It’s time to grab your tackle box and cruise to the bait shop before heading out to fish all day on Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2. Developed by MasterCode and Silent Bear Studio, and published by Ultimate Games, this ultimate simulator of fishing is available across all devices and has just left early access. So, it’s time to gear up and get out there to haul in some monsters of the deep.

Starting in Jackson County USA, you start your fishing adventure to greatness. Like most simulator games, you practically start with bare-bones equipment and need to grind your way up to unlock higher-tier gear that can take more of a beating from the underwater menaces and unlock new areas to fish. There are a total of 6 fishing locations ranging from the rivers of Yellowstone National Park to the Danube Lowlands of Slovakia and the sandy beaches of Thailand.

Each fishing spot caters to a vast variety of species, each different from the last. A total of 59 species can be obtained throughout these maps. Before you start reeling in those monsters, however, you are asked if you want to do the tutorial, every time you want to “go fishing” – unless you hit the don’t show again button on the prompt. Now, the tutorial is useful. It will run you through the two different starter kits and how to use them effectively. The spinner kit and the bait kit. I highly recommend doing this short tutorial to get the basics down, however, I found the tutorial to be extremely basic and only told you how to do things. It did not inform you of what they are used for, or when and why to use them. This led to me losing many fish in my travels.

The mechanics of the fishing itself were great as you had an amount of control over every variable from float depth to drag strength. Then comes the amount of modifications to your fishing kit. You can change up the rod, reel, line, sinkers, bait, lure, and hooks. Almost everything! The only downside is that the tutorial doesn’t show you how. If you want further information that only slightly expands what you’ve already been shown, you have to head to the help tab in the menu.

When hooking and reeling in a fish, you have to pay attention to more than one thing. Most fishing games I have played are usually focused on line tension, but in Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2, there are three tension bars and a drag meter, so you’ll be paying attention to how your rod, line, and reel tension is, all while trying to keep the drag in the sweet spot so the fish doesn’t break off. Multiple different mechanics can aid in this from adjusting the drag, changing the reel speed, pumping the rod, and obviously, manually tilting the rod to fight and tire out your 10lb snapper.

As I stated earlier, there are a few fishing styles at the start, but once you start grinding and catching monsters, you will soon be able to unlock and afford the better equipment, ie. Surfcasters, feeder baskets, and rod support so that you can cast multiple rods at once. All up, there are 5 types of rods and they are obviously used for different fishing styles. To help progress, there are multiple daily, weekly and monthly quests. This award you with cold, hard cash and skill points. You can use the points to start improving your performance by making you stronger, increasing sale prices, increasing XP from catches, and making yourself an “attractive competitor” to increase lure effectiveness. Where do I sign up?

On top of all of this, there are tournaments you can enter in-game. These tournaments rotate all the time and are a really good way of spotting some extra cash. They are all time-limited and rotate in and out frequently. You can also create your own tournament to compete against other online players and brag about how many fish you can catch in an hour, or boast about how big the fish you caught was. There is also a leaderboard to take the bragging rights further.

The leaderboards are based on the game mode you are playing in; Casual or Realistic. Realistic is slightly more difficult, by removing the usage of the underwater camera and removing the ability to teleport around to other spots and change the weather. The maps are free to roam, however, there doesn’t feel like much of a need to change location, unless you are wanting a change of scenery. It seemed like a missed opportunity to have left out a trader of sorts that you had to go and sell the fish and buy supplies from. It seems all you have to do is fish from one spot, buy and sell from the menu, then rinse and repeat.

Sporting an Asus STRIX 3070TI, AMD 5800X, and 32GB RAM, running at 1440P on ultra settings, I averaged 120FPS and the game ran flawlessly. The water design was something to marvel at and had separate settings that weren’t affected by dropping your texture and overall quality. So if you needed to drop textures to compensate, the water would still look just as good. Dropping textures and overall quality to low, I gained a 30FPS boost, and dropping the water settings didn’t change a thing.

Having all low settings reminded me of the graphics from The Forest, and with everything on Ultra, the game looked insanely good for the performance it was spitting out. The atmosphere of the game was extremely relaxing, being one with nature and hearing all the birds around while casting the rod and reeling in fish was a surreal feeling in the game. I could have easily spent hours in this ambiance, however, it does feel like quite a grind getting from level 1 to 3 to unlock your first new area and gear. It felt like I was forever chasing the biggest fish I could to get to those levels quicker and get to a new area.

Being an avid fisher since I was a kid, I used to be crazy about fishing. My favorite game on the PS1 was Saltwater Sport Fishing and I spent countless hours dragging in Mahimahi and Blue Marlin. I can easily see myself spending way too much time on Ultimate Fishing simulator 2 on a lazy Sunday just to wrestle with sharks in Thailand and haul some monsters. If you are a keen fisherman and love fishing games, I recommend you check it out, and if you are new and want to try your hand at fishing games Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2 is a great starting point. You may just want to study the mechanics of the game before jumping in as the tutorial is billy-basic.

Written by: Bigfoot