Aqua Real 2, our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner, is a DigiFish product by Formosoft International Inc. and has the best combination of believable tropical fish, vivid backgrounds full of color and overall feature set.
Aqua Real 2 is truly stunning when you first see it. Every scene has a sense of visual depth and vivid color that most of the other programs we reviewed couldn’t achieve. Fish would swim just pass the screen and then travel back into the distance and pass behind coral, plants and shipwrecks. The scenery looks fantastic, but the real strength of the program is in the fish. Aqua Real 2 has some of the most life-like fish that we’ve seen, and their movements and behaviors are completely realistic.
Add to that the great features, like feeding the fish and music playback, and a simple interface and Aqua Real 2 stands out as the clear winner in our aquarium screensavers software review.
The interface used in Aqua Real 2 is high quality and very impressive. The menu is self explanatory and easy to navigate through, with a wide variety of features. Simply right-clicking anywhere on the brightly colored screen will bring up a small menu bar with picture icons which represent various action options such as tickling, feeding and summoning the resident shark in each scene.
The setup menu is straightforward and easy to use, with options for customizing visuals and sound. Aqua Real 2 also has the ability to work in full screen and windowed mode, but one of our favorites is the option to use it as an active desktop. This means the program runs as a wallpaper behind all your icons and other windows.
Aqua Real 2 has a lot of interactive features which makes it more than just a screensaver. You can interact with the fish by feeding them and by touching and moving them with a hand icon. The fish react accordingly, and they will even react to the presence of aggressive species of fish such as a shark, swimming nearby. With full screen and windowed modes, you can interact with them for as long as you want.
This program comes with 26 different types of brightly colored fish to choose from and can have a total of 48 fish onscreen at a time. The background is larger than in most other programs and has a unique depth quality that makes it able to hold a lot more fish than other programs can without looking overly crowded. There are only three backgrounds to choose from, which disappointed us a little until we found out that the manufacturer offers free downloads of two more backgrounds and three more fish species on the Aqua Real 2 website.
Our favorite feature by far has to be the music playback function. This is fairly new in the world of aquarium screensavers software and is a wonderful feature because it allows you to create a playlist of your own music to play during your screensaver, so you can create whatever mood you like while the program runs.
The installation of Aqua Real 2 is quick, easy and all but automatic. We did have a problem with the active desktop function at first, but it was quickly resolved after reinstalling the program.
If you have questions about the installation process DigiFish provides a FAQs page, which contains common instillation problems and solutions.
Formosoft International Inc. has a dedicated email support team that was able to answer all our questions within 24 hours. You can also access a detailed forum with a variety of topics to cover all questions and concerns. As stated before, there is also a FAQs page where you can look up your question.
You can definitely see a difference between the look of fish in Aqua Real 2 and many of the programs located farther down our list. The fish look very life-like, and their behaviors are very realistic. The fish scatter when the shark swims by, and you can even watch some fish antagonize others because they have more aggression and territorial manners in real life. The realistic fish are what really make this program so great.
There are twenty six different species of tropical fish coming in a wide variety of size and color. You can have up to 48 fishes on the screen at a time. Each fish swims in different directions including in circles, right to left, up and down and diagonally.
The scenery in Aqua Real 2 is very realistic, with coral, plants and anemones that border the screen and sway with the current. A unique feature to the background of this program is the high quality depth and color which gives the fish more room to swim and made it feel more like you are truly in the ocean instead of in a fish tank.
The light rays in the screensaver add additional dimension and texture to the ocean floor and can be controlled from the menu screen.
We did have one major problem with the scenery though. In two scenes there are animated anemones that provide cover for the clownfish and anemone fish. The anemones sway realistically in the currents and when pushed aside by fish, but they still look so fake that they were a major distraction. They looked like they belonged in a cheap video game rather than in this beautiful setting. We hope that the manufacturer can come up with a way to render the anemones better or make them look more realistic in future versions.
Aqua Real 2 is an innovative aquarium screensavers software with the highest quality animation of its time. The various backdrops and immense detail which is put into them, paired with the personalization features, make this program stand apart from any others.
