I was very excited when I came across Fishin 3D AR in the app store. I love fishing games. I even play them in large titles like Final Fantasy XV as mini-games. I love the anticipation not knowing which fish you are going to pull out, if at all.
What is Fishing 3D AR?
Fishing 3D AR is a realistic ice fishing simulator augmented reality game. You can enjoy fishing as well as educate yourself about the different species you fish out from those three available locations: Alaska, Oregon, and Quebec.
You start the game in Mat-Su Vallery Lakes, Alaska. You unlock the others places with experience points you gain as you play. You also obtain coins which you can use to buy better fishing gear that gives you a higher chance of getting those rarer fish species. You can choose from different fishing rods, bobbers, and tackles. There are also 12 different trophies to achieve.
Gameplay
When I’ve first read the game’s description, I really thought I am going to feel like I am really fishing in AR, but it wasn’t even close to that. The game draws a hole on the floor. You put the fishing float on top of the hole, and press and hold until the bar feels up. After a few seconds, you can see which fish you’ve caught and get to see some interesting information about that fish that you’ve caught—it’s a nice feature.
The overall fishing experience didn’t fill exciting, it was kind of glitchy (I’ve played it on my iPad, so maybe it wasn’t optimized for it) and boring. The game has quite a lot of ads, but you can remove the adds buy buying the full game. It even let you know that those ads are annoying and recommend buying the full game which costs $9.99 as of the time of writing through the US App Store.
Let’s say it like that, there was nothing in this game that kept me motivated to continue my fishing trip. I was expecting a cool arcady fishing simulation and got a boring and uninspiring gameplay controls.
All the visuals are summed with just a small snowy hole. It might feel nice if you use it in a snowy area, but if you don’t, it would just look awkward and very unconvincing.
The UI looks nice, same goes for the fishing rod animation. Speaking of animation, you don’t even get to see the fish coming out of the water, you just hear a sound and see an image of it with some textual information I was expecting to see a nice animation of the fish coming out of the hole, but no, all I get is an image of the fish.
Conclusion
This is definitely not the type of augmented reality fishing game that I expected it to be. In my head, I’ve already seen the game that could have played great in AR, but Fishing 3D AR is nothing like that.
I finished playing the game with a big disappointment. This could have been a much better game with emphasize on authentic physics and animations both for the fishing equipment and the fish, a nice water 3D rendered environment, a better rewarding system and competitive gameplay features.
The game definitely sells itself well on the App Store with some great screenshots and very exciting and descriptive explanation of the game, but for me, the game doesn’t effectuate on its great premise and the end result is a boring and unexciting fishing simulation game.
You can download the game from the App Store here.