Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep (N-Gage) Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

Hooked on? More like permanently addicted

Here's our first review of the new NGage platform and one of it's leading titles Hooked On: Creatures of The Deep.

It's still early days in the NGage's new life and we don't really know what the games of the future will hold at least in terms of size. But this game, which would have been in close development between Infinite Dreams and Nokia is a whopping 20+ Mb. Thankfully you can download this through your PC connection and then transfer across used PC suite.

What does 20 odd Mb buy you these days? A graphically good game but more importantly a game of huge length and depth. As most of you are hopefully aware by now, we at MobileGameFaqs like to complete a game before writing the review. I'm sorry to say that unless I hard wire my Nokia into a PS3 and let that play for me, I don't think we could be ready for a review by the time the sequel came out.

Hooked On is a fishing sim and the pre-release screenshots looked totally idyllic and it was assumed that this would be the NGage' graphical masterpiece. After getting our hands on the game, the true quality of the game is in its depth and its sheer size. There are four fishing venues to play starting with Costa Rica. Your progress is measured in XP and associated levels of experience. The other venues are unlocked if you have enough XP. The harder to catch fish give higher XP and points are also up for grabs by completing quests. The only snag is that when you travel to a new venue you leave your XP and upgraded equipment behind (presumably along with your troubles). The different resorts are wonderfully created and Scotland is as bleak and dreary as any non-Scotsman would imagine.

Fishing sims need not be boring, especially this one. There is a good balance between quests, tournaments, upgrades and XP to always give you a reason to cast your line just one more time. To be honest, I wasn't overly blown away by the graphics during the fishing. After a while of playing you might start to notice some smearing of the rod against the sea but it's not too intrusive.

Fishing itself involves steering your boat from the overhead map to a suitable place to fish. After you have pressed 5 and a short loading time you are presented with a first person view of the water and your big rod. Casting is similar to the old golf swing games. Press 5 to start your power bar and then press it again to stop the bar as close to the top as possible. Then it's a case of either waiting for a bite or trying to tease a fish by gently tugging on your line. When the flashing blue button appears, press 5 to start reeling the line and hopefully a fish will be hooked. That's the easy bit, the battle of reeling the fish in can be tricky. A bar shows the tension on the line, too far left and the line will break, too far right and the fish will unhook itself and swim off. Another bar shows how much line you have left to reel. It just needs some careful reeling and balance to bring the fish in. You then have a choice whether you want to keep or release the fish.

Anyway, that's the basics. The more you play and complete quests, the more secrets and tactics you discover. Certain fish only swim at a certain depth so you need to adjust your lures accordingly. Also take note that you're not going to find a shark in shallow water. It's mostly common sense but to help you guys out we will be continually adding to the hints and comments section.

The online section is pretty big too (and data intensive). High scores are there for every kind of fish caught to the total number of kilos collected. After about 10 hours gameplay we had only scratched the surface of this truly remarkable game. Winner of our top award without a shadow of a doubt.