GAMES REVIEW: Fish Hooks: Freshwater Bounce

Ever play Doodle Jump? Ever watch Fish Hooks? Well Freshwater Bounce is the fusion of both, but does that make it good, a cheap clone, or just plain bad? Let’s start with the contextual story and find out.

One day, Milo, Bea, and Oscar are having their usual gym class until the crazy Richard Simmons looking fish decides to put more of a challenge into the tryouts. Tryouts for what exactly…? Well the difficulty is spiked by having our three student fish jump endlessly up platforms, collect starfish and jumping on top of bullies.

The controls are exactly like Doodle Jump or any of its clones. Move the mouse left and right to move your character. The yellow platforms are stable to jump on, the brown ones snap after two jumps, and the blue ones move. The game also has two power ups, he invincibility bubble, which protects you from the bullies and the power plunger which lets you ride it very high. Funny enough the game also has jump pads which do the same thing is the power plunger. Its almost like they added two similar game mechanics to try and smoke screen the fact that the game is very bare bones.

The game itself is very responsive. Playing Freshwater Bounce on both my laptop and PC proved to be enjoyable and difficult in a steady and fair manner. I also like the randomization of the platforms. But even with all these likes, Freshwater Bounce is too bare bones to really stand amongst the crowd of clones. Remember the Steven Universe Game Gem Bound? Unfortunately thanks to its variety in game mechanics and constant increase in content through play Gem Bound has twice the replay value than Freshwater Bounce does. This isn’t to say Freshwater Bounce is bad in any way but it does mean then when comparing it to the crowd Freshwater Bounce is just OK.