catch five cowfish, even though I’d already shown I know how to catch a cowfish! Simply ramping up the number of fish I needed to catch (and the reward) doesn’t make for an interesting progression, and “Cat Goes Fishing” relied on this too frequently.įor what it’s worth, the game is still being updated by Cat 5 Games.
Relatively early on in the game, I had to catch two cowfish - a somewhat annoying process, albeit satisfying once it was achieved - using small bait to catch medium bait, and then using medium bait to catch the cowfish. “Cat Goes Fishing” sometimes suffers from a lack of variety. Why should I be rewarded for buying two rockets or two bombs - “missions” that popped up repeatedly? Even though I admit that this game snared me and I found myself casting my line over and over, some aspects of the mission structure, which could seem arbitrary or too straightforward, seriously grated. The game progresses by giving you missions - usually something like “Catch X of Y fish” - for which you are rewarded. While many of them didn’t exhibit particularly complex behavior, there was enough diversity for me to feel like I learned a little more each time I played. If you don’t have a sense of which fish have which tendencies, you won’t get very far.
Part of the satisfaction the game delivers comes from slowly gaining mastery over the different sorts of fish flitting about in the depths. When you have enough money, you can buy various upgrades for your rods (allowing you to repel or attract certain kinds of fish, sink your lure faster, and so on), fish-finding radar, boats that let you travel to more lucrative waters, bombs that can scatter fish you’re not looking to catch, and rockets that help you cast your line much farther. In fact, you get into a bit of a zone as the game’s soothing music plays (I eventually turned it off by hitting “M” - a setting that doesn’t appear to be advertised anywhere in the game itself). Once you have the fish in hand, you can either sell it or use it as bait to catch other bigger and more expensive fish.