The Fish Wrangler Review

For the past few months, I have been playing a game on Facebook called Fish Wrangler. What is most interesting about the my fascination with the game right from the opening is that it is about fishing — something that, in real life, does not interest me at all.

Yet day after day I log into the game and play it. What is the appeal
of a game in which you are fishing? I would like to say that the game
is more similar to a traditional role playing game such as Dungeons and
Dragons or one of its many offshoots than you would be led to believe
with a name such as “Fish Wrangler.”

I am using – a Steam Powered Hydro-Pole – as well as the kind of “chum” that I use to attract fish. Since I enjoyed playing the game so much I donated money to the creators of the game and was rewarded with a special fish attractant that makes playing the game just a little bit easier.

When you start playing the game, you are equipped with what amounts to a feeble stick with a string attached to it. Throughout the game you are able to purchase fishing rods with increasingly greater power and eventually you can modify the fishing rods to make them even more powerful. You are taught how to play the game with a single button that says “Fish Now!” Through this command, what could have been a trickier game is made all the simpler.

This simplicity is one of the appealing factors of the game. You are allowed to fish only once every fifteen minutes which means that you cannot just stare at the game for hours on end and actively play.

The second image shows you two different additional sorts of fun you can find within the game: Tournaments and Quests. Every day, depending on your ‘rank’ as a fisher (catching fish pushes you towards higher ranks), you are advised of the location and fishing rod requirement of the Tournament. Unlike normal fishing, you can Tournament fish every twenty seconds. You get Tournament points for this and increase the strength of your rod but the fish you catch here, for example, do not count towards Quests.

The Quest concept was introduced recently and has changed the game in a lot of ways for the better. Instead of just encouraging you to push the button every fifteen minutes to arbitrarily catch random fish, you are enticed to catch a certain set of fish with the purpose of supplying them to a restaurant. When you catch a fish that counts towards your Quest, you see a message such as the one below.

As well as having caught a fish for the Quest, I happened to have also found 3 “Miny Repellents” — Miny being a sort of fish in the game, and repellent being just the sort of thing you would want to use when you aren’t keen on catching that sort of fish. There are numerous resources that can be found and eventually bought in the game, which makes for a more varied and nuanced game.

If you have a Facebook account I would suggest you try the game out — it’s an entirely different sort of fun from Pet Society but it’s quite fun nevertheless.