Review: Plenty of Fishies (Wii U eShop) | 8 Bit Forward

[CosaNostra]

The Nintendo eShop can truly be a wonderful place, as it allows developers to release a myriad of creative games to millions of consumers with relatively low risk. Unfortunately, the eShop also allows quite the opposite to happen, with a increasing number of low quality games sneaking by quality control and vying for digital shelf space with truly amazing games. These titles are often unoriginal takes on top selling games and offer little to nothing new onto the original concept. Plenty of Fishies falls firmly into this unwanted category.

Plenty of Fishies offers up three different game modes to choose from, though none of the choices are particularly fun to play. The main Adventure mode pits you against an endless number of other fish, of varying sizes, and encourages you to eat other fish to grow into the largest fish in the sea. You control your Clown Fish with the left control stick and eat fish by running into them.

This is a gameplay idea that has been executed countless times before, and Plenty of Fishies does nothing to attempt to make it seem original or different, or even as good as the games that inspired it. You simply swim around, eating other fish, until you're the largest one and win the level. This single stage can take upwards of thirty minutes to beat, due to an odd moving pattern of your fish, who turns in very wide arcs and is significantly slower than most of the other fish. Why does your fish need to be so slow and difficult to control? We don't know. Once this stage is completed, if you ever get that far, there are even more levels to attempt to beat before you run out of lives, including one where you need to eat every fish in the sea. Yes, every single fish. In the whole sea. It takes longer than you think it would, and the scope of the level is far too large. And there are even more levels after this as well. The main problem is that you need to beat them all in a row, in on sitting. As such, most players will never even know there is a stage two, let alone reach the end.



If you ever finish with Adventure mode, or just (wisely) skip it, you'll run into another Flappy Bird clone. What is a Flappy Bird clone doing in Plenty of Fishies? We don't know, as it serves no real purpose to the game whatsoever. It is very difficult to get anywhere in due to awkward controls and moving enemies, and is just altogether bad. Controlling your fish here feels like trying to accurately guide an angry fish you're reeling in on a fishing pole, and works terribly.

The third mode is a survival game, in which you cart around a trail of fish eggs behind your clown fish, and attempt to keep them alive as long as possible. This usually takes about a dozen seconds. The other fish are faster than you, can turn more easily than you, and simply catch you and eat the eggs. There's not much you can do either. They always defeat you in the cheapest ways possible as well, making this game mode basically a waste of a minute or two. There's no real point in even trying to survive, as fish will randomly appear and eat some of your eggs as you awkwardly try to turn around in a ridiculously wide arc.

So what is there to enjoy about Plenty of Fishies? Well, the developers included a Multiplayer feature for each regular mode, so you can show off your poor swimming skills to your friends and family. Provided you can actually convince someone to play this shipwreck of a game with you, that is.


To top off this extraordinary experience, full of simplistic game modes, graphics and looping tracks, is an absolutely awful framerate. The fish move at about one mile per hour in the first place, but the framerate makes everything just look plain weird. Fish swim awkwardly, and it does nothing to help the already bizarre controls and turning. The bizarre thing is that the developers did this to save space in the memory of the game. Why they thought making a game unplayable for the sake of some memory is beyond us. But it makes for a bad time for the player for sure.

Somehow, even with this quite low frame rate, Plent of Fishies manages to squeeze one last surprise into the mix. No, not an additional game mode- we're talking about lag here. In a game this simple and small, and with frame rate issues, you'd think lag would be the last thing to be found in Plenty of Fishies. But it is here, and as bad as it has ever been.

On top of odd controls and annoyingly difficult game modes, your fish will lag as he swims around. The end result is the equivalent of listening to a terrible song on Youtube on a Dial Up connection- you see and hear random bits of blandness, and it moves terribly slowly. You'll likely attempt to wait it out, but it will never end, and you'll walk away unsatisfied and wishing you had all that lost time back.

Plenty of Fishies is simply one of the worst games available on the eShop right now. It certainty has it all, with lag, low frame rates, boring and copy cat game modes, pointless multiplayer, strange movement patterns that badly try to mimick real fish and slighlty simplistic graphics. There's isn't really any redeeming quality to this game other than the fact that a patch is promised for next year to remove the lag from the game. Despite intentions from Nitrolic Games, it will take a lot more to save this sinking ship of a game.
 

1.5 / 10