Cocoto Fishing Master - WiiWare review

In ye olde Wii launch days, one of the few things that really showed off how well the remote and Nunchuk could work together was Twilight Princess’ fishing minigame. It was awesome – a great display of control finesse. Cocoto Fishing Master, a port of an old PS2 title, takes similar-ish controls and aims to strap them on to a more fully featured game. That should be a recipe for success, right? Unfortunately not. Cocoto Fishing Master’s got some nice touches, but the most fundamental thing about the game is wrong – those controls just don’t feel right.

There are various problems: holding and releasing the A button while making the casting motion is bearable if annoying, but that’s nothing next to the delicate upward motion required to actually ‘hook’ a fish. Given that the game explicitly tells you to ‘strike’ while showing a remote with an arrow pointing upwards, you’ll spend the first hour or so in sore-armed frustration, failing to catch anything because the game doesn’t come with even a basic tutorial.

When you do figure it out, the first few levels of fishing become pleasant enough, if undemanding. Later stages require some ridiculously sensitive hooking, however, and the ponderous movement of your boat over the water is teeth-gritting. Cocoto’s a nicely designed game visually, at least, and the characters have a little bit of charm to them, but it doesn’t play as well as a minigame that launched with the Wii well over a year ago. It’s best thrown back in the water. Cocoto can bore you into thinking you’re having a good time, but it’s a poorly executed game that’s been done much better before elsewhere.

Jul 21, 2008