Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep for N-Gage

Gameplay

Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep is one of Nokia's flagship first party games, and one of the most eagerly awaited titles of the new N-Gage platform's launch. It's been published by Nokia itself, and the developers are the Polish company Infinite Dreams, who are well-known in the smartphone community for their acclaimed high-quality games such as K-Rally, Sky Force and Super Miners (all of which are available for N-Gage phones, just look for the versions labelled "Symbian S60 3rd Edition").

HO:COTD is a sort of combination of a fishing simulator and a role playing game, with every successful catch earning you experience points (XP) that bring you closer to "levelling up", which unlocks new features, playing areas, items and even mini-games. You can just fish at random if you want, or you can choose to take part in a quest (usually to find a particular object lost underwater, or to catch a certain creature), or you can take part in tournaments which are held several times a day in the game world (they're offline tournaments against computer players, so you don't need an internet connection). All three activities can be done at once, so for example if you get bored of a quest you can go off to join a tournament.

The game takes place in four real-life fishing resorts in Costa Rica, Alaska, Scotland and Thailand. Some of the characters you meet exist in real life, and the resorts themselves are represented by locations in the game based on real maps. You start the game in Costa Rica but as you earn experience you'll unlock the other locations, and you can fly to them from each resort's airport. As you level up, new fishing tackle will be available to you from the resort shop (you don't have to pay for it, just reach the right level of experience and go and collect it).

The controls for the game are very, very simple: you move with the direction pad, and you select things with either the direction pad button or the top gaming button (the A button). You also occasionally have to choose an option with the blue soft keys. The simplicity of the controls means you can play the game just as easily with one hand as two, and the game plays just as well in horizontal/landscape mode as it does in vertical/portrait mode. HO:COTD is suited to practically any phone model with any button layout.

You choose where to fish from a detailed 2D map which you drive your boat around. The map is animated, so for example you can see where other boats are fishing (if there are any), and the depth of the water is visible from the colours of the sea or lake. Once you decide on a place to fish, you just click the button and you're presented with a 3D view of the spot where you can look all round and up and down.

Using a golf style power meter, you press the button to cast your line, and then press it again to choose how far out you want the line to go. If you've managed to obtain a depth meter, you'll see a chart showing how deeply your lure has sunk, which is important as different lures sink at different speeds, and different fish live at different depths. Reeling the lure in keeps it at that depth, though it may drag it away from an interested fish. When a fish does try to take the bait, the game's camera zooms in on the end of your reel, and if the fish is ready to be reeled in a blue icon will appear telling you to press the game button.

This is where the excitement begins: you have to get the fish all the way back to the boat, with that distance represented by a blue bar. At the same time, the fish has to get away from you, so it tries to pull on the line as hard as it can, and the strain on your line is represented by a green and red bar next to the blue bar. If you don't reel the fish in it will get away, but if you do reel the fish in it will cause strain on the line. Your task is to balance the strain with the reeling, and this is where the essence of the game lies, in "playing chicken" with the strain gauge so that it goes as close to breaking point without actually breaking. This is made very difficult by the constant changes in direction of the fish, and you see it spinning you around in the main display, occasionally even jumping out of the water in a rather spectacular manner.

If the above process sounds complicated, it isn't, you get to know the game very quickly and fishing becomes an instinctive process. Catching a fish feels very much like a duel, which is probably as it should be.

If you manage to get a fish reeled all the way in, you receive experience points based on how rare the fish is and how difficult it is to catch. You can then either keep the fish or release it (the game generally rewards you for releasing fish, especially rare species).

Sometimes you'll find a fish is very easy to reel in, and then you'll discover it isn't a fish at all but an object of some kind. It's worth keeping all the man-made objects you find, as you receive bonus experience points for removing rubbish from the water, and the objects may help you solve certain quests. Particularly interesting are the messages in bottles that you catch from time to time, which reveal the back-story to the location you're in at the moment. For example the Costa Rica resort has lots of ancient maps and messages from Christopher Columbus.

You'll also very occasionally catch a creature that isn't a fish, such as a turtle, crocodile or even (if you're lucky) the Loch Ness Monster.

Some Important Hints

One of the problems with HO:COTD is that it doesn't really have a tutorial to get you started, so let's take a break from the review for a moment and look at some important things you should know before playing the game:

• The "Pause" menu is your best friend, it contains all the important information you need to play the game.

• The "Pocket" section of the pause menu contains your tackle box (where you can choose the fishing equipment you want to use), as well as a Pokemon-style bestiary of the fish you've caught in that resort, and a "Live Well" section containing all the objects you've kept.

• Don't repeatedly pound the game button to reel in the fish, just keep it pressed down to reel in and release it if line tension is too high.

• When you're at an appropriate level you can collect new tackle from the resort, represented by an orange circle with a house in it. You have to collect it for it to appear in your tackle box, and you have to then select it from your tackle box in order to use it.

• Tackle unlocked when you reach a higher level is NOT necessarily better than tackle from a lower level, quite often a lower level item works better than a higher level item. For example some of the higher level lures sink much more quickly, which means they're useless in trying to catch fish which live near the surface. You need different kinds of tackle for different kinds of fish, there are no simple tackle "upgrades".

• The green and red dots represent quests, just go to them and click on the button to find out what they are. If you want a further hint or a reminder of what you're supposed to do, go back to the dot and click on the button.

• The game does have a variety of different lures, rods, lines and other equipment, but these aren't open to you when you begin. As you progress, the fishing techniques you can use become more subtle and complex.

• Different fish live in different places, come out at different times of day, and live at different depths, so try to vary where and how you fish as much as possible. The depth meter will help you do this, as will an appropriate choice of tackle.

• Your level, experience and tackle box only count in the resort you're in. You earn experience, levels and equipment completely separately in each resort, so for example you might be level 10 in Costa Rica but only level 2 in Alaska. In effect, each resort is a separate game.

• If you want to use the rumble feature, as well as switching it on in the options menu you also have to have vibrating alert switched on in the phone profile you're currently using. For example, if you have the phone in offline mode, you'll have to activate vibrating alert in the "offline" profile for the rumble feature to work in the game. You can usually find the profiles icon in the "Tools" folder on the main menu screen.

• Let the main menu of the game run on its own and you'll see fish and objects you've recently caught float by in a virtual aquarium.

Graphics & Sound

The very first time you play the game you may be disappointed by the sea looking a bit pixelly compared to the preview screenshots, but the more you play the game the more you realise just how spectacular and detailed the visuals are.

Everything is exquisitely done: the surface of the sea moves convincingly, the boat bobs up and down appropriately to current conditions (and recoils realistically if your fishing line snaps), the sky and landscape change their appearance (often quite radically) in relation to the current time of day and weather conditions. The sky is populated with flocks of birds, jets flying overhead and even the occasional hot air balloon. Around you the sea has other boats, fish close to the surface and bottles floating by (though the bottles you can see don't seem to be catchable, you can only catch bottles that are under the surface). If you've gotten wet from reeling a fish in or because it's raining, there are photo-realistic drops of water which gradually run down the camera lens, and if you look directly in the sun you see the classic "lens flare" circles you'd expect from a camera. If it's night time you can see the lights on the coastline, and now and then the hot air balloons will light up as their pilots turn on the flames of the heater.

Even the map changes colour with the time of day in the game world, and is animated with clouds floating over the map in a parallax fashion, fish swimming through the sea and other boats trying to find a good spot.

You really have to play the game for some time to fully appreciate just how much work has gone into the graphics, as a location in bright sunshine looks completely different in a storm, and completely different again at sunset. When it's not raining the sun can be shining directly, or hidden by cloud, or creeping behind the mountains, and when it is raining it can either be boring showers or a full-blown thunderstorm with lightning striking the sea (and, unlike films, there's a realistic delay between the lightning and the thunder). The effect of weather and sunlight on how the game looks is amazing, it makes the game feel much more real and adds to the atmosphere tremendously.

One serious disappointment is how the game handles graphics when you finish reeling something in. While you're reeling it in the graphics are absolutely excellent, as you and the line get dragged about by the creature in all directions and you often see it leaping out of sea, but for some reason when you've actually got the creature all the way to your boat the game pauses, then presents a dialogue box with the creature's name and a 3D rendering. It feels like the graphic artists didn't know how to handle the end of the capture so they just left out the ending completely, which is a bit of a cop-out.

In general though, this is one of the most beautiful and lovingly put together phone games at the moment, and really raises the bar for what you can expect from graphics in a mobile phone title.

Sound is also very good, with a separate soundtrack for each location. The Costa Rica location you begin in sounds a lot like something from the Monkey Island games, and the music uses a separate volume control from the effects so you can turn it off if you don't like it. The music is contextual, so it only plays when it's appropriate and changes itself to suit current events. The music plays on the main menu and the map, but fades away when you start the actual fishing. There's then an exciting bit of music when you start reeling in a fish, which speeds up the nearer you get to making a successful catch.

As the game itself points out, if you turn the game's music off completely you can listen to your own music instead using the phone's music player, though this won't be in sync to the game's events because it's running in a separate application.

The sound effects all suit the game well, though of course there's not a huge variety of effects in a fishing game as they're mostly related to water. The thrashing of the fish is convincing, and if you listen carefully you can even hear the faint "plop" of the lure as it hits the water.

N-Gage Arena

As far as we can tell, the only Arena features on here are online scoreboards, and various in-game actions also earn you N-Gage achievement points for your N-Gage profile.

Overall

Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep is great fun to play once you've worked out where all the options and status screens are, and it gets even better once you've unlocked things like the depth meter, extra tackle, and the other resort locations. People who invest time in this game will be rewarded.

Unfortunately the game's designers haven't made it very easy to do the things above. The "Pause" menu is far more important than its name suggests, and the "Pocket" menu also needs to be much more prominent so people can easily find some extremely vital things like the tackle box. There really ought to be a tutorial at the beginning of the game taking the player through finding all these features, because progress will get very very difficult without them. Infinite Dreams know how to do tutorials, they have an excellent one at the beginning of their K-Rally game, so it's a shame they didn't make one for this game too.

Another problem is that the amount of experience required to unlock certain parts of the game is far too high. The main reason this reviewer has taken so long to write this review is because it took about two or three days of long playing sessions to unlock the first extra resort. Considering the average phone gamer is only likely to be playing this on their way to and from work, it may take them weeks to unlock even one extra resort, by which time they could well have become bored as progress seems so slow. It also seems odd to lock these resorts at all, as the player starts on level 1 in all of them and progresses in each resort completely separately.

It's also a shame that N-Gage Arena hasn't been used for more than just scoreboards, and some features touted last year (such as putting your own message in a bottle for other Arena members to read) seem to have been dropped.

This is a frustrating situation because all the ingredients are here for one of our ultra-rare "Mega Game" awards, but unfortunately HO:COTD doesn't quite make it.

However, this is still one of the best phone games out there, it has great gameplay which suits long and short playing sessions, it has wonderful graphics, it has depth and longevity, the controls are simple and intuitive, and it brings a new kind of game to phones too. At 10 euros this is really good value for money, there's so much to discover in HO:COTD that it will keep you going for a long, long time.

We feel very happy to give Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep our first "Recommended" award for a next gen game, and hope that Nokia will get Infinite Dreams to do lots more N-gage games. If they're this good on their first attempt, they definitely deserve a long term contract.

AAN Score: 86%