Ultimate Fishing Simulator

Genre: Sports (Fishing)

Players: 1

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Review:

Ultimate Fishing Simulator is a Fishing game first released on PC in 2018 and brought to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game aims to be a somewhat realistic fishing experience, including a variety of real-life equipment players can unlock in-game and RPG elements allowing players to gradually upgrade their fishing skills.

Graphically, Ultimate Fishing Simulator isn’t much to look at. It’s environments are fairly low-poly, there’s plenty of pop-in, the framerates drop on occasion, there’s jerky animation for the fish, low-resolution textures in some places (clouds in particular are pretty ugly), ugly foliage, and nothing you do seems to have any effect on the water’s surface. At the very least, the game’s lighting is decent, and the game features a day-night cycle and changing weather that do a good job of making the environment feel a bit more realistic. The fish themselves also look pretty good, outside of the aforementioned jerky animations. The visuals are backed by a decent but forgettable light synthesized soundtrack that’s not especially memorable, but works well enough for this game.

The gameplay here takes some getting used to, but once you do it’s fairly enjoyable. The game doesn’t use the Nintendo Switch’s motion controls in any way, and optional touchscreen controls are only used to navigate menus, leaving the fishing itself to be done only using traditional gamepad controls. After moving around using the analog sticks to pick a spot, players cast with ZR and reel in using ZL. It works well enough, but it can get a bit repetitive.

At the very least, the game adds a good sense of progression, which lets players decide whether to sell a caught fish to get cash for buying equipment, or release the fish to get experience to level up their character, allowing to not only unlock new locations and new purchase options, but also giving the player access to new perks for their character, such as the ability to cast farther, or the ability to unlock ice fishing (a cool idea in theory, but in practice it’s not too different from normal fishing, aside from the need to use an auger before you drop your line straight down). Interestingly, this cash/experience system is similar to what was in Fishing Adventure, but the progression here is much faster, making the game feel like less of a slog.

Aside from the repetitive nature of the fishing itself, Ultimate Fishing Simulator does have a few other flaws. Firstly, as with many of the games in this genre, Ultimate Fishing Simulator doesn’t do enough to inform players about the pros and cons of its various equipment. Perhaps fishing pros may know what line diameter and rod length mean when trying to land the big one, but the average player is likely to be clueless about this stuff, and the game isn’t interested in explaining it. Another issue this game has is its menus, which are poorly optimized for Nintendo Switch and are needlessly difficult to navigate.

For all its flaws, Ultimate Fishing Simulator is one of the better Fishing games I’ve played on the Nintendo Switch. The gameplay is decent, the progression is good, and the game provides players with a wealth of real-life equipment and even some unexpected alternatives like ice fishing. Having said that, the presentation is rough, the menus difficult to navigate, the fishing itself can get a bit repetitive, and a lot of players will feel clueless about just what the various equipment on offer actually does. While the core of this game does a good job making fishing enjoyable, everything around that core could use a lot of work.

tl;dr – Ultimate Fishing Simulator is a solid fishing game with some good but somewhat repetitive gameplay, plenty of variety, and good progression. It suffers from some ugly visuals, and a lack of proper explanation for its real-life fishing equipment, poor menu design, but if you can tolerate its flaws, you should find this to be a decent fishing experience.

Grade: C+

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