Rapala Trophies Wii Disappointment
Fishing games are a lot like fishing itself. Either they are a ton of fun and very gratifying or they are beyond terrible. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground. My favorite fishing games ever are the Sega Bass Fishing and ocean fishing games. On the Dreamcast I had so many hours of fun playing Sega Bass Fishing that when I heard that there was going to be a fishing game launching with the Wii I was quite excited. Unfortunately, this was not a Sega fishing game, it was something quite less.
I grew up fishing and have spent many afternoons on the water, so I can say that I know fishing quite well. Using the Wiimote to control the fishing rod and reel should be quite natural, but Rapala Trophies just didn’t feel as natural as fishing in Zelda: Twilight Princess did. Everything feels delayed. It’s like the system has to think about whether or not I cast or not or if I jerked on the controller. It gets pretty frustrating. Also, the actual mechanic of winding in the fish doesn’t work well. You just hold down the A button to wind in, but if the fish fights a lot you have to jerk back on the pole to drag it in. When fishing in real life, that would probably snap the line or lose the fish, so that threw me off quite a bit.
Overall, there are a lot of little problems with Rapala Trophies that make it feel very rough around the edges. It seems like it was a bit rushed and a few months of testing and tweaking would have helped. Then again, with the netting system making no sense, there are some areas that don’t work at all and would never have been fixed. Sometimes games are like that, but I can’t recommend this game to anyone really.
