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The most realistic fish you're likely to find this side of the 3DS fish pond.
There's more drama and tension in a three second Animal Crossing fishing encounter than any ten minute mission here.
Much like its real-life equivalent, fishing games often require a bit of patience. You cast your lure, wiggle your line a bit, maybe reel it in a fraction, but ultimately it comes down to the simple act of waiting. Fortunately, Reel Fishing Paradise 3D never leaves you hanging too long with nothing to do, but even when a fish does take the bait, it’s rarely the most hair-raising of encounters.
Like many fishing games before it, keeping an eye on the tension bar is key to reeling in your catch. If it gets too high, your line is likely to snap and you’ll lose your fish. Keep it too loose and your fish will let go and swim away. You can always use the Circle Pad to raise the line’s tension by pressing it in the opposite direction to where the fish is swimming (or lower it by pressing it in the same direction it’s swimming), but this is rarely needed when reeling it in does this for you anyway.
This is where Reel Fishing Paradise 3D loses the plot, as this means fish can be caught simply by tapping A over and over again. This rids the game of all its potential drama, and worst of all, it gets very boring incredibly quickly.
This isn’t helped by the fact that there’s no visible way to tell how much reeling in you have left to do before you land your catch. There’s never an opportunity to see how close you are to you or your boat (assuming you even have a boat), and even when the camera is fully zoomed out, it’s always fixed tightly around your fish. This means all you can do is keep totting up the tension bar until the game decides you’ve done enough and pulls it out of the water for you, which robs players of any sense of achievement.
It’s not the most inspiring game to look at either. The reams of fish available to catch certainly look very realistic, but turning up the 3D slider makes them look incredibly flat and bland in their one-note environments. There’s very little to do outside of the game’s main missions as well. You can look at your fish in your own personal aquariums and add little trinkets to them that you’ll gradually unlock by completing more missions, but that’s about it.
At £3.59, Reel Fishing Paradise 3D isn’t the most extortionate of eShop games, but there’s very little here that hasn’t already been done a lot better elsewhere– and as side-note mini-games to boot. If you’re really desperate to get your waterproof waders out, go and find those new seasonal fish in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. You’ll have more fun there than you’ll ever do here.
Nintendojo was provided a copy of this game for review by a third party, though that does not affect our recommendation. For every review, Nintendojo uses a standard criteria.
