Gone Fishin’

A couple of months back I made a tentative return to The Fisherman – Fishing Planet. At the time I was thinking that it would probably be least affected by the Windows 10 issue of all my games, after all, you do spend a lot of time stationary 😉

I have posted about this game before but it has been a while, so here’s a quick reminder. There are two versions of the game; one free to play and the other pay up front. They differ mainly in the economic and experience points areas, with the free to play version requiring a lot of grind to progress and offering a number of pay to progress options. The buy up front version is less of a grind and has now started following the paid DLC route to fund further development. The actual fishing is very much the same in both, so if you wanted to get a taste for the game, you could try out the free to play version. Then, if you like it but get fed up with the grind, you can always buy the other version to continue. Your progress in one does not copy across to the other though and you might find yourself actually having a different user name in each! I’m quite lucky having Roach_Pole in both 🙂

At first glance, the game lacks depth – not the watery kind of course – you go to a lake or river and catch fish. But the developers have got around this with daily competitive fishing contests aimed at all levels of player and by continually adding new challenges for the players to complete. Then there is the matter of buying and selecting your gear. That in itself can be a complicated and thought provoking process. When I came back to the game after a two-year long lay off I found that my rod case had quite a disfunctional set of rods and reels. I’ve spent a while rebalancing my collection and now I’m a lot happier 🙂

Let’s talk challenges and fish. The Trophy set of challenges breaks down groups of fish by their type and asks you to collect a ‘Trophy’ sized specimen of each in the group. This is only partly a species definition – Carp are Carp, Pike are Pike – actually, they are also Pikerels, but Sunfish are Panfish 😉 Panfish – You know, fish you catch to throw on the barbie 🙂 So there is a trophy challenge to catch Panfish. It’s quite easy – most of them can be caught with any type of bait, just about anywhere there are weeds to hide in. The tricksy one is the Pumpkinseed – it wants shade from trees leaning over the water (a rare combination). And that’s part of what the game is about – learning about where a species of fish is likely to be and then presenting them with something they would like to lure them into biting. The Panfish challenge is fun because some of the fish are truly beautiful…

Redear Sunfish…

Bluegill…

The Warmouth, with a Punk hairstyle…

And, of course, Pumpkinseed…

…Pretty aren’t they 🙂 You can see a family likeness in these fish too! I made catching them seem easy but as a beginner there will be a lot of experimenting at each location to find the right bait and the right depth to set the hook. And if you want to catch the biggest specimens (unique fish) then you’ll have to do you homework 🙂 I’ve only talked about float fishing – you can always try sinker fishing. That’s a good way of dealing with a river where you want to keep the bait on station 🙂

I think that’s enough for this first return to game posting. Hopefully you got the more challenging than it looks vibe? I hope to do another post soon that will look at my favourite rods and attempt to explain why they get used most 🙂 Tight lines everyone!