Fishing Sim World review

Fishing is a game of patience and skill. You start by finding a quiet and secluded location out on the water, to cast your line out while you wait for a nibble on the bait at the end of your line. The real test then comes in keeping the fish hooked on the line right through to reeling it out of the water. Fishing Sim World attempts to encapsulate these real life aspects of fishing, but how well does Dovetail Games’ simulator achieve this?

You may not be aware, but this is a sequel to the 2014 release of Euro Fishing, which focussed on fishing in EU locations such as Germany and the UK. Fishing Sim World shifts a new focus onto the US, with larger lakes to catch fish in 2 states and keeping EU fishing lakes.

Watching the tutorial videos is a neccessity despite the option to skip, particularly due to the game’s steep learning curve. There are many elements to learn in Fishing Sim World from casting, choice of bait to actually cathcing a fish once hooked. It can all come across as quite overbearing at first and I would recommend watching the video guides available to get a full understanding of what you need to do. Then practice! Lots of practice is needed, even after the tutorial videos, I was still infuriatingly not catching anything and then I remembered I needed to use the sonar hud to find what depth fish were at before casting out.

All in all, there are 18 different species of fish each with their own behavioral systems – reacting to water temperature and bait choice – so you have to choose your strategy carefully to pull a fish out the water.

Equipment is equally as important, with hundreds of items to choose from including licensed tackle from some of the biggest names in fishing: Bass Cat Boats, Rat-L-Trap, Duckett Fishing and Korda. The attention to detail is made on equipment selection and you can play around the lures until your heartss content.

The fishing experience as a whole is rather satisfying once you start hauling fish after fish in. From the moment you see a pull on the line, right through to the point of pulling your rod back to yank the fish out the water as a catch. In the end, it becomes a competition of catching different types of fish and sizes, as the bigger catch becomes more difficult to net.

For a game that takes place largely on the water, one disappointment was the game’s water physics and visuals. As you can expect with previous sims including Euro Fishing, graphically the game delivers at average visuals with frame drops occurring occasionally. At one point I was driving the provided boat to get to a new fishing location and my frame dropped to around 10FPS. My guess would be the mechanics at heart behind the fishing largely form the game’s engine with visuals taking a back seat.

Fishing Sim World is one for the fishing enthusiasts with the time and patience to invest in learning the game’s core set of controls for catching fish. Play the long learning game and you’ll be pulling fish after fish out the water, but if you struggle to get past this barrier you’ll be throwing your rod into the lake and heading home for the day.