By Ned Jordan
I never played Fishing Joy, but after some time with Fishing Joy 2 I'm surprised that the game warranted a sequel. Fishing Joy 2 presents you with a coral reef teeming with life and all manner of tropical fish, turtles, and jelly fish, and the "joy" comes in shooting them with lasers. Hitting them isn't particularly difficult since you're essentially shooting fish in a barrel and there's nothing attacking you or presenting you with the least bit of danger. The game part of the exercise is tied to your ammunition. Each shot that you take costs you coins from your bank, and you can choose how much each shot will cost you. Spend one coin per shot and your shots are weak, spend more and your shots become more powerful but will drain your account faster. On the other side of the coin, so to speak, when you hit and blow-up a fish you're awarded with some more coins to use for your ammunition. The catch, though, is that hitting a fish doesn't guarantee that you'll blow it up and get some coins. There's a random factor involved so sometimes fish give you coins and sometimes nothing happens ' the problem is that most of the time nothing happens. While small fish are supposed to give you small payouts more frequently and large fish big payouts less often, the fact is simply that most of the time your shots have no effect. Your bank account is doomed to slowly (and often not so slowly) dwindle away to nothing.
Now here's where things go from pointless to infuriating. Once you're out of coins the game will not issue you a new batch of coins for two hours. That's right; the game becomes completely unplayable for two hours. You can play the game for five minutes or so and then it's a two hour wait until you can play it again for another five minutes. The idea is, of course, to make you pay for your impatience through in-app purchases. These in-app purchases start at $2 for 500 coins, which if you're lucky will give you about ten minutes of play or so. Let's say that you are lucky and get fifteen minutes out of it; that's a cost of $8 an hour to play this game. On a system in which there are plenty of games that are actually fun to play that are free or will cost you a one-time fee of ninety-nine cents, this game has the gall to force you to pay each time that you want to play. And if you do break down and buy more coins, what does that really buy you? More time poking at the screen in the hope that one of your laser beams will actually destroy a fish. No thank you. I can barely take wasting five minutes on this pointless game, let alone actually paying for the right to spend more time with it.
Final Rating: 20%
