Rapala Tournament Fishing

"Throw this game into the water"

When a new video game generation comes along, you'd think that developers would learn from their mistakes and stop making terribly generic titles that no one can truly enjoy. The fifth generation didn't have as many of these as not very many gamers would have bothered with them anyway, but with the sixth generation and the surge of casual gaming, a lot of people bought games about the dumbest things, including fishing. However, as the seventh generation continues I haven't seen nearly as many of these generic titles released for the Xbox 360, but, unfortunately, this trash has landed in the new generation of video games, and it is my duty to warn you about how bad this game really is so you can avoid the temptation to purchase this worthless title.

As the title suggests, the main game mode is about a fishing tournament. There are a few different kinds of tournaments with different weight goals, but essentially they are all the same thing. When a fish is too small, the game will tell you and you will be forced to throw it back, plus you can only hold five fish at a time. Restriction like this just doesn't work in a game of this nature and makes it even worse than it should be.

You can choose from various lures and equipment, but your fishing really won't be altered that much at all. Now, I'll get into how you actually fish in this game, since that is the point, right?

As you drive around in your little boat, which handles unexpectedly well, you will notice a little map in the upper-right corner of the screen that's supposed to let you know where fish are at, but it's basically useless. All you have to do is cast your line out to wherever you want, move the lure around a little bit, and wait for a fish to bite.

Moving the lure around is as simple as moving the control sticks around. When a fish bites, you have to reel them in by holding down the right trigger and holding the right control stick down until the fish finally get to your boat, which can actually take quite a while depending on how far you cast the line. Sometimes you'll have to move the line around depending on the size of the fish, but that's really all there is to it, meaning the gameplay gets, as you could imagine, extremely repetitive.

A ranking system is put in place to compare you to the A.I. competitors, and they are usually impossibly better than you. Besides that, though, there is other stuff that fills your screen and some of it is the most useless information ever. There is seriously something that tells you what temperature the water is. Besides the one useless map in the upper right hand corner, there is a slightly useful one in the upper left hand corner that shows you whether other fishermen are at and where the dock is located. Your lure appears on screen in a little box as well and flashes red when a fish is nearby so you know when to stop watching TV and actually start playing the game again.

I do have some praise for the game though in the gameplay department and that is that it actually makes the loading screens interactive, a feature which would have really helped out some of the 360's more popular titles like Oblivion, which suffered from horrendous load times. In Rapala, some loading screens will have you catching fish in a net, keeping tracking of how many fish you caught. Another loading screen is basically a quiz over fishing facts and Rapala merchandise, but this is way worse than the fish catching mini-game as you definitely won't know any of the answers, leaving it up to random guesses.

You can free fish at a variety of locations, but when the tournament mode is insanely boring, why would you want to do this at all? Hell, I find fishing in real life boring, how can anyone expect me to find a video game about fishing any fun at all?

Rapala fails the most in that its other gameplay modes are basically rehashed versions of tournament mode but with restrictions. For example, the Time Trial mode just tests you to see how many fish you can catch before the time runs out. This can drag on forever and becomes very, very boring.

The other mode is an “arcade” mode it calls it, but that seems kind of a silly name to me. It's basically the same thing as tournament mode except you are expected to catch a certain number of fish and a certain kind of fish before the time runs out. Do you see what I'm trying to get across here? Everything about this game is way too similar and while extra modes could have made the game better, the developers made these extra modes so much like the main tournament mode that they are obsolete.

Another extremely boring aspect of the game is that one of the main unlockable features is freaking videos of people fishing. You know how in some of the Tony Hawk games you can unlock some videos of people skateboarding and they are a little entertaining? Yeah, there's entertaining at all about watching people fish and the idea that anyone could get enjoyment out of that revolts me.

Since the gameplay is unimaginably terrible and shallow, you would expect them to make the graphics above par to make up for it, right? Well, in most of my reviews after that somewhat sarcastic sentence, I would reveal that the graphics are terrible. However, in Rapala, the graphics are actually very good. The character models are amazing, the water is just as good as the water found in BioShock, the boat is heavily detailed, and the lighting is nearly flawless. Sure the environments aren't really that varied and the fish aren't as detailed as you'd expect, but the game does pretty well in the graphics department.

Surprisingly, the sound of the boat motor constantly running isn't nearly as annoying as you would expect it to be. The background music isn't really all that great, but it is better than you would expect, so I guess that's a somewhat good feature about this otherwise unremarkable and shallow game.

Tournaments can take up to sixty minutes, but chances are you'll catch the fish you'll want way before that timer runs out. There are about five tournaments to participate in and you can unlock the boring fishing videos. The other three gameplay modes are unremarkable and very poorly done rehashes of the tournament mode, so they are no fun to play and you probably won't waste your time with them. That being said, nothing about this game is fun in any way, shape, or form, meaning that you won't even try to get achievements like in other games, meaning that there is virtually no replayability.

Rapala is a game that has very beautiful graphics, decent audio, and is actually smart enough to make loading screens interactive so players don't get bored waiting for the game to load, but that doesn't make up for the fact that this game is extremely shallow and sinfully unentertaining. None of the game modes will provide you even an ounce of enjoyment as they are all extremely repetitive. Games like these give video games a bad name as a lot of casual players who happen to enjoy fishing are going to pick this title up regardless of the scathing reviews, meaning that developers will want to release similar games as to make more money off of them. If we want games like Rapala Tournament Fishing to stop being made, all we have to do is simply not purchase them anymore. Don't make the same mistake I did, and just let this title collect dust on the shelves.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/08

Game Release: Rapala Tournament Fishing (US, 11/21/06)