VR Experiences: Bait! Review
A Free Fishing Game for Oculus
Bait! is a relaxing fishing game in VR made by Resolution Games. Plus it’s free, which is a pretty good deal. The core gameplay is casting your rod out into the lake, waiting for a fish to bite, and then reeling it in slowly. You have to time it right, only reeling when the fish isn’t trying to swim away or else the line will break. Once you catch a fish, you attempt to grab it while it flops around with janky physics, and then you start over again.
Gameplay: Simple & Samey
There aren’t any real stakes in Bait!, mainly just catching specific fish that the NPCs ask you to catch. There is an overarching story of sorts, but it isn’t very important compared to catching the fish. There also isn’t any real strategy (as far as I’m aware) to catch specific fish. It’s mainly up to luck what size and kind you catch. Gameplay does get repetitive to me, as the reeling motion is always the same. The amount of times each fish attempts to swim away is also the same each time, depending on the type of fish. Maybe I’m not cut out for the fishing lifestyle, but I feel as though there should be some way to spice up the gameplay a little. Another thing I did not like was having to hold the fishing reel with the grip button, and then using the trigger on the other controller to reel. That always confused me, and I ended up just holding down all the buttons or else I switched the reel to my other hand and messed up reeling in the fish.
Graphics: Nice Designs With Visual Quirks
The environment was low-poly and featured some interesting tricks to achieve various post-processing effects. One was the use of a plane that billboards to the user and has a fog texture. However, as seen in the screenshot attached, the fog clips through various objects. The sense of scale was also somewhat off on some of the shops, as the humans felt small compared to me. This might have also been because I was seated.
One thing I really enjoyed were the creatively designed fish. One I remember was a punk fish, and there was also a literal diamondback ray, where the ray was encrusted in diamonds.
Final Thoughts
Overall I enjoyed Bait!, and for a free app, it offers quite a bit of content and interesting visual environments to fish in. You can tell a lot of thought and care went into the environment itself, and the gameplay works well enough. If you want an app that doesn’t require as much movement or you just want to fish for a while, I recommend checking out this game.
— Brendan Hutchins, Developer