Reef Shot Reviews

The game is about diving around underwater scenes searching for stuff the game tells you about (fishes, ruins, etc) and take decent photos of them, meaning you need to find the right angle, zoom, etc to have your pic rated with more stars. From time to time it's hard to understand what or how you need to take a pic to have better rating, fishes move a little too much in the later levels but the game is short (in three hours you can do everything) so probably it was made just to create a bit of challenge. Overall i liked the experience, maybe bigger levels with no or less air limit (a bit annoying but as i said levels are quite short so it wasn't much an issue in the end) would also have helped enjoy it more.

This is just not a good game. The environments are very sparse and poorly designed. There's only a few plants here and there, with just a lot of featureless grey rock everywhere else. Barely any sea life. In fact the only fish you'll see are the ones that were specifically put there for you to take a picture of. Swim off the path and you'll see just...nothing. Completely linear. The waypoints guide you from one place to the next and there's nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Even worse is the "manual focus" mechanic introduced later in the game that requires you to perform a quicktime action every single time you want to take a picture. Oh and it's only 1:30 hours long. Do yourself a favor. If you're interested in these types of games go play Everblue 1 & 2 on the PS2, or the Endless Ocean games on the Wii. Those are the games this game tries and fails to copy.

I paid $2.24 for Reef Shot. That might have been a fair price. I had a small idea what I was getting into - some kind of mashup of Afrika on PS3 and the Endless Ocean series on Wii with far lower production values. Unfortuntely, Reef Shot eschews the laid back, kinda open world, collectathon-with-light-story format of those games and strives for something more like a mobile device find-the-things-in-the-picture idea. It's unfortunate, and, by the fourth level, it's just annoying and not worth pursuing. It's irritating enough to search for the photography targets as they are drip-fed to you, unable to approach the dive how you would prefer. But then the game feels the need to pile on immersion-breaking rhythm game timing challenges as well as weird, exceedingly gamified resource limitations. Who, in this day and age, can't fit more than 35 shots on a digial camera? Why am I buying additional oxygen, autofocus uses, and film (!?) with in-game currency while still underwater? It's so dumb that it boggles the mind. I wasn't expecting a hardcore simulation here, but the game's internal logic is so bizarre that it's distracting, and the emphasis on twitch gameplay and resource management over exploration and enjoyment is a crazy choice, given the way the game is framed and themed. Reef Shot very much suffers from its own mechanics, as well as unfavorable comparisons to Subnautica and Abzu, which far exceed its depiction of underwater life in both higher and lower fidelity presentations.

Here lies a game that could be good with enough time put into it. As it stands, it is an average escape into a world within our grasp with all the enthusiasm of a school-sponsored field trip. Nice enough in its presentation, it could use much more work in terms of world-building and character development, if not giving a reason for the viewer to care about anything that happens at all. Reef Shot is a nice shot, yet blurry from age and a lack of development. Only those with a background in scientific fanaticism, and a penchant for a more story-driven video game experience, should be willing to take that initial dive. + Good visual appeal + Almost corny enough to be charming + Effectively immersive soundtrack - No reason to care outside of innate curiosity - Areas become repetitive quickly - Renée Read the full review at https://www.keengamer.com/article/17567_reef-shot-review

A pleasant game with a decent amount of atmosphere, I don't know why but even coming to this game a decade late I enjoyed it much more than I expected. You could almost consider it a 'walking simulator' since the other characters are only voiceovers and you can't affect anything, just move around and look at/for things in the order you're told to, but it's still neat. It's not that long, I finished everything in about 3 hours without too much trouble. I guess I wish the ending wasn't so abrupt, but that list of credits after it is pretty short.