Reel Fishing Paradise 3D Review
Natsume are past masters at providing gamers with a gentle, pastoral experience – thanks to their work on the Harvest Moon series, their slept-on Legend of the River King titles, and their long running Reel Fishing franchise, which dates back to 1996. Their latest fish-‘em-up brings virtual trout tickling to the masses in stereoscopic 3D, but Reel Fishing Paradise 3D isn’t going to be challenging those end of year lists by any stretch of the imagination.
Proper fishing involves a number of factors: perhaps getting up at the crack of dawn, maybe setting up an overnight bivvy, negotiating the quiet, military green horror that is the bait and tackle shop, surrounded by men in waders eyeing up brightly coloured lures and expensive rods, while presumably teetering on the cusp of almost certain divorce from their long-troubled spouse. Thankfully here you don’t have to worry about this – the kindly owner of the fishing lodge will see to that.
There are fifteen stages or “days” of fishing to negotiate. The aim is to progress by catching a set number of fish in each of the locations, with new fishing spots serving up different species of aquatic beasties to tempt onto your hook. The new locations – and new fish – are only unlocked by progressing past the previous stage, and you are told in no uncertain terms what kind of lure or bait to use to catch each type of fish. To begin with you have a lure that can be waggled and maneuvered to mimic the movements of the tasty prey the trout are after. Later on you get to go old school with some worms, which are the favoured foodstuff of the carp (even though any fisherman worth his salt knows that boilies or sweetcorn would work better).
Sometimes you’re challenged with catching a fish of a specific weight, but other than that there are no other parameters or arcade-style conventions to worry about. Some fishing games, like the bass-oriented slew of titles that seemed to be around during the late 90s (and yes, I owned Get Bass with the rod peripheral during the Dreamcast era) compensate for the potentially mundane nature of the sport by adding time limits and other challenges. Not so here, as proceedings are far more laid back and leisurely. You can take on each location – represented beautifully with a picture postcard image on the top screen – completely at your own pace.
Once you’ve cast your line using either a swipe on the touch screen or a button press, the task of catching the blighters is underway. You can jiggle your lure or bait around in the water to entice the fish, which you can see swimming about in the murky depths. You can pull the line back and re-cast at will, to ensure that you drop hook in an area where your intended catch may be lurking. The camera can be zoomed in or out to view the underwater scenes, but that is as far as it goes. You could moan about this and ask why the camera isn’t more expansive, but then you’re lucky to have any camera at all – in the real world fisher-people have to get by using their wits and instincts alone, right?
Once you hook a fish, reeling in is done by using either the face buttons or swirling stylus motions, and you can move the rod around using the circle pad. There are three speeds available when reeling in. Reel too quickly or use sudden jarring motions and the fish could escape or the line may snap – so it is all about playing the fish carefully and paying attention to the bar on the left of your screen that indicates how close you are to pulling it out of the drink. It soon becomes apparent that it isn’t actually that difficult to land any of the fish you go after. Whereas in real life, you could ostensibly face a lengthy battle hauling in a wily carp or other tricky sporting fish, here it doesn’t take much effort before the fish are safely ensconced in your virtual aquarium, a kind of boring fish equivalent of a Pokedex, if you will. Watching the fish swim about or observing them as you fish has the benefit of some 3D slider depth, yet it becomes migraine-inducing during the sections where the fish is frantically trying to fight against man and rod.
VERDICT: There is a lot of fishing to do here, however due to the lack of any real challenge it soon becomes a bit of a trudge. There is plenty of variety in fish types and tackle, but none of it makes a huge amount of difference tactically when confronted with fish who seem to enjoy chowing down on anything put in front of them. Anatomically correct models of recognisable fish are all well and good, but this is a fishing sim desperately in need of an injection of excitement and a bit of purpose. Not terrible, but not enough to wrest me away from Extreme Fishing With Robson Green.
AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.
