Fishing

Scorecard

What you actually do

You look straight down at the sea floor. A reticle sits near the bottom of the screen and you steer it by dragging your thumb across the glass. Fish cross in horizontal lanes: quick silver ones near the top, fatter slow ones lower down, and the occasional armoured thing that plods across at its own stubborn pace. You aim, lift your thumb, and the line casts upward. A hit adds the fish's value to a running score; a miss costs only the half-second it took. Small fish fall to one cast; the bigger ones need two or three and keep swimming while the line resets, so a large catch becomes a small planning problem.

Two systems sit on top of that. The first is a stage timer — each stage is a fixed window of about ninety seconds, then the screen tallies your catch and moves you on. The second is the hold-to-charge line: press and hold instead of tapping and the line fans into a wide spread that takes a whole cluster at once, but building it costs a beat during which you cannot fire. That trade is the game's whole argument. Pick off singles quickly and you waste no frames; hold for the spread and you clear a shoal but leave a gap for a fast fish to slip through. The efficient line and the greedy line rarely coincide, and knowing which one a lane deserves is the intermediate skill.

How it feels in the hand

Very good, which is why this entry runs long. The aim drag tracks your thumb closely and the cast fires on the exact frame you lift, so a fast series of taps produces a fast series of casts with no queue building behind the animation. I played whole stages one-handed on a moving bus and nothing about it felt like a compromise. For a game that lives on precise aiming, that is a high bar cleared.

The one real complaint: the reticle keeps a little momentum after you lift, so a hurried flick overshoots the fish you wanted and lands in empty water. On the older handset the coasting was slightly worse, and I began making my aim drags a fraction shorter than felt natural to compensate. A sensitivity slider would fix it in a second; there is not one.

The best stages are the ones where you stop aiming at fish and start aiming at the water they are about to be in, the way you swing a net ahead of something rather than at it.

Session shape

A poor stage ends with a thin score and a half-empty tank; a good one fills it. The stage I would mention to someone was the one where a dense shoal crossed the middle lane just as my spread finished charging, and the whole cluster came down in a single cast. Ninety seconds is the right length for the situations a phone gets used in — a queue, a kettle, the few minutes before something starts.

The friction is not the stages, it is the seams between them. After roughly every third stage there is a video advert of fifteen to thirty seconds. The adverts are fine and skippable at the end, but the game also offers to carry a stage on in exchange for watching one, and that prompt appears in the same spot where the plain next-stage button appears half a second later. Twice in my first week I tapped the offer by accident because my thumb was already travelling. That is a layout choice a studio makes on purpose, and it is the biggest thing holding this score down.

There is also an upgrade track — a slightly stronger line, a faster reset, a few cosmetic reticle skins — unlocked with points you accumulate simply by playing. I filled most of it over the fortnight without going out of my way, and nothing useful is locked behind a wall you cannot walk over with ordinary time. That is worth stating plainly.

Where the difficulty actually comes from

Not from speed. The fish never move faster than they do in the first stage; what climbs is the density of the lanes and how often the awkward fish appear. Late stages send a big armoured fish across the middle at a crawl, and it soaks two or three casts while quick silver fish stream past the lane above. You cannot catch both, so you are forced into the trade the game is built on: ignore the slow points that will still be there in a moment, or chase them and let the fast ones leave for good.

The shoals are the fairest hazard and the one most people misread. A shoal that changes direction halfway across looks like a disaster and is actually the best target in the game, because for one frame the whole group bunches up and a charged spread takes all of it. My scores jumped once I stopped firing at the leading fish and started waiting for the turn.

Five pointers

Who it is for

Anyone who wants a pure aim-and-timing loop with nothing to wait out, no timer nagging you back at six o'clock, and no obligation on day two. If you like the physical act of leading a moving target and reading a lane a beat ahead, this is a clean, honest version of it. If you want more depth unfolding between runs rather than inside them, one of the slower-burning entries further down the diary will serve you better than this one will.