I think its important to keep the Price and Dev scale in mind of this game.
I feel this game is fine for it's price point, and I'm not looking to be overly critical, but as a point of feedback for the dev's future games, and for people interested in trying it, I just wanted to give my experience and perspective of some issues I had with the game. :)
Ultimately, if you're buying this game because you enjoy fishing I feel it's a bit shallow?
There's a handful of Mini games, it feels as if the mini game is selected at random when you catch a fish. They don't scale in difficulty over the course of the game. The Minigame you play in the first 5 minutes of the game are the same you play at the end of the game.
On top of this, if you enjoy fishing from the perspective of Completing a Catalogue, this game has that... but I think again, it just is kind of lacking. I personally really enjoy Conditional Fishing. Catch something at night, under X weather effect, when Y event happens, etc. I think it just gives more agency in terms of chasing a goal. This game has none of that. Each Region has 8-10 Fish to catch with a flat % Catch rate, and you either catch it with your rod or with a timed trap. The problem here I feel is the trap catches fish in bulk, so you really don't even notice when you catch something new since its stacked on top of 10 other fish.
Overall I just found the catalogue not really that interesting or satisfying to complete, it was just something I did in a few hours and only target farmed like 3 fish to finish as everything else was just collected pretty passively.
I feel adding Shiny, event fish, conditional fish, specific bait types to catch different fish, Just something where you feel you're taking more of an active role in collecting a catalogue would make it feel way better. I like the idea of different mini games, but I wonder if having them unique to each zone would be better, or just having Legendary fish use a unique Minigame so you notice when you're fighting a rare catch.
However, past the fishing, the much larger part of this game in my opinion is the Idle/Incremental side of the game. I feel after a few hours, Fishing starts to not really feel worth your time, which is kind of silly in a game about fishing? This game ultimately is all about making Money to progress upgrades, increase your Research rate and unlock new things. But actually Fishing really just isn't that profitable.
The point of the Fish is to fill the Fish tanks which gives you a passive income for each customer in your store. This quickly becomes the Majority of the money you're making and managing the shop overshadows the actual Fishing side of the game.
The game also uses an Ascension system to reset progress and leverage Meta Progression. However, I think this is kind of where I feel the game starts to fall apart. The game in the later stages are really poorly balanced and planned out. You can easily unlock everything without ever Ascending, and if you play for a few hours on your first Ascension you can unlock everything besides Offline passives instantly, making the point of ascending again feel kind of pointless?
On top of this, once you reach the end of the game and you're just chasing the last few achievements, your income quickly plateaus where doing anything active in the game feels completely pointless. The last Achievement I have is to earn 1 trillion dollars. Right now, I have a passive income of 42 Million per Minute, If I were to go and catch a fish, the best selling ones go for around 21 Million. So I might be able to double my income, but when we stop to look at how the numbers work... At my current rate of income, it would take about 400 hours to reach 1 trillion. So that's 200 hours of grinding actively to hit the end.
All upgrades currently run me over 1 billion, and when you do the math it would take over 10 hours for the upgrade to become profitable.
Ascending does give you a multiplier, but it really feels pretty small all things considered and completely resetting progress feels questionable if it would be worth it.
Just as an example, it cost me 207million to upgrade my tank capacity by 1, doing so, putting the most valuable 1 weight fish into the tank, increases my profit by 0.39 Million per minute. So in 530 minutes, it would become profitable to have made that choice.
Ultimately what I'm really saying is just that I think this game just scales really poorly. You can rush through and unlock everything in 4-6 hours, and then to actually 100% the game, the last achievement suddenly asks you to invest 200-400 more hours in.
Even if I'm missing something here, I think the real point is that its just not a really interesting system to half afk, cleaning tanks every 20 minutes for the next 2 weeks to earn an achievement. The game has the idea of Synergies within a tank with provide a multiplier, but the value only applies to the fish within the synergy, and is out preformed by just spamming 1 higher value fish. I think this bonus should apply to the whole tank, or even go further and say the whole room. If you have a room dedicated to all ocean fish, that should be a bonus. If you have Ocean synergies within each tank that should be a stacking bonus. Giving more things to tinker with and work towards would be a nice way to help scale.
And on top of that, Research quickly becomes pointless. Either having it convert into money, or instead allowing you in the end game to upgrade zones themselves so that every area you visit could reach the same level of value, allowing you to use all the different synergies and find set ups that could be worth more would be more interesting then just spamming the same thing in every tank.
Just in closing, again I do think for its price, this game is 100% fine, and I hope this didn't come off as too mean or critical. I wanted this to be more constructive on how they could improve the game, or ways to make the next game better. I think it was fun for a few hours, but I think there's just a lot of room to tighten up and fix the experience to make it generally better then what it currently is. <3
