5:36 PM
nokiac3
When you think about it, the essence of fishing - waiting around for hours doing nothing for a few minutes pay-off - doesn’t exactly scream prime mobile game material. And yet here we are, playing the latest in a surprisingly long line of fishy mobile games.
If developer Digital Chocolate knows one thing, it’s how to distil the maximum amount of fun from the most mundane subject matter. Fishing Off the Hook is a case in point.
There’s no tedious waiting around here. Once a level starts and you’re out in your little boat (viewed from the side, affording you a fish tank-like view of the pond-life), you just need to press and hold ‘5’ to set a power bar moving. Releasing it at the appropriate point casts out your line.
Once the hook lands on the water it begins to sink, and any nearby fish will be tempted into taking a bite. Holding ‘5’ again will start reeling your catch in.
If the line starts glowing red, that means it’s under severe stress from your wriggling quarry. If you don’t release ‘5’ at this point, your line will snap and you’ll lose your fish.
That is Fishing Off the Hook’s gameplay in its entirety. The rest of its appeal lies in the tactical potential of Tournament play.
In Tournament mode you meet a series of rivals in one-on-one fish-offs. Do you keep a steady stream of easy tiddlers coming in, or do you cast your line farther out and try to snag that elusive shark?
As you beat individual opponents you gain the chance to increase your proficiency in one of three areas at a time - line length, strength and quality of bait. This proves helpful in moving up to the middle Professional level, but upon reaching Elite I found myself being beaten soundly by opponents with far longer lines than my own.
It seems that assigning too many of my resources to my bait quality was a mistake, as it had left me woefully ill-equipped for the top level. This would be fine if you could go back and add further stars by re-entering the easier tournaments, but the game awards you nothing for doing so.
It’s a rather large issue, as it can make more than half of the single player game (there are more rounds in Elite than the other two put together) overly frustrating.
Fishing Off the Hook is an extremely fun, intuitive mobile game, but it gets its line snagged on daft balancing issues in the murky depths of its second half.
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