There’s an arcade fishing game by Namco where you view the action on a horizontal screen parallel to the ground, like you’re looking into a small fishing pond.  It’s called Ace Angler, and I know I played it once in an arcade, or at least another game that was trying to imitate it.  It’s been a while.  Anyway, the game is pretty popular in Japan and has even gotten a couple of Switch home ports. The newest one even made it to the US digitally this past year.  And now anyone can play a mobile version of the game (reviewed on iPad here) with Ace Angler: Fishing Spirits M.

In the game, you view the action like how you do in the arcade, like you’re looking down into a pool of water.  First you select your stage, each with a different background and fish to catch.  When you start, you’ll pick a rod.  Each rod costs a certain number of medals, and the more expensive ones give you a better chance of catching fish.  Then you tap somewhere on the screen to cast, and when a fish bites, hold down on the bottom right side of the screen to reel it in.  On the left side of the screen, you can use a thunderbolt to shock the fish to weaken it so you can catch it easier.  Using a thunderbolt requires one medal, though.  You’ll have a certain amount of time to catch as many fish as you can, and when you are done, they tally your score and you’ll earn more medals!  You can use the medals in the shop to upgrade your stages so they have different kinds of fish, or buy new stages all together.  There’s also an album where you can view the fish you caught and read some info about them.  Any new fish you catch you can also get more medals for here.

A lot of the things that annoy me about free-to-play mobile games didn’t bother me as much here.  You do have to view an ad at the end of a level, but that didn’t seem too bad and some of the games they were showing looked fun, too!  There is only one in-game purchase, and it’s just to remove ads and it’s only 3 bucks, so that’s not bad either.  At some point, a lot of these freebie games make it so you can’t progress without spending money, and I almost got that way in this game, but then I got super lucky and unlocked a random sunken treasure ship stage and earned a ton more medals.  As of this writing, I’m at that point again, but I only have one last stage to unlock.  So for a free-to-play game, I feel like I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Kid Factor:

Not a whole lot of violence here.  When you press the thunderbolt button, you shock the fish and it shakes for a bit, but that’s about as violent as it gets.  The game may be considered somewhat educational since you can read fish facts on the ones you’ve caught.  But there are also some made up fish, too, so yeah.  Reading skill is needed for the text, and parental supervision is recommended for the in-game ads and purchases.

Tags: Game Reviews