iLook at Injustice: Gods Among Us

I don't mind fighting games on the iPad, Infinity Blade proved to me that it's doable and you can have complex, fun fighting systems even with the limited control options. I wondered what kind of game Injustice would be on the iPad, being sure that it couldn't be a port of the hit console mortal kombat-like fighter. I was mostly right, it's not.

The fighting system is shallow and gets repetitive after the first fight. You basically have four moves and they always play out the same way. You can either tap the screen to do basic attacks, swipe left/right to do heavy attacks, hold two fingers to block or activate your super move when a meter is full. There is no strategy involved, you tap and swipe and use your special moves when you can and the enemy switches out to another fighter when they're close to dying and usually they unleash a special move right then, blocking should be more effective, you can't block while you're being attacked and all attacks are combo strings, so either you block while nothing is happening, or you can't block at all.

Swiping up and down should be used for something, you can add a few more moves that way, I'm sure these characters had plenty of moves in the console fighting game, more variety would've been welcomed.

"I am going to claw you" versus "I am going to sword you"

Some characters have special abilities but they don't matter much in the long run. Catwoman deals extra damage to enemies suffering from bleed effects (she should've been able to make enemies bleed with her normal attacks or something) and Solomon Grundy can revive when he's down (with low health, low enough to be knocked out by a combo), most of the character's special abilities feel like they don't exist at all and besides basic statistical differences, they're mostly the same. You can equip various items to your characters to make them better in some ways, but these items cost power credits and you only gain a few per battle.

That damage over time special would've been better if enemies didn't tag out immediately.

Speaking of power credits, I know it's something weird to argue about, but why not add a credit doubler or something similar? I'm never going to buy 100$ worth of credits (and that's not even saying it's enough to unlock everything in the game) but 1.99$ or something to get double credits after each fight would be very tempting because you gather them quite slowly and the things you can buy cost up to 100 000 credits. And then you have to buy support cards and upgrade your powers and all that stuff I won't bother with because I can still win fights.

900 000 free power credits, maybe, but that's still not enough to get everything, so why bother?

Otherwise this is a fun little game for a while, even if the energy system makes you hit a wall after you go up a few ranks. Each fight takes energy out of your characters and you need to wait/pay to make the energy come back, the more you go, the more energy you need to spend to fight, so after a while you'll NEED to wait/pay, and that's not very fun, waiting while doing nothing isn't great gameplay.

How many of these in a row can I fight until I run out of energy?

iLook at Star Command

I didn't back Star Command when it was on Kickstarter because I rarely back kickstarters, but I decided to give it a shot when it launched on the iPad a few weeks ago and see what kind of space game it was. This game has charm but a few issues that could easily be fixed. Okay, some issues are tougher to crack, especially the crew control, but I'll try to offer some insight on what is wrong with Star Command and what I would do with it.

Space is full of predetermined battles. Every time you go somewhere, it's the same fight.

The token system is fine for upgrades/recruiting, dumb for room abilities
For winning fights and completing missions, you get tokens. Red, blue and yellow tokens. You can use them to recruit people and to upgrade/build new rooms for your ship. This is pretty well explained and the upgrades are pretty straightforward. You also have rooms that need 'ammo' tokens to be used. Such as recharging your shields, firing big missiles and dodging incoming fire.

The flavor text is okay.

The problem is that these rooms wont produce ammo automatically (you need to manually start the process), wont collect ammo they made (you need to select the ammo) and will not tell you how much ammo you've got (you'll click the button and it will say 'YOU ARE AT MAX AMMO'). Why not have the ammo replenish automatically, be collected automatically and stop being made when you're at max capacity? Micro-managing is painful in Star Command and reducing it to the maximum would make a better experience.

The use of tokens instead of complex resources streamlines the game a bit.

This game lacks descriptions and help
There is a fair amount of flavor text in this game, but not much on the descriptive side. Rooms have no explanations at all, leaving you to wonder what their point is. You don't know what you get from staffing a room, more so with multiple people (which would be easy to fix by adding a description of what the room does, what it does if staffed and the effect of additional staff.) and even tho I've staffed all of my rooms, I don't know really why or what would happen if I hadn't.

So, what is the engine for? I can delete it, so it mustn't be very important?

It's the same thing for weapons, you get a minigame without any explanations, even the first time, and I'm still unsure of the timing of some of them. I really like the concept of minigames to fire at the enemy ship as it removes the need for randomness and allows it to be a little bit more skill based but sometimes I'm unsure of when I need to tap the screen and I can fail or win with a seemingly random chance.

You need to tap the big yellow circles when the small dot is in the red circle, I think

Otherwise the game lacks automation
I think that more things should be automatic in Star Command, because the game is hard to control with all these tiny character sprites that you can miss easily and tap on the room and vice-versa. I would add a list of all your crew somewhere on screen, with their current station and a little number of options (such as their behavior if something breaks/aliens board your ship/someone is injured, depending of their shirt color) so they would staff their stations and then move automatically to fix/kill/heal when needed. It wouldn't take much space, enough for an icon representing the crew member and then a button to change the station they're staffing and another toggle to set if you want them to stay at their station or leave to do stuff in the ship.

Because right now it's a bit weird to try and have your characters move in range of the enemies, move your engineers to fires in the ship and move your medics if someone get hurt. If the controls were more precise, maybe that would be fine, but with how small everything is, I don't enjoy it one bit. Also, why can you wait for weapons to shoot when they're ready? Just pop the minigame when a gun can fire, it pauses the game already so there's no worry you're going to die while you're shooting and waiting to fire when a gun is ready has no use.

These characters are so tiny, I can barely move them.

iLook at Random Heroes 2

This game does on-screen virtual buttons in a satisfactory manner, I haven't played many games like that but I found the controls good for an iPad platformer game. You jump with the B button and fire with the A button (and you can drag the A button up to fire upwards) while moving around to dodge enemies and projectiles, jump over pits and collect stars and skulls. There are tons of levels and tons of things to unlock.

Not a fan of on-screen controls, but they work

The collectibles could been more integrated to the game
There is no point really to get the three stats each level (well, after two worlds I still don't know what it does) and the skulls are used for upgrades or for reviving you when you die (which is weird, because I wasn't able to access any kind of real money store, so you just run out of skulls after a while?) so they aren't much more then challenges to find everything. That being said, there is no quick way to restart levels, so if you fail to pick things up (by missing a jump so you can't go back up to pick a star or skull) you need to finish the level and then move to the next one and then go back to the main menu. A restart option somewhere would've been useful. No need for it to be on screen at all times, just letting you restart a level you just beat would've went a long way.

Here's Merio and Princess Peich

Neat characters
You start with a plain guy without any abilities but you can buy upgraded characters from a bandit that gets extra money when you kill enemies (but loses everything if you die) to a character with double jump, to character with other abilities (that you can activate with another button) such as hitting enemies with melee weapons and the like. The best characters attract coins and turn everything into gold. Most of them have nice  effects but some are useless and they cost a lot. Money is a bit hard to get by in the game, later enemies drop the same amount of coins as the easier ones (and that's with the bandit character) and you can upgrade your life, movement speed and jump height two or three times with each characters.

These three guns are a good example 

The guns have a few issues but they're fun too!
Buying new guns instead of upgrading old ones can be a more costly and less effective way to spend your money in Random Heroes 2. Buying a machine gun and upgrading its stat to make it as good as another machinegun really makes the purchase of the second one useless. The upgrade system should've focused on unique ways the gun work to add them better abilities and not just increase their stats. If some gun as 1/3/1 (that's for damage, rate of fire and stability) and another one has 3/1/3, you can get one to 3/5/3 or 5/3/5 without having to buy the other one. Some of them have special effects such as damage-over-time flames or explosions, but most of them shoot bullets

Also, I really wished you could aim downwards in the addition of upwards because most enemies are just a level below you and you can't shoot them, I actually preferred weapons with low stability so I could hit enemies without being in the line of fire.

iLook at Epoch

Epoch is quite like Infinity Blade. It plays similarly (With simple swipes and touches), has similar mechanics (you level up and buy things to get better) and kinda also looks like it (interface-wise), but I like it all the same! It has some issues that I'm going to get into later on, but is a neat way to spend a few hours getting good stuff and reading about the story.

You unlock fragments of texts after completing levels, I think they make a good story.

The core gameplay is simple and easy to pick up
You get into a level and there are enemies on the other side of the screen. You have a few options, move left, right, get into cover, shoot enemies (by taping on them) and using special powers (missiles that hit everything on-screen, some boost that you can equip such as regeneration, slowing down time, shooting faster, and grenades with various effects such as stuns and slowing enemies). You usually have three places to stand on and moving from either side can be done by jumping when you're on the far left or the far right. That's pretty much it, if you get it, you take damage and enemies are all the same. There is no hitscan so sometimes you might be frustrated because you miss a shot (the enemy dodges the actual bullet)

Swipe left and right to move, tap enemies to autoshoot them until they die

You then get loot, story bits, experience and credits, get you spend some to buy better things and onward to the next level! There's also an arena if you want to complete little missions to burn some time. Problem is, the game is a bit shallow. There are only four enemy types (one that shoots at you, one that lobs time-delayed grenades, one with a sweeping laser and one with charged shots), one boss (a robot that alternates between sweeping lasers, grenades, charged shots, etc.) and a few weapon types (rapid fire, chain lighting, damage over time, area of effect, slow but powerful) so after a while, you've seen and did everything. The difficulty ramps up (enemies fire more often basically and you take more damage)

On the hardest difficulties there are MORE lasers

It's a really neat game for a few hours but otherwise I got a bit frustrated on the higher difficulties because there's no invincibility period when you take damage (worse, some enemies inflict damage over time to you) so you can just get wrecked if you don't pay attention to what's on the screen. Enemies have various patterns, the basic shooty enemies will loosely lock on your location and shoot there, the grenade throwing enemies always aim for your location but you can move away, it's easy to jump over lasers, but when all of these things are happening at the same time, things get hectic and using grenades/missiles/buffs all while dodging and shooting gets kinda crazy. The sad part is how levels are built in two-three stages and if you die on stage two or three, you need to replay the level.

The way attack and defense is presented (12+27, 120+270) reminds me of Infinity Blade

Even with solid gameplay and neat systems surrounding it, it's hard for me to keep playing Epoch because it just gets crazy and even tho I want to see the rest of the story, I'm not ready to replay these levels until I get them right. Giving the player some amount of money and experience even when you lose would've helped a long way because then you didn't do that level for nothing. Having more than a few weapon/boost types would've been nice and the missiles are kinda pointless because they just increase in strength. Maybe weaker missiles that automatically launch? Stronger missiles that have a delayed effect?

I did buy the credit doubler, I don't regret it, things climb in price really quickly between difficulties.

iLook at Nameless: The Hackers RPG

I feel like there's a trend with iOS games that I'm unsure about. The trend of having subpar core mechanics but really great fluff, random loot, leveling systems, skill trees and collectibles are added to games with weak gameplay loops. Nameless: The Hackers RPG is one of these games, I love everything around it but the main thing you do in it - fighting in turn-based battles - is poor. Also the anime style is not what I'd like in that kind of game but that's not relevant, design-wise.

Stealing energy is vital if you want to use your abilities

Let's jump right into it, the battle system is confusing
You control up to four characters and they can have up to six skills each, some with clear uses (stealing energy, healing, stunning enemies) some with overlap (basic attack skills with comparable costs and no different effects) and some are just plain obviously better (big damage attacks), it's not clear whether the game wants you to fight different enemy types in a different way but basically you can win most fight by stealing energy and using the strongest attacks you have.

Tons of numbers pop out and you're not sure if you're doing the right thing, but most battles can be won by stockpiling healing items and going all-out. You have some stats but they barely matter when some moves are plainly better at dealing damage than other, making them de-facto choices.

I would fix this by either adding cooldowns to the strongest moves and removing the concept of energy, or implementing some kind of rock-paper-scissor system where some types of moves are stronger against certain defenses and weaker against others and vice-versa, that would give you reasons to use different attacks instead of spamming that one with the huge numbers.

I leveled everything, just because

Leveling all of these skills is a bit underwhelming too
You start with some skills and can unlock more in the store, then you need to pay ByteCoins and research points to level them up, they get stronger, have more chances to work and sometimes cost more energy, like I said about the combat system, it feels a little weird to level them all, even tho that's the thing you probably should do. Leveling one attack skill over another is a trivial choice - both of them are going to be equally useful.

Besides skills, you can buy healing items that will help you win most fights and bonuses that last a few real-life minutes, they're useful, but not essential.

Cities will give you item, quests and flavor text

Moving around is boring
The way the world map is set up isn't the best, moving around to pick random fights and buy items would've been done from a menu. A list of fights and cities, with a big button for the shop would've worked perfectly. Instead what you have is a map where you can scroll around and zoom in/out for some reason (why zoom in? There are no details anywhere).

A list would make much more sense, have one button be the next story mission, another button be random fights, another button for the shop and another one to visit cities, no need to move around a world map for the little flavor it adds to the game.

One luck, that's right.

I really love the card system
For winning fights, completing quests and story missions and plainly available in the store, you get cards that increase some of your stats. Each card has some flavor text on it and you can get 4 rarities of cards, the rarer the card, the more stats on it. You can reroll the stats on these cards by spending BC or RP, and have a chance to get a better version of that card, you can also upgrade them after fights, and these cards are the better way this game offers to make your characters stronger.

All and all, N:THRPG is a neat little game with a few good ideas and some so-so execution. It also goes pretty quickly, so if you're a fan of turn-based RPGs, you might wanna check it out.

Pick a card, any card.

iLook at Super Stickman Golf 2

I don't have much of an opinion on golf games in general but I've heard good things about Super Stickman Golf 2, so I gave it a shot. It's a very quirky golf game where the stages are setup to make you use your powerups carefully to get good scores. The stuff around the core game - level up system, equipment, challenges - is also pretty neat and difficult and getting everything is taking quite some time.

Welcome to the world of Stickman Golf 2

Okay, the level up system and hats are mostly irrelevant
You get different golfers and they don't do anything besides cosmetic changes, you also get access to new courses, but that could be unlocked after you beat the previous ones. Why is there an exp system? You get experience when you beat levels, with bonuses baked in for getting gold stars and not using powerups and things like that, but all and all, it's pretty much useless.

Even the hats, most of them don't do anything useful, having blood water won't help anything and slower moving power meter will not matter much, at worst it'll be a nuisance.

I'm level 7! Okay? Also I have some hats.

How I would fix this?
Why not give meaning to the levels? You could have variable power levels depending of your level (starting with weak shots then being able to do stronger ones) also accuracy, number of power-up uses, strength of some power-ups, who knows! The list of potential stats that could get better are limitless.

Nothing pro with that.

Not sure why I would buy that
You can also buy a few things with real money, such as an experience doubler, but as you might know already, I fail to see why you would buy it for the low value of actual experience in the game. The other things are multiplayer matches and a little meter to show you how strong you hit the previous shot. Weird, that could've been part of the main package...

Why is there money in that machine?

Also, hats, you unlock them with a lottery system much like Super Smash Brother Brawl and the trophies, the more money you wager, the more chance you have to get a new hat. It's a neat carrot because the hats have at least, SOME uses.

You might have to do some tricky shots and lose a few strikes to get these dollars!

You get money for tons of things, achievements give you money, you can find money in the courses - and getting them all will give you a bonus - and some random challenges also appear to give you a few buxs. I usually try to do them because they are basically related to the number of shots you need to do to win the level.

This goal had me hit a birdie.

Otherwise, the game itself is pretty good
You move a line with virtual arrows then a power meter fills and drains until you hit the shot, then the ball flies around, hitting hazards, water, pits, sand and much more. You do that until you get to the green, then your only choice is to putt the ball very gently. Which means that if you wanted to do some tricky shot to get somewhere and fell on the green, too bad, you rarely can get out of it.

No way to get that dollar now. I'm stuck on the green.

Most levels have a recognizable design; there are a few ways to get to the hole, one of them will take few shots but is trickier to manage, the other is more easy but will take more hits. Sometimes you'll need special abilities (such as sticking to walls, freezing water) to navigate the shorter routes and sometimes you'll just need to aim good. And it's hard to know where and how far your shot will go, maybe some kind of pointer would've been nice?

The multiple routes way is very obvious here.

iLook at Slayin

iOS games are very interesting because they can do microtransactions and try all kinds of business models to get things to the player and get money in return. Slayin is kind of squandering that opportunity even tho it would be very easy to implement hooks here and there so the player has the incentive to spend some money to get things in return. That being said, the gameplay loop is too simple and short as of right now for me.

Pretty simple game and kinda addictive too, if it wasn't that tough...

Everyday I'm slayin'
You have a huge virtual controller (I like it) and you move left and right, using the button to jump (if you're the knight or the knave) or turn into a tornado (if you're the mage). Basically, if enemies hit your body, you take damage, if you hit them with your weapon, they die in one-hit and the mage can turn into a tornado to defeat enemies. You get gold as you kill them and the gold heals you a little, you can use that to buy things at a shopkeeper that appears randomly, better weapons for the knight increase your range and attack speed, the mage gets spells that are cast after a while of not attacking and the knave gets more gold on kills.

As you kill enemies, you go up in levels and after ten levels, a boss appears, the boss fights are kinda sluggish and slow, during normal levels you just kill everything in sight and dodge left and right, during bosses (especially the first one which you have to wait for it to run at you and jump over and hit him, like 8 times) the style is slower, it breaks momentum.

The second boss is kinda bad too, the third and fourth one are a little better...

Then after a while because there's too much stuff on the screen, you die.

No glory nor fame
After dying, you get Fame that can be used to 'buy' 'new things'. I'm saying it like that because there's not much to buy. You have to unlock the mage and the knave (and the knave plays pretty much like the knight so it's kind of a bad deal) and everything else is more or less cosmetic.

I don't want to spend my fame on skins, also hello iOS volume control.

I know this might sound weird but I wish the game tried to sell me a fame doubler or even a coin doubler. As of right now, all you can buy with real money is fame and I don't buy consumables, especially if they serve almost no purpose. Fame could be used to buy upgrades for your characters, having them start with more powerful weapons or armor (the fighter's armor acts as another HP bar, the mage lets him cast spells faster and the knave gets more gold) or buy longer HP bars, anything to make the game easier. I don't know how many levels there are (There's a game mode that starts at level 80 so I never got close to the end) but there's no improving your character by playing more.

Missions to complete but for what end?
There are also missions that you can beat to get more fame and of course, I'm trying to beat them because that's what you do with missions, but the fame rewards aren't really compelling me to continue doing so. Maybe if there was more to do with fame, like I said before.

Too bad two of the characters play exactly the same.

iLook at Nimble Quest

Nimble Quest is similar to the 'snake' game, you need to move a line that grows longer without touching anything, nor the walls, nor the other parts of your snake. In this case, you have a line of heroes that walk alongside arena-style maps where you have to defeat enough enemies before you can proceed to the next level. You start with one hero from a list of fifteen heroes or so (albeit they are but all locked at the beginning) each with their attack types and armor values and then you acquire more heroes by finding them randomly in the levels.

Here's a line of 6 heroes in the sewers! I love the mages.

I have a few problems with the resources involved with Nimble Quest. You have two resources types (stop me if you've heard this one), one which is easy to gather but gets useless as the game goes on (I haven't played THAT much already but I unlocked all of the upgrades you can get) and another type that's pretty useful, but you get very slowly and have to pay money to get it fast.

I've upgraded all of these things.

The upgrades are weird also, you just increase the duration of buffs you gather randomly by killing monsters. I wish there was more to it than just duration upgrades, such as upgrades to increase the chance of finding certain powerups, or even being able to activate the power-up during levels at the cost of gems (giving them another use), maybe other things such as adding range upgrade to the attack speed skill or increasing the radius of the magnets.

My main problem with the tokens is that they're almost necessary.

Tokens can be used for a few important things, skipping levels, adding party members, restarting when you die and buying buffs for that run. These buffs range from two-sided (increasing your movement speed is really important, but also makes it a bit more difficult to not run into things) to weirdly necessary (having 25% more attack speed is plainly better than not having it) so you just need the tokens for more difficult levels (and they do get tough) and they drop dreadfully rarely. I wish you could spend gems to get tokens, maybe 1000 gems for one token?

As a general rule, I never buy finite resources, but will throw a buck or two for permanent upgrades.

I was surprised that there is no exp/gem doubler in Nimble Quest, all you can buy that lasts 'forever' is an unlock for red gems that are worth 10 green ones. Otherwise you're stuck with blue/green gems, I suppose. Too bad there wasn't a way to buy exp doubling or gem doubling, or token doubling for that matter. Oh, what really surprised me was that this unlock was 4.99$ I'm not buying into the 'everything needs to be free or .99$' vision so I don't mind giving the Nimblebit guys my money, but I thought 5$ for that kind of upgrade was a bit weird.

GEMS!

The gems are fun to collect, you either fill you screen with them by completing a level or by opening a chest, it's even better when you have a magnet to get them all (I could say that it's the best in that case), otherwise if you don't have the speed boost buff (that costs 1 token), you're not going to get much, which is kinda sad and frustrating to see them all disappear about five seconds after they spawned. It's in these situations I really wished for a way to trigger the magnet myself.

I really like this.

Otherwise, the gameplay is great, you swipe in all four directions to change the way your 'snake' is going, and that works perfectly (but don't stay too close to the borders or near enemies because even if it works, it's not perfect and you might turn the wrong way a small - but frustrating - number of times) I really love the differences between characters and the way they can upgrade to become stronger - the little cosmetic changes as they level are neat - but then again, I wish some characters would get other upgrades such as being able to bounce into walls or double the range of the magnet or ignore slowdown from enemies. Little things to change how the game plays and that would really impact how you choose your leader.

iLook at Shufflepuck Cantina

Shufflepuck Cantina is a weird game, on one hand you have an interesting air hockey game with power-ups, special moves, and prizes to be won, on the other hand you have a deep achievement system, shops, different NPCs with stories and moves to master, quests and some gambling here and there.

This is the core of the game and also where I've spent the less time.

The music reminds me of the cantina theme from Star Wars
SC oozes style and personality, it's a great looking and sounding game that makes you interested in the small number of characters you can learn about and chat with. The game opens with the concept that you crashed your ship on this planet where people play air hockey to become rich and famous, so of course you're going to climb the ladder and become air hockey champion number one to leave the planet. You start with the bartender, M4rv1n, then ideally you would move to tougher opponents with crazy special moves and better AI, upgrading your puck and paddle along the way, gaining levels and using special moves yourself.

My character sheet, I have a long way to go.

Content, content, content!
There are tons of things in SC, if you like achievements and unlocking things and not having to buy anything for real money, you probably are going to enjoy this game. Air hockey is almost secondary to the whole thing because there's almost enough content to make a whole other game by itself. You talk to NPCs and do their quests, you buy pieces of their biographies and when you have everything, you can play as that NPC, learn their special moves and master it. You also have two kind of currencies (A recurring theme in free games), one is used to buy most things, pucks, upgrades, paddles, the other is used for 'gambling'. Basically it's a lottery system and you scratch cards and if you pick a skull, you lose everything you haven't cashed in already.

The scratch card thing.

It's interesting but also entirely luck-based, which removes a bit of sense into doing it any other way than just picking the first square and hoping for the best. Also I never got anything good from it so you might need to play it a lot to have any hope of finding rare rewards.

I'll never get your 9 gold medals, sorry M4rv1n.

I can't get past the first guy
This game is horribly though for me. After playing it for maybe six hours, I can't beat anything else than the 'training' match m4rv1n offers. Anything tougher than that and I lose and more often than not I blame the way the game works, because I don't think that I have terrible eye-to-hand coordination. I also think that I understand air hockey, I know you don't have to physically drag your paddle and if you tap somewhere the paddle just teleports, but I feel like the control scheme isn't that great with a touch pad. I just lose, or get into matches where I can just barely keep the back-and-forth going, and that's why I'm not sure I can recommend Shufflepuck Cantina. It's got charm and neat mechanics, good design ideas and tons of content, but if I can't get anywhere in it, I can't see any of it! Maybe adding a difficulty toggle between normal and casual? If that's what it needs for me to see the ending...

I would spend top dollar for a way to be able to win at this game.

iLook at Ridiculous Fishing

Ridiculous fishing in a clamshell
You drop your line down the sea, you navigate carefully between fishes, you either hit fishes or go to the maximum depth you can go, then your line comes back up, during which you try to get as many fishes as you can, then they pop out of the sea and you hate to shoot them with guns to get money. You use that money to buy upgrades and you go to other maps with different fishes by catching different species. This is ridiculous fishing, and it's pretty good, almost perfect in the way that small games can be with their simplicity and amazing fun factor.

I love puns, and the fish-o-pedia is full of them

The style is great and the music is awesome, more notable is the lack of in app purchase, everything is already unlocked with no need to spend more money. You're going to spend time and effort to make the cash you need to progress but you always unlock new gear and new fishes to fish, it's always a little bit of a fun grind before the next thing.

You need to dodge fishes when you're going to the bottom of the sea.

I have some issue with the controls
I'm not a big fan of tilt controls when you want to carefully maneuver between obstacle and sometimes I feel like the control scheme of RF isn't the best it would've been. You need to tilt the ipad left and right to make the lure go down while you're dodging fish, then you need to tilt it again to go up while you're trying to get all of the fish (but not the jellyfish, it's true, they're worthless and will actively take money away from you) so it's a bit tricky at first. You get upgrades like a lure that drills down and electric items that kill stuff you bump into, but I've never felt like I could control carefully my lure as it went down and up. Some spots are easy enough but some are real mazes where jellyfishes form patterns that you have to avoid. Maybe a big left and right button on each side, you press on them to move in that direction?

Maybe if all sections were that easy I would have less trouble with the controls.

When you get all fishes above water, you have to shoot them, and they go flying in the sky and slowly fall down. If they hit the water, they're gone and won't give you any money. The screen will always focus on the fishes that are the closest to the sea so you can shoot them before they hit it. This becomes problematic when you have huge packs of fishes and a small number of heavier ones that will fall rapidly. Maybe they're worth nothing compared to the rest of your catch but the screen is going to focus on them and after a while everything else you've fished will follow in one big clump.

Like I said, get a bigger gun. Not a slow gun tho, they  are also frustrating then they miss.

Getting a bigger gun fixed this for me, but it doesn't occur every time, the fish composition needs to be a certain way for it to be a problem, so it's not a big deal, it's just frustrating when things go exactly the 'right' wrong way.

Trying to dodge jellyfishes but still get a huge batch of them is always ridiculous.

But these minor things aside, Ridiculous Fishing is ridiculous fun
The endless process of getting money to buy more things to get more money is something that fascinates me in video games and RF is really fun at doing what it does. Besides some minor weird story elements, the game is full of good style and ideas. Getting a screen full of pricey fishes zapped by a Tesla coil, shooting the catch of the day with dual miniguns, watching a flying fish go 800 meters in the sky, wearing a robe and a wizard hat, these are all things you can do in RF and I'll keep at it until I've catched them all.

Some of the items could have a more descriptive text blurb but they probably all do something.