Rapala Fishing Frenzy 2009

Fishing.  Not the most exciting of sports.  In fact only really snooker, indoor bowls and darts [lies! - Ed] come close to matching its mind-numbing dullness.  So you might be forgiven for thinking that fishing would be an unlikely subject for an arcade style video game.  And you'd be right.  However, in a world where Barbie Horse Adventures exists, anything is possible.  Promising "rod-bending, heart pounding, fish fighting" action, Rapala Fishing Frenzy 2009 is the latest entry into this surprisingly well populated genre. 

The basic game play is, at first blush at least, surprisingly engaging.  Casting your line with a dextrous flick of the right stick, you go about hooking and reeling in your catch with a combination of right stick balancing (think trying to maintain a rail in Tony Hawk) and quick time events involving either button presses or stick movement.  It's well put together, offers a decent dose of fast twitch gaming, and gives a real (if you'll excuse the pun) feeling of the contest between angler and catch.  The feeling of having battled and won against your first big bass is one of genuine triumph.

Sadly, that's pretty much where the good bits end.  The games main failing is, ironically enough, that it has almost zero depth and the limitations fast reduce any semblance of fun to repetition and tedium.

There are three basic modes: Tournament Fishing, Quick Challenge and Open Fishing.  Tournament Fishing is the first port of call and being successful here opens up areas and items for use in the other two modes.  Each tournament (regardless of difficulty level) however boils down to the same formula - catch X number of fish Y within Z minutes, and since all the fish behave in the same way once hooked, and can by and large be caught from the same place, there is even less variety here than that suggests. 

Quick Challenge loads a random lake and gives the player a random task of exactly the same type as in tournament mode, and presumably is there to provide a suggestion of continued value once all of the fifteen tournament rounds have been defeated.  Open Fishing is however the major disappointment. 

The back of the box promises "100's (sic) of hotspots on the world's top angling waters."  What this actually equates to is severely truncated sections of 7 North American lakes, which to the untrained eye look suspiciously alike.  Each session is bizarrely limited to 30 minutes for no obvious reason, and whilst you can explore the lakes in your (unresponsive and sluggish) boat there is, as previously mentioned, no reason to do so.

In conclusion then, although briefly fun and unexpectedly engaging, Rapala Fishing Frenzy 2009 quickly becomes repetitive and loses its appeal.  If you're really jonesing for a fishing fix (and I'm guessing someone out there must be) it might be worth a rental.  Me, I'm waiting for the inevitable EA Sports Big version - Fishing Frenzy Street.