Fishing: Barents Sea Complete Edition

Genre: Open-World Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Simulation Gold Bundle: Flight Fishing Construction, along with Construction Simulator 2 US – Console Edition, Construction Simulator 3 – Console Edition, and Take Off – The Flight Simulator.)

Fishing: Barents Sea is a Simulation-style game in an Open-World setting that was first released on PC in 2018, then ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2019. As the title implies, this is a Fishing game, but not in the way you may expect (which is why I haven’t lumped it in with the other Fishing games in the “Sports” section). See, this game isn’t presenting fishing as a sport, but as a business, and while players will be physically catching fish themselves, they won’t be doing it with a fishing rod, but by placing down bait lines in the ocean and then returning to harvest them. As such, Fishing: Barents Sea represents a very niche subset of an already extremely niche genre, meaning that this game will only appeal to a very, very small audience.

The presentation isn’t doing this game any favors, either. The game’s world is presented using very rough, low-poly visuals. The sea itself looks fine, but people, land masses, towns, and the boat all look low-poly in the way that makes this seem like a game that came out over a decade ago, not a mere 5 years ago. The fish look mostly fine, but one of your tasks will be to gut those fish, and the trail of blood you leave looks absurdly fake and videogamey. However, worse than all of this is the way the game’s rendering of these visuals leaves hazy trails at times, almost as if you were viewing the game drunk. And yet, despite all this, the framerates are wildly inconsistent too. This game is UG-LY.

By contrast, the boat sounds all seem fairly decent here, and the somewhat cinematic soundtrack is decent enough, though it often sounds really out of place, as if it’s heralding some great hero who is… currently just trying to line up his boat with a line he placed in the water.

Now, I said that the gameplay here was niche, and that’s largely because it is pretty slow-paced. The game tries to speed things up where it can, allowing players to set waypoints for fast-travel, but even so, you’ll find yourself going through the same motions repeatedly and laboriously, and it can be a while at times before those efforts bear fruit.

A typical game loop here will start with players buying bait for a line at the port, preferably to match the sort of fish they’re trying to catch. More discerning players will check fish prices to see what’s selling and compare that against a map showing what fish are currently plentiful in the area. Once properly prepared, you’ll want to mark the spot on the map where your fish of choice are biting and either slowly make your way there or, more likely, set a route for your ship to go automatically via fast travel. Once there, you’ll want to set your line. These lines can take hours of in-game time to be ready to haul in, so ideally you’ll want to set up multiple at a time to make the best use of time while you’re out. Once enough time has elapsed, you’ll want to angle your boat so the line is at starboard (the right side of the boat), and select the option to haul it in, starting a concentric circle timing-based minigame. Repeat this a few times and once you’re done you’ll be given the option to gut your fish – not a necessary part of the process, but one that will make for better profits when you sell later. Choosing to gut the fish brings up a line-tracing minigame, with players rewarded for accuracy. Then, once the fish are caught and gutted, it’s time to plot a course back to a port to sell them, keeping track of your earnings in an automatically-updated ledger, and using your profits to buy supplies, make repairs, purchase upgrades, and eventually buy new boats and hire on additional crew. Keep repeating this process, and you’ll be slowly making your way toward building up your fishing empire.

Okay, so that was one very large paragraph, and I’ll say now that if your eyes glazed over while reading that, this game probably isn’t for you. However, if your main concern was that all of that seemed really intimidating and possibly complicated, I have some good news for you, because this game’s tutorials do a good job of breaking this process down, and as a result it’s all fairly digestible. In fact, my biggest hurdle in figuring this game out wasn’t figuring out how to catch and sell fish, but trying to contend with the controls.

Quite simply, while the game goes out of its way to make learning the process of catching fish easy and intuitive, the controls are often anything but, and you’ll frequently find yourself guessing at how to do some tasks in-game, as there aren’t handy labels for button assignments on everything, and often the way to select a menu item isn’t what you’d be inclined to think. Technically, this game does offer touchscreen controls which could theoretically make things easier, only unfortunately the text in handheld mode is often uncomfortably small and difficult to read.

Despite these flaws, I really respect what Fishing: Barents Sea is trying to do here, and the lengths it’s willing to go to do it. I can’t imagine that many Nintendo Switch owners were clamoring for a commercial fishing boat Simulation game, especially one priced at $30. Yet for those select few people who were, Fishing: Barents Sea manages to provide them a really good one, with lots of options and a thorough simulation of the entire process that somehow manages not to be overly difficult or confusing. It’s just a shame that the controls are so awkward and the graphics are so terrible. Still, if you can forgive those flaws and if this game’s premise interests you, it may be worth a look.

tl;dr – Fishing: Barents Sea is an Open-World Simulation-style game where players operate and manage a commercial fishing boat. This is an extremely niche game that’s not going to appeal to many players, and it’s not helped by some terrible graphics and unintuitive controls. Yet, despite these flaws, this game does a good job of making the process of running a commercial fishing boat surprisingly accessible, and while the game is extremely slow-paced, those eager to try their hand at operating a deep sea fishing boat may find this game worth taking out of dry dock.

Grade: C+

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