by Geir Gunnarsson
I am partial to the occasional simulator, especially if it lets me build up my business and try to become the biggest trucker, fisher, store owner or whatever the simulator lets me play as and when I got Fishing North Atlantic I was looking forward to testing it out to see if they could make industrial fishing fun, being Icelandic, a nation of fishermen and farmers, I am quite biased and tired of industrial fishing.
The game starts with a simple tutorial, so simple really that it is downright confusing and not entirely useful as it omits what key presses are needed for certain actions and it becomes a trial and error to find the right key bindings.
When I finally managed to finish the tutorial, after opening the settings multiple times to try and find the correct key for the action I needed at the time and quite frequently it wouldn’t be listed in the key bindings, I discovered a large open world with many towns and other boats and ships cruising about fishing.
The ocean looks pretty and the movement of the water seems pretty realistic but the rest of the game does look quite dated graphically speaking. The textures of the boats are quite bland and low quality compared to the ocean. There are numerous graphic glitches I noticed and one of the worst one is how reflective everything is and if you are fishing at night, your boat and rubber boots will glow like they are some kind of beacons and will blind you to most everything around you.
The character models look very stiff and low quality compared to the boats which I have to say is somewhat an achievement since the boats already look pretty low quality. It is clear that most of the time was spent on the ocean seeing as that is the star of the show here.
Gameplay wise the game did seem to be ok until I tried to fish on my own without the help of the tutorial. The only method of fishing to begin with is harpooning, which was fine for the tutorial as a school of swordfish were conveniently swimming around the surface and so was very easy for me to harpoon a couple but once the tutorial was over, I had a very hard time finding any swordfish.
I went to the nearest town and docked my boat to look at my options. My tutorial fishing trip netted me some cash but it was not enough for net fishing or any kind of different fishing than harpooning so instead I bought information about where swordfish could be, amongst other fish that I bought information for. The information could be anything from 3 days old to a week old.
I plotted a course to the swordfish location that was 3 days old and when I got there no swordfish were visible. Since the information was 3 days old, I started to patrol the area to try and find some.
I used my deep-sea sonar and all the equipment at my disposal (which I was never taught to use in the very limited tutorial) yet never found anything I could fish. After about 2 hours of just drifting around trying to find something to fish I ran out of fuel and was dead in the water.
I was very low on cash, so I decided to restart the game and see if I missed something in the tutorial. I did not.
The tutorial is just woefully inadequate to teach you all that you need to know to fully enjoy this game or even to play the game properly. I ran into the same problems as the first time, couldn’t find any fish to harpoon and couldn’t figure out how to operate most of the equipment and just got frustrated with the game.
In conclusion: if the graphic glitches are fixed (looking at you lighting up like a flashlight) and pad out the tutorial to actually teach you something useful in the game and maybe not make it so difficult to find something to harpoon, this game could be quite decent. As it stands it is really not worth it unless in a huge sale and you have the time to use trial and error to discover how to use all the equipment.
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