Player Select

Working through some new Apple Arcade releases, and this game leapt out at me - islands and fishing and a gentle adventure, it sounded right up my street. I've been playing for a few weeks and have managed to unlock the second island, although there is still plenty to do on the first one. When I dip in every now and again, I can never decide which island to work on next!

It's in the Game

When I first picked this up, it took me a while to understand what was going on. I was running around the small home island for a long time before realising you could catch a ride on the helicopter (hanging off the back of it - an adorable graphic but somewhat terrifying concept). There are whole new islands waiting to be fished, and once I realised that, I was off and running. It's a slow pace of game and you only have a small amount of space to carry fish in your bag, so there's a lot of back and forth and running around.

The end-of-level boss for the first island was a kind of fish monster, and it was quite the hurdle for me to get over. I was tapping at that screen for ages, thinking ‘this can’t be right’. And it wasn’t. It’s not about the speed of tapping, it’s about holding pressure on the screen for the right amount of time, keeping the balance right to pull in the fish. Quite like fishing, I expect, although I’ve never been.

Thoughts

Even though I caught the monster on the first island, there's still lots to do. It makes it easy to want to return every couple of days, making small amounts of progress each time. For a casual game, that's exactly what you want. It doesn't sustain my attention for long each playing session, I probably don't actually have the right temperament to be a fisherman, but I keep coming back to it. So this game gets a 5 out of 5.

Rating: 5 / 5