Too eager to please and blighted by buggy reflections, so-so scenery, and flawed cameras, Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2’s stay on the THC toe-warmer was mayfly brief. Within ninety minutes of making my first cast, I’d had enough and was reinstalling its superior predecessor.
UFS2 got the heave-ho mainly because it was foolish to enough let me earn a ‘Catch 20 fish’ Steam achievement inside thirty minutes. At ‘realistic’ difficulty, using the default tackle at the only venue unlocked at the start (Jackson National Park) my annoyingly-hard-to-discern-with-the-naked-eye float was usually jiggling less than thirty seconds after it hit the water.
Whether it was a hungry bass, trout, perch, pickerel, pumpkinseed, or bluegill that caused the agitation, didn’t seem to matter much. None of the hooked fish put up much of a fight.
If Silent Bear’s offering had evoked lakeside and riverbank exceptionally well, maybe I wouldn’t have been in quite such a hurry to replace it. Unfortunately, neither of the two venues I visited during my short playtest felt like real places. Bizarre/broken rod reflections (see above) didn’t help.
This, for example, is UFS2’s approximation of a Polish carp lake…
And this, for comparison, is UFS1’s….
I know which one I’d rather sit beside.
My stress relieving fishing game of the moment is Fisher Online. Very slow progress (190 hours in I’ve only unlocked half the locations!) but great variety of fish and even before leaving the beginner pond hook size, bait and time of day all appropriately come into play.