Developed by FusionPlay and published by Team17, Nice Day For Fishing is a fishing RPG where you catch fish in order to defeat big, bad bosses and complete quests. Nice Day For Fishing comes from the minds behind the creators of Epic NPC Man, so if you are a fan of the show, you will find Nice Day For Fishing very familiar and equally hilarious. While from its name, it may sound a little misleading because you would expect the game to revolve around you sitting on a boat on a sunny morning and spending some time fishing, but at its core, Nice Day For Fishing is a full RPG with plenty of fun and deep mechanics. This is our review of the PC Steam release of Nice Day For Fishing, in which we cast some spells on fish and feed them to a hungry goblin.
Nice Day For Fishing is set in the land of Azerim, and you play as Baelin, who used to be just a fisherman NPC in a world of adventurers. When the underwater dark lord Yz’halden is freed from his long slumber, your village, Honeywood, is destroyed, and you must become an adventurer as you step up to rebuild your village and help the people around you. You interact with different characters from the village who give you quests and help you get on the right track. The dialogue is filled with humor, and sometimes a cheeky quest will also find its way into your journal, giving you a well-deserved break from the normal routine.
The fishing mechanics of the game are fairly simple. You need a hook, a fishing rod, and some bait to catch fish. Naturally, Azerim is full of water bodies, so finding fish is no difficult task in the game. Once you have arrived at the location, you choose the right type of bait and cast it out in the water. Once a fish catches on to it, you will begin ‘attacking’ the fish. You can only attack when the fish is facing you, but if the fish is facing away from you, you have to switch from offense to defense. Each fish has a health bar, which represents the time it takes you to catch it. Every ‘attack’ will reduce the health bar, and the fish will come closer to the surface, making it possible for you to catch it. Once its health reaches zero, you will successfully catch the fish.
This is where the RPG mechanics kick in. Both your character and fish have a level in the game. Being closer to the fish’s level will make it easier for you to catch a fish similar to any other RPG, where you can only defeat an enemy who is closer to your own level. Fish that are a level higher than you will deal more damage to you instead, and your attacks will not result in any significant damage, and thus you will be unable to catch them. For this reason, you must find and catch fish that are near your level. This is also related to the game’s progression system, as once you unlock the fish collection, the more unique types of fish you catch, the more upgrades you unlock for your character.
To help you in your fishing endeavors, there are multiple tricks up your sleeve. One of the most basic ones is the type of fishing rod that you are using. Each rod gives you different character stat buffs or debuffs, like power or a health boost. Similarly, you find different rings in treasure chests, and you can equip them for different bonuses as well. Next up, you have multiple spells that assist you in different tasks in combat scenarios, like healing yourself or damaging the fish. The fish do not damage you during the fighting scene, and they can only damage the rod, so if your health drops to zero, you just lose your bait and the fish. You do not die in the game. You can just cast your line again if you have more bait without any trouble.
To repel incoming fish attacks, you can block the attacks, but if you time them right, you can parry the attacks, which massively reduces the damage you take, even during the normal block. Sometimes this even drops to zero, so you take little to no damage, but you have to time it right. Every time you level up, your power and health are increased, which allows you to catch even better and powerful fish, and the waters of Azerim are filled with some of the rarest fish. While your magic spell attacks can make catching fish easier, you will need to watch out for mana. You have an inventory system as well, where you can purchase items from vendors like mana potions by spending gold. Your mana increases slowly, but a potion will refill your meter a lot faster. There are multiple vendors in the game that will sell you every type of item, like new fishing rods, mana potions, hats, and more, but you can also sell the fish you catch for gold.
There are some advanced mechanics that you unlock to help you in different tasks as well. Such as a magnet to fish out lost treasures in the ocean, or using the water currents to head over to caves that cannot be accessed with just a normal fishing rod. You also unlock a drill to head down even further into the abyss to catch fish found there and other useful tools to help you navigate the water bodies in the game. On the ground, you have basic movement options like jumping, moving, and sprinting, but in the water, you will need a good grip on different mechanics because most of the action happens in the water.
Nice Day For Fishing is not a very hard game, but we did need to grind a little bit during certain sections to level up a bit and or get some gold. There are multiple boss fights in different story points, but they are manageable, and if you keep a random mix thrown in the story, you will be near their level, and your gear will be decent enough to make the boss fights manageable. Typical for RPGs of this fashion, there is a lot of back and forth between areas, but the humor and the ingenuity of quests mostly keep you entertained enough to not make it feel like a chore. You will be re-visiting some areas again and again, but something is always new to play around with, so it keeps the spirit alive.
Obviously, you cannot expect a Witcher 3-level of complexity from quests, and in Nice Day For Fishing, they are pretty basic, like fetch quests, fishing quests, and similar ones, but they fit with the overall theme of the game perfectly. We did find some quests to be a little repetitive, and that is what is to be expected from a game of this nature. Sometimes a boss would pop out and change the repetition of the quests, and sometimes a tough fish will keep you on your toes as you do a little bit of grinding to level up and try again, so there is always something keeping you going in it, which is part of the game’s charm.
Nice Day For Fishing is certainly not a short game, but it does not matter because once you boot into it, you lose track of time anyway. As you move from quest to quest and fish to fish, you are always saying ‘one more quest before I quit’. The short and fun quests ensure that you are not stuck with the same mission for a long time, and you can move forward after experiencing that particular bit. The map is not particularly huge when compared with other RPGs, but it offers enough diversification that you do not feel bored. You will find yourself exploring coasts, deep oceans, forests, destroyed towns, and more.
The game is also free of any sort of bugs and technical issues. It ran flawlessly throughout for us during our review playthrough and beyond that. The delivery is crisp, the gameplay mechanics are solid, and the game runs like butter. True that it is not a particularly demanding game when it comes to hardware, but a poorly optimized title will not run smoothly even when its hardware requirements are not high. Throughout our gameplay, we did not encounter any sort of gameplay, visual, or sound hiccups that would ruin the gameplay in any way.
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Final Verdict:
Nice Day For Fishing is a highly addictive pixel-art RPG that will keep you busy for hours. With its charming cast of characters, beautiful world, and satisfying fishing mechanics, it does justice to the franchise that inspires it. Despite some backtracking and repetitive quests, the game does not feel like a tedious chore, thanks to its simplistic approach to humor and straightforward quests. It is rare for a video game to have a perfect balance of humor, solid gameplay, and great design in one package these days, but Nice Day For Fishing manages to do it flawlessly. If you love playing cozy RPGs with solid gameplay mechanics or if you are a fan of games that offer a little twist on known genres, Nice Day For Fishing will be a great title for you to try out. Highly recommended for RPG and fishing game fans.
Final Score: 9.5/10
