I enjoy the great outdoors. I jump at the chance to go hiking or camping whenever I can. I have made countless midnight runs to the pier in order to do some ocean fishing in the dark. Regularly, I feel the call of the wild and have to set off on some excursion to enjoy the wilderness. However, my outdoor time has been recently limited due to work and university. That is until Dovetail Games Euro Fishing came along.
Euro Fishing is the new addition by Dovetail Games into their popular suite of simulations. I was excited to jump into a game that I could play while relaxing with some pizza and a beer, and emulate what I was missing due to my strict schedule. What I found was a very complete fishing simulator with enough diversity to keep drawing me back in.
The main gameplay loop in Euro Fishing involves choosing a starting location on the bank of a pond, walking to a fishing spot, setting up the gear and then fishing. That was the easy part, actually catching the fish was much more complex. Once a fish was caught, I was awarded with XP and money that I could use to purchase new equipment and locations.
I had to select the proper hook, rod, reel, line, bait, weights and floats in order to fish for specific types of fish in specific types of environments. A gravel-filled lake bottom would need a hook, bait and float that kept the hook from sinking between the rocks. A lake filled with a lot of reeds needed a closed hook so it would not get caught in the vegetation. Luckily, the game has an optional tutorial that thoroughly explains every aspect of the fishing experience, and plenty of hints and tips appear on screen while playing.
Once all my gear was set up, I had to properly cast my line toward visual cues in the water. Fish breaching the surface and small pockets of bubbles were the usual signs of fish in the area. Once a fish was on my hook, I had to repeatedly switch between pulling and lowering the rod, reeling in the line, and adjusting the tension on the reel. The entire process felt intuitive and incredibly realistic. The feedback on my Xbox One controller added to the realism of having to fight a fish until it ran out of endurance.
While I was impressed with the tight and responsive controls, I was underwhelmed by the camera. When the fish was still far from me, the camera was sufficient at allowing me to stay observant of the fish’s actions. But as the fish came closer and I had to steer it away from reeds and rocks, the camera would zoom in and out wildly. The first-person and third-person view suffered from this problem and became very frustrating at times. When I was on a bank with few obstacles, the lack of visibility was less of a problem.
Graphically, Euro Fishing is beautiful. I was instantly impressed by the swaying grass, lapping waterfront and character models. The fish were also realistically modeled, though I only got to see them after I caught one. Weather effects, time of day, and player position in relation to the sun all played a part in the lighting effects on the body of water I was fishing at. This helped create a serene setting where immersion was offered in spades.
The sound design was also a high point. The narrator for the tutorial was funny and informative. He made the tutorial a pleasurable experience and not a chore. The sounds of birds, bugs and the rolling tide all felt properly balanced and welcome in the setting. The music choices were mostly forgettable and more of a background distraction than anything else.
The technical performance of Euro Fishing was top tier in most categories. The frame rate stayed consistent, even when I had three fish on three different lines. There were never any hard crashes or issues with lag. However, the opening title screen took over five minutes to get from the boot up logo to the start screen. Every other loading screen only lasted fifteen seconds or less, but the title screen was noticeably long.
Another performance issue I found was while playing in the tournaments. The first few amateur tournaments task the player with catching as many fish as possible. It did not matter what breed of fish or how much that fish weighed, just that I was able to reel it in. In my first match I caught five fish in total. However, the game only credited me with catching three. I looked in the help screen and did a quick Google search to see why this happened. I could not find any information that related to why my catches were not credited. Luckily, I was only playing against bots. I would have been very frustrated if I was in one of the online tournaments and this error cost me the gold.
There are four basic game modes in Euro Fishing: free-play, challenges, offline tournament and online tournament. In free-play, I just picked a spot on the map and practiced with different lures, lines, and rods. This was the quickest and easiest way to level up, buy new gear and prepare for the tournaments. The challenges involved trying to cast into targeted areas and things of that nature. The offline tournaments placed me against bots that were not very skilled in the earlier rounds, and extremely skilled in the later rounds. With practice, I was able to dominate most of the tournaments. Netting a gold medal meant a significant amount of money and XP.
The online tournaments played much like the offline, except with live players. Each tournament has a scheduled time, and all players must try to catch the requisite amount of fish by the end of the session. In the way other games do a daily challenge, this works the same way. I was not playing at the same time others were, I just competed against their best score and tried to win. Each day, a new tournament was posted and I could try again.
Summary
Overall, Dovetail Games Euro Fishing is a very competent player in the simulation fishing genre. Not many games offer the level of realism mixed with fun and engaging gameplay that Euro Fishing offers. I hope in future iterations Dovetail Games can fix the small nuisances that detract from the overall greatness that is this game. If you are a fan of fishing games, this is not one to be skipped.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.