Ridiculous Fishing in the PAX10: Why Can’t Actual Fishing Be This Fun?

I was looking through the PAX 10 earlier and saw an iOS title called Ridiculous Fishing. The name caught my eye so I checked the description: “A handcrafted game about fishing with guns, chainsaws, and toasters”. How could I not go buy it immediately and check it out? That’s exactly what I did and these were my findings.

Presentation

Ridiculous Fishing has an art style reminiscent of old pixel art, though the lines are too clean to be actual old pixel art. It’s bright and colorful and easy on the eyes like some phone games can be. The chiptune music in the game is well made and appropriate. It’s relaxing and peaceful when lowering your line and picks up the pace as you’re reeling the fish in and shooting them out of the air. Oh yeah, you’ll be shooting fish out of the air.

Gameplay

Ridiculous Fishing works like this: You lower your line down into the water, just like most fishing games begin. On the way down, you’ll be dodging fish, unlike most fishing games. Once your lure touches a fish or you run out of line, your line will be dragged back up to the surface and you have to try to snag as many fish as you can on your line before you reach the surface. But it doesn’t end there. Once your fishy load breaches the surface, you’ll have to shoot as many of the fish out of the air as you can with your gun. Each gun shot will juggle the fish higher, letting you get more time to shoot the ones that take multiple gunshots. Points are scored based on how many fish you managed to kill.

So how is it?

The game makes use of the accelerometer to control the lure as it travels downwards, and I’m usually not a big fan of games that do that, unless they use it well. Ridiculous Fishing definitely falls into the “does it well” category. I never felt hampered by the control scheme like I do in other games. It was responsive and well calibrated.

This game is insanely addicting. I had trouble putting it down to get this review written. Every time I would reel in a load and blast them all out of the air, I was already thinking about the next one, planning how I could get even deeper or what unlockables I could buy. And there are tons of unlockables. Better guns, longer lines, a chainsaw lure that slices through fish on the way down and accelerates the lure, a Tesla coil, hats (for you Team Fortress 2 players), and much, much more. Catch enough different breeds of fish and you get to travel to a new location with new types of fish to catch. It’s the type of game that will keep you hooked for hours.

There are also no in-app-purchases, so parents, feel free to hand the game to your kids.

Ridiculous Fishing is available from the Apple App Store. If you’ve got an iOS device, what are you still doing here reading this? Go get it! Now excuse me. I have fish to shoot with my shotgun.