Which brings us to the last, possibly most interesting aspect of Ridiculous Fishing—the in-game store. Here, you can go to buy upgrades for your fishing-line, lure, and gun. It's precisely the sort of place where, in almost any other iOS game, you'd expect to be shaken down for a few micro-transactions, but Ridiculous Fishing refuses to do so. It's odd to see this game and the similar Little Inferno as exceptions the microtransaction rule. It's enough to make me feel like an old codger, telling kids about how in my day, all games were like this.

Advertisement

The change here is a welcome one: To buy things in the store, you have only to play the game. (What a concept!) Every time you cast your line, even if you screw up and only snag a few fish, you'll make some money, and be that much closer to buying that lure-chainsaw or shotgun you had your eye on. But when it comes down to it, the rewards and prizes serve mainly to shake things up as you progress. The game itself is a pleasure to play from the outset.

The spectre of another game looms over the launch of Ridiculous Fishing: Gamenauts' Ninja Fishing, which flagrantly cloned Radical Fishing and beat Vlambeer to iOS, where it found success. It would be easy to mistakenly think that Ninja Fishing came first—see one of the game's developers correcting one of our commenters, who mentioned the similarity but got it backwards. There's a fair amount of satisfaction in Ridiculous Fishing's obvious superiority, and it's hard not to root for the game to bury its imitator and in so doing demonstrate that this time, craft and care won out over crass cloning.

Advertisement

At any rate: Ridiculous Fishing lives up to its name and then some. Come for the fishing, stay for the uzis.

Advertisement

Ridiculous Fishing

Advertisement

Get Ridiculous Fishing on the App Store