Developer: Ultimate Games S.A.
Publisher: Ultimate Games S.A.
Platform: Switch
Tested on: Switch
Pocket Fishing – Review
Pocket Fishing is a Switch game that will let you experience the fun world of fishing. Pocket Fishing is now available exclusively for Nintendo’s Switch, and is developed and published by Ultimate Games. Collect all the different kinds of fish while you sit at home or on the bus. The question that we ask here is: Do we experience the fun world of fishing or does the game smell fishy?
Story
The story in this game is very simple and short. You are a fisher that wants to fish around the world. In reality, there isn’t a story. They could have done a little intro story, but they didn’t do it. While we didn’t mind the absence of a story, it would have still been nice if there was something to motivate you to keep pressing onwards.
Graphics
Graphically, Pocket Fishing isn’t the prettiest game out there. The plants look like paper and the hands look like shiny plastic. When we get to the underwater part of the fishing, it is even worse. We would describe the game as extremely cheap and it’s also probably an asset flip. The animations of the fish underwater aren’t great either. When a fish swims around to try to take your hook, it moves but goes around like a ping-pong ball. It looks like they didn’t put much effort into the animations.
Nintendo’s Switch is aging, but even then we do notice that the quality isn’t there. The developers managed to make the fish of the day on the title screen look good, but that’s probably because it’s just a photo and not an actual in-game model.
Sound
When the game starts, the first thing that we notice is the lack of music. There is no music playing on the title screen or while you are fishing. Only the chirping of the birds is what we get when fishing, which is weird when you look at the options. There is an option to put the music on and off. Besides the birds, the fishing part does have sound effects. Again, these are not of the greatest quality.
Gameplay
Pocket Fishing is a fishing simulator in which you can both fish from two different viewpoints. You have regular fishing from a regular point of view, like how it works in real life, but you also have underwater fishing that gives you a different perspective. The offset is not too bad, but the way you play the game is noticeably meant for a PC setup. You’ll constantly see a mouse cursor and this is used most of the time to get what you want. Other than that, you do have a few Switch-specific button inputs, and these have to do with the fundamentals of the fishing itself.
Now we can start talking about the actual fishing. After throwing out your hook and the fish bites, you have to drag your cursor to the first button and drag it up. When that is done, you have a little tug-war and button-mashing to get the fish. We did try to fail the tugging or button mashing, but we failed in failing a catch. It is difficult to fail a haul once you start it.
You are also able to switch the type of fishing. On the side, there are two options that you can pick: coarse and spinning. The default is coarse, but if you pick spinning, the gameplay is different at the beginning of your haul. It starts with a minigame of keeping a bar at a certain height. This is again accomplished by dragging your cursor toward the button and spamming the click button.
Once you get a fish, you have two options according to the game. The game gives you the option to continue or to collect, but no matter what option we pick, the game does the same thing anyway. Other than that, there is night and day fishing, but we weren’t able to switch from day to night.
While fishing you collect some sort of currency, and with that currency, you can buy other bait, hooks, lines, and boats. It normally affects what kind of fish you will get, but so far we have not noticed any difference in our fish. The same can be said about the boats or when you select deep and still fish in shallow waters. Boats are just a fun way to go over the water, but the steering is poorly implemented.
Pocket Fishing also has a level system. That system lets you unlock places to fish or items you can buy at the shop. The display on the title screen is sometimes bugged as it will show level 1 even if you are level 6 for example. With a level system, there is also a skill system that is poorly explained. It says that it improves on which type of fish you catch.
Conclusion
Pocket Fishing is a fishing game that isn’t optimized for the Switch. The game presents you with a fairly generic fishing experience with cheap graphics, no background music, and no way to actually fail at fishing. You do have a bit of progression in terms of unlocks and leveling up, but even then, the game holds little to no surprises and most upgrades felt a bit pointless. All in all, this is a title you’re better off skipping, as there are many better fishing games out there.
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