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I've been here twice now. Once with my 1yr old daughter and a group of moms, and once with my now 2yr old daughter and new son.
I grew up with Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, so my standards are high, but I'm not going to compare one to the other.
Overall, it seems pretty good. Pretty nice tanks, nice variety of fish, fairly clean etc. the first time I went was when they had their special jelly fish thing going on. By the advertisements I had seen prior, I was expecting something pretty cool. It...wasn't. Not at all. But the rest of the place was pretty good. Today, it was turtles. Points for being better than the previous jellyfish display and more engaging, but kind of random.
The tunnel tank is pretty great though I noticed a lot of kids get scared by it (not Sea Life's fault). The "bubbles" in some of the tanks where you can climb in and look around from inside are awesome. My daughter loved it, and it was pretty clear that other kids did as well. It doesn't take much time to go through...maybe 30min if I were alone and reading everything. With kids, that time stretches longer for obvious reasons. I wish it were bigger/took longer to go through, but it's in a mall. Not much can be done about that.
Bonus - a play area just before the gift shop. This is a bonus and also why it gets 3 stars instead of 4. The play room really needs some staff management. My 2yr old was getting bowled over left and right by big kids...one of them had to have been a girl of about 13...who were just sprinting around. There are couches for parents to sit on, but this also lead to them not watching their kids, which was irritating the third time the same boy pushed my daughter away from the slide. The whole room just has a chaotic, not very clean, "we don't care about this area feel to it".
The gift shop is decent.
Up the staff supervision in the play room (and maybe put one staffer in each aquarium area to supervise - some places were kind of crazy), and is be much happier.
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