Open Fishing XL Reviews

Although I didn’t like the original gamejam demo, I bought this product hoping that continued development would make it a worthwhile experience. Despite some major graphical improvements and the implementation of many new features, the unfortunate truth is that the gameplay is still just as bland as it was back in 2022. Doing everything in this game takes absolutely ages; waiting for a bite takes ages, reeling the fish in takes ages, cooking the fish takes ages, and getting enough money to buy a worthwhile upgrade takes ages (Unless you’re on the Rogue Isle, in which case you can’t work on your catch record or any of the achievements). Hell, even saving in this game takes ages. This would be great for an idle game, except that this isn’t really an idle game. Depending on your rod strength, you will lose many larger fish unless you instantly react to a bite or enable an optional setting which disables pretty much all of the game’s progression mechanics, and even if you do enable this setting, you still need to manually decide what to do with each fish and then manually recast your line. Rods have a durability meter which only decreases when reeling in a fish, meaning they will only break in the middle of a catch, and they can’t be repaired pre-emptively. Nets (Which can catch up to five fish at a time, or sixty fish every forty minutes if you max out your inventory) don’t count towards any of the angler achievements, which means that you need to manually catch eight times more fish than the catch record actually contains, and even if you use softbait and enable the instafish mechanic (Which essentially halves the amount of time it takes to catch each fish), it will still take at least seven hours of straight grinding to get the final achievement (Potentially even longer if you get bad RNG). With all of the other achievements in the game, it almost adds up to a staggering forty hours, which is insane considering I did nothing but sit on my ass waiting for a bite the entire time. A lot of this could be forgiven if the atmosphere was at least engaging enough that I wanted to spend that much time in-game, but the atmosphere this game offers is about as barebones as it can get. Many biomes are barely distinguishable from one another, and without any sort of portable radio or dynamic music system, you’re just left with looping nature sounds for the entire duration of your playthrough. Maybe the game is better played with friends for this exact reason, but it’s not advertised as a multiplayer experience in any way whatsoever, and honestly, I’d be extremely surprised if you managed to find a single other person who wanted to play it with you. The dev has openly stated that they don’t really care about making or playing video games and that they were just in it for the money, which I think explains a lot of the poor design choices and overall lack of polish, but it’s still no excuse to stop working on a half-baked product, let alone to start working on and eventually release what is now a fully abandoned sequel. [hr][/hr] TL;DR - More chore than chill.