Fishing Adventure

Genre: Sports (Fishing)

Players: 1

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Review:

Fishing Adventure is a Fishing game released on the PC in 2019, and brought to the Nintendo Switch in 2020. This is a game that delivers a fairly straightforward, campaign-based simulation of the sport.

Graphically, this game gets the job done, but it’s not going to impress anyone. The environments do a decent enough job conveying where you are, and the water looks nice, but there’s nothing noteworthy going on here, and there are even a few notable flaws, such as some nasty pop-in of scenery.

The gameplay here is decent enough, giving players both traditional and motion controls to choose from. The motion controls are not very imaginative, and bring little to the experience, though they consistently deliver better results than the traditional controls, so while I might just prefer to stick with traditional controls, the game pushes the player towards those motion controls.

The game does take some getting used to, especially because it doesn’t explain things very well, such as the fact that you need to walk away from the water to go into your inventory, change your rod/reel/bait/etc., and buy new items. How to cast and reel in fish is also not immediately apparent, though it’s easy enough to figure out. At that point, the game’s fishing becomes a fairly repetitive activity that’s simple enough… though it can get a bit tedious.

Perhaps the biggest source of that tedium is the game’s progression, which is iceberg-slow. When catching fish, players get experience for each fish and can get a boost to money by selling the fish or a boost to experience by releasing it, but no matter which one you pick, you’ll be building it up verrrrry slowly. All of the game’s locations require players to gain levels through experience, and all of the equipment requires either money, or both money and experience, and you earn both of these resources at a very slow pace.

To give you an idea how slow, I try to make it a point to comment about a game’s sound in my reviews, but notice how I skipped over it above when talking about graphics? Yeah, that’s because for the hours that I played this game, I was stuck in the first location, Poland, which drowned out all other sound with the sound of rain. So my entire audio experience with this game was the menu music (which was actually pretty nice), and rain sounds. Do the rod and reel make sounds? Do the fish make splashing noises? I dunno, maybe, but I can’t hear any of that over the loud sound of the rain in the only level I was able to access during hours of gameplay. Hours spent doing the same casting and reeling over and over again, without anything resembling variety or challenge.

Despite these complaints, I don’t think Fishing Adventure is a terrible game. I could certainly see someone enjoying the calm monotony of it all (it is fishing, after all), and there are definitely worse Fishing games on the eShop. But Fishing Adventure is tedious and repetitive not only due to its gameplay, but due to the monumentally slow progression, and I think that only the most diehard fishing fans will enjoy it.

tl;dr – Fishing Adventure is a Fishing game that delivers a fairly straightforward simulation of the sport, albeit one bogged down by repetition and tedious and slow game progression. It’s not terrible, but it’s not very good either.

Grade: C

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