which falls under standard content pricing and does not indicate predatory monetization.