Though I’d say that on the whole the Switch remains woefully under-represented when it comes to decent indie sports games, one of the flavors it has plenty of are fishing games. You’d think that would be great, but unfortunately the one thing almost all of them have in common? Pretty well across the board they’re uniformly simplistic and dull, and those are the good ones.

I don’t know what has happened with dedicated fishing games over the years, but at some point they really went off the tracks. I think the last time I played some generally solid, engaging, and well-made ones was back in the SNES days, but that was likely helped a bit by arcades still being around. What’s most unusual is that at some point you had games like the Zelda series and some others taking up the reins to show how you can make fishing both satisfying and fun… but it seems the dedicated fishing games missed the memo.

For quite some time most of what I’ve played have been variations on Pocket Fishing, titles that feature all sorts of equipment and gear, and will let you fish in a variety of locations and circumstances. So yes, you’ll move around to different locales and be able to change out your bait and other equipment to attract different fish… but is that really what people are looking for? What happened to the focus being on making the act of fishing itself exciting and challenging? Just as with many others, Pocket Fishing completely fails in this department, with pretty well every aspect of the action being dull and repetitive. To add insult to injury, the game doesn’t seem to understand whether it wants you to play with a controller or the touchscreen so it has sort of gone down the middle with what feels like the worst of both worlds in the process.

Given how desperate I know the fishing fans have become, patiently hoping a game would finally come along that gets things right, it’s sad that this is another clunker. Despite its focus only being on fishing it has somehow managed to invest effort in everything you can buy to fish with and where you’ll be able to go, but comparatively little on trying to make the experience fun. Folks will just have to keep looking.