The moment Pocket Fishing began, a chilling wave of dread washed over me. Without any build-up or music, the game throws you into a menu with widgets and graphics that look like it was designed for a mobile device. You only hear the deafening silence broken by repeated sounds of birds chirping in the distance.
A wise man once said that any game with fishing in it can’t be all bad. That man never encountered Pocket Fishing. There were many ways this game could have gone wrong and somehow the developers who made this managed to go above and beyond. This may be the worst Nintendo Switch exclusive of all time.
How did they do it? Despite it looking like the most bare bones mobile port to console, Pocket Fishing is not on mobile devices. It borders on becoming nigh unplayable and for its price, you would expect higher-quality visuals. Where does it all go wrong? Read our Pocket Fishing review to find out!
Pocket Fishing
Developer: Ultimate Games
Publisher: Ultimate Games
Platforms: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: February 26, 2024
Price: $12.99 USD
Pocket Fishing should have been a title that inspired joy and giddiness in the hearts of Florida men everywhere. Instead, it’s a depressing and bleak abyss that swallows your soul. It’s also incredibly confusing. The idea was sound on paper, but the execution was botched in every way imaginable.
Pocket Fishing promises first-person fishing where players can freely move around a small 3D fishing hole. There are several of them and moving around to cast a line at different parts of the map would yield different catches. The actual fishing is realized by a simplistic tapping minigame and all the stats are determined by your tackle and gear. So far so good, right?
Problems arise instantly when trying to move about. Every single first-person control scheme since the 90s has the right stick function as the “look around” mechanism. Pocket Fishing maps the left and right “head-turning” to the left and right directions of the D-pad, instead of the right analog stick, utterly defying any sense of logical control layout.
The right stick controls the “virtual touch screen” controls via a very slow-moving mouse cursor. This is a very cumbersome way to play and suggests that Pocket Fishing may have originally been designed to be played on a phone touch screen. Amusingly, there is no phone version and Pocket Fishing has no touchscreen functionality on Switch.
The way the incoherent controls are designed appears to be intentional. The UI graphics are also buggy and will overlap each other, jumbling the words into an unsightly mess. Navigating the menus is also very delayed and is not made for a controller at all, despite being a Switch exclusive.
It is as if Pocket Fishing was a fishing game that came from Silent Hill; a profane imitation of a thing you love distorted into an abomination. The stiff and mindless fishing mechanics have a very mechanical casting animation. Mercifully, getting a bite is fast, but then the Wario Ware-style minigame to reel the fish turns out to be unbearably basic.
The fishing mini-game in Final Fantasy XV has a ton more depth. In that game, players had to carefully pull the rod in specific directions, the time of day was a factor, and you could reel. In Pocket Fishing, you tap the left or right bumpers at the bar at the top of the screen. What’s happening on screen with the actual fish does not matter and is only a visual representation that is only for show.
The mouse pointer is used to interact with the touch screen buttons that you can’t touch. It feels less like fishing and more like a point-and-click control interface for operating a forklift. Once in a while, you have to mindlessly mash X like a madman to drain a heart meter, which might be the fish’s health. Who knows. The mini-game is very tedious and the game does a poor job making it feel exciting.
The lack of music, the lifeless, low-quality stock assets, and the minuscule fish models fail to impress. The developers were seemingly aware of the lack of polish of their fish because they kept the models far from view and the only close-up you get is a stock PNG image.
The environments are an amateurish wasteland that have inconsistent lighting for the models and look like they were banged out in a day with store-bought Unity assets. Many of these assets don’t fit in the same style and clash with the setting. There are fishing games on N64 that are more consistent and appealing with more character than the hellishly bland, soul-destroying purgatory of Pocket Fishing.
One of Pocket Fishing’s selling points is that it boasts around 65 species of fish to catch, but it feels more like a threat. There is also a surprisingly dense amount of tackle gear to earn money to buy, but navigating these menus induces headaches. They’re confusing and leveling up and earning money to unlock these means having to play more Pocket Fishing, and I don’t want that.
The store also may trigger anyone with trauma who loathes microtransactions. While Pocket Fishing has none, its menus and layouts are designed with the style of an application with in-game purchases, which will color the mood of anyone who gets caught in the tangled web of the interface.
It is a miracle that Pocket Fishing doesn’t let you wander off out of bounds, because it is the Big Rigs of fishing games. It has very little going for it at all and it thankfully didn’t corrupt my data. Sadly, Pocket Fishing does not crash often enough and you’ll be wishing it did for the excuse to not play it anymore.
Pocket Fishing was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided by Ultimate Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Pocket Fishing is now available for Nintendo Switch.
