Review: Lets Fish! Hooked On

Publisher: Wired Productions
Developer: Sims co.
Platforms: PS Vita
Genre: Action/Adventure, Sport
Price: £14.99/$19.99

Let’s Fish! Hooked on, is the first fishing game specifically designed for Playstation Vita, the developers behind the game (Sim co) have bought us the likes of ‘Sega Bass Fishing’ for the DreamCast, in fact they have 8 Fishing games under their belt for various platforms, so it’s fair to say they know what their doing.

The game consists of 5 modes, challenge, world tour, training, Underwater View, Tutorial, although the latter two cannot really be called modes.

Tutorial Mode doesn’t really go into much detail and gives you the real basic controls, it would of been nice if it walked you through the process in a little more detail.

Underwater View is pretty much as it sounds,you choose a stage and it gives you  an underwater on rails view allowing  you to pan the camera, i assume this is to check out the area before you set for the other modes, but what benefit this actually gives you i am not to sure.

Training Mode is basically free play allowing you to choose which stage you wish to play on, your weather and time of day unfortunately though this mode is still timed so its not a true free play mode, and being timed put unnecessary urgency when trying to practice landing your fish.

Now on to the two modes that make up the majority of this game.

Challenge Mode – This mode has you has you fishing to earn yourself 3 stars on each stage across each stage, the challenges mainly consist of either Catching (X) amount of weight or (X) amount of fish and each challenge is also timed.
This mode seems throw you straight in the deep end (Pun intended) and you will be snapping your line and losing fish from the start, earlier challenges are not necessarily easier and i found this mode to get very frustrating very quickly.

World Tour – This mode on the other hand seems to be a bit more balanced starting you of in the amateur league and working your way up, the mode sees you battle against other fisherman in your league to be the best, coming first in a competition will unlock equipment to use for in your future fishing trip (Lures/Bait etc…) this mode has a very loose story mode but you can easily lose time in this mode

GamePlay/Graphics
So as I mentioned earlier this game was made for the Vita, so how have Sim co done with making this game feel right on the Vita, Well the game can be controlled either completely by touch screen or buttons, Game play wise you can move around the lake either swiping left or right, you cast swiping the screen up, this will trigger a power gauge, you then tap the screen again to cast (Preferably the more power the better), when your lure is in the water a side bar pops up, this acts as your reel, Sliding the finger over this bar will control how fast you reel in your line, you can also reverse.
Once you get a bite, what kind of happens next is a load of quick time events, you need to reel in your line while performing the quick time events which insist of sliding left, right, up or down, the faster your reaction to this the less chance or your line breaking and you loosing your lunch, while what I said may sound fairly simple first of i found this very frustrating and just didn’t seem to be very responsive, reeling in at the same time as performing the quick time event was very difficult.
Having struggled with the touch screen controls i then moved on to using the button, this made so much of a difference for me, instead of having to slide in some kind of direction on the screen, you could just push the left stick in the same direction the quick time event states, this worked so well to the point were i was not missing any of the quick time events.

Sims Co also done a good job with the graphics, although not fully utilising the power of the vita the Everybody’s Golf style graphics is bright and pleasing to the eye.

Trophies:
There are 31 trophies in this game including a platinum, nothing to taxing but if you want to platinum this game prepare to put the time in.

Conclusion:
With the pleasant graphics and hours of game play the challenge mode and world tour bring you are definately getting alue for money, however with the very steep learning curve, basic tutorial, annoying touch screen controls and minor text and graphical issues it is hard to recommend this to fishing game fans, if you were waiting for an indepth fishing sim this is probably not you.