At the end of the day, every game on the market is essentially a sim – GTA is a gang-banging sim, Call of Duty is a military simulation, and Super Mario Bros. is a mushroom trip simulator. Video games let you do things you wouldn’t get to do in your normal life, with the exception of those that give you a glimpse into the world of some niche professions. I have yet to play one that took me anywhere I remotely wanted to be, including the recent Deadliest Catch: The Game.

The title focuses on the long-running reality show of the same name, where you are the lone owner-operator of a fishing boat tasked with running every facet of the business, from selling the catch and managing your budget, to actually going out into the ocean and covering the manual labor portion of the operation. The end result is a game that splits its time between navigating menus and completing menial tasks in the first-person viewpoint. There is no story or campaign to be found, it’s simply going through the motions in an effort to gain money to funnel back into hiring staff or improving your vessel. Kind of like work. Extremely grindy work. Like worse than early Destiny grinding work. As someone who dreams of hitting the lottery and putting working days behind them, this wasn’t something that really spoke to me on any level.

From a presentation perspective, this game is a complete mess from start to finish. Everything looks like it was ripped from a late ’90s PC game, which it kind of was since this is a console port of a 13-year-old PC game. Even if we were to forgive this, the game studders and struggles to run properly even when dealing with the menus outside of the first-person view, resulting in this easily being the worst release of 2023 thus far. Everything looks blocky and just downright ugly; the water looks like it’s a pool of Jell-O, and the menus (I know this is a petty complaint, but since you spend so much time in there I think it needs to be said) are generic looking and littered with typos in addition to being presented in the most basic of fonts. I’ve seen better layouts in memes made with Microsoft Paint.

I’ve had frequent soft locks and hard crashes when I wasn’t even doing anything visually taxing, one of which was when I was just trying to name my boat (The Oceangate #2 if you were wondering). The first-person mode fares no better, as it runs at about 7 frames per second at best, and has the weirdest perspective I have ever seen where either all of the doors are meant for those vertically challenged or my avatar was Shaquille O’Neal. I personally leaned on the former. I was hoping that there would at least be some fun music, some jaunty pirate tunes, or maybe some licensed music from Alestorm, but it’s just there until it’s not, which happens regularly as it just drops in and out at regular intervals. This doesn’t necessarily ruin the experience for me, but I just felt the need to call it out to add to the long list of issues with this release.

The game’s biggest issue is the controls, as they fail to function even in the most basic of actions. I don’t remember ever stopping to get drunk (within the game that is, outside of it I was downing rum like it was water just to get into character), but I regularly lost control of my avatar in a way where he’d just continue walking into a wall, veering off to the side, ignoring my commands to walk or look straight. Even within the menus that I spent roughly half of my time navigating suffered from unresponsive prompts and lagging responses.

This is a title that even if it did work as expected, I would have struggled to find some crumb of joy or entertainment from. After three fruitless voyages that left me heading back to land nearly empty-handed, reminiscent of the early days of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, I went as far as trying to break the game and sink my ship. Sadly, this was also a failure, as I was fully expecting my Oceangate #2 to reach the depths of the ocean either indirectly or directly from my actions.

Deadliest Catch: The Game is easily one of the worst games I have played this year, or any year for that matter. There is literally no redeeming feature here – fans of the show will likely be outraged at how badly the license has been handled, and simulation fans will be let down by the downright broken state this game was released in.

1 out of 10

Pros

• You Can Name Your Ship After Oceangate

Cons

• Dated Presentation
• Audio Bugs
• Unresponsive Controls
• Overly Grindy

Deadliest Catch: The Game was developed by 4Fishing and was published by Ultimate Games S.A.. It is available on PC, NS and X1. The game was provided to us for review and played on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Deadliest Catch: The Game, check out the official site.

 

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