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Ask for a fishing game and you get handed four completely different hobbies wearing the same word. A patient sport about reading water. A business sim where the fish are stock to be shifted. A horror game that happens to put a net in your hands. And a place to stand around talking for two hours, where casting is mostly something to do while you chat. Buying the wrong one is easy, because nobody ever says which of the four they meant.
So: no ranking here. This is every fishing game we can actually price on PC, split into those four groups, with the Steam verdict and a live price next to each one. Work out your group first. The name comes after.
Four hobbies, one word on the box
Before any game name, work out which of these you came for. Most of the sour reviews in this genre are just somebody who bought out of the wrong family.
| Family | What you actually spend the hours doing | Who ends up keeping it |
|---|---|---|
| Rod simulator | Casting, reading the water, choosing tackle and fighting the fish. Technique is the whole game. | People who fish, or who want a slow hobby with rules to learn. |
| Commercial boat | Running a vessel and a business: quotas, fuel, crew, gear, selling the catch at the right dock. | Management sim players. The fish are inventory, not trophies. |
| Fishing as a hook | The casting is the loop, but the game wrapped around it is horror, cooking or tactics. | People who want a game first and a hobby second. |
| Cosy and social | Short sessions, low stakes, usually with other people in the same lobby. | Anyone after something to do with their hands while talking. |
Rod, line and a lake: the straight simulators
This is what "fishing game" means to people who actually fish. It is also where the price gaps get silly, because most of these have been out for years and half the shops in Europe stock them by now.
Ultimate Fishing Simulator — the cheap way in
Ultimate Fishing Simulator, by Ultimate Games. Start here if you have never held a virtual rod. Very Positive on Steam across more than eight thousand reviews, Metacritic 70 — nothing else in this group pairs those two that well, and it is usually the cheapest realistic option going.
Every figure below already has the shop's own coupon folded in, which is why the order sometimes disagrees with what that shop shows on its own page.
Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2 — newer, not automatically better
Silent Bear Studio's sequel, Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2, and here the sequel is the riskier buy. It sits at Mixed across roughly two thousand reviews; the original is Very Positive across four times as many. Read a few of those before you pay the difference.
Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour — tournaments and licensed tackle
Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour comes from Dovetail Games, who have been at this longer than anyone else here. Very Positive. It is built around match sessions and a clock, not around wandering a lake at your own pace. Be warned that a whole stack of individual lake packs sits on top of it.
Euro Fishing — the old carp and coarse standby
Also Dovetail, and the oldest thing on this page: Euro Fishing. It shows its age and the Mixed rating says so, but it is still the cheapest way into carp and coarse waters, and its lakes are sold as separate add-ons.
Call of the Wild: The Angler — the open-world one
Call of the Wild: The Angler is the open-world one. Expansive Worlds also make theHunter: Call of the Wild and reuse the trick — one big map you walk across, rather than a menu of lakes to load. The Mixed score across more than six thousand reviews is a lot of argument to wade through first. Reserve packs for Spain and South Africa cost extra.
What if you want the boat, not the rod?
Two games here treat fishing as an industry, and both come from the same small studio, Misc Games. Nobody fights a fish. You work out whether the diesel it takes to reach the good ground is worth what the hold will fetch when you get back.
Fishing: Barents Sea — trawling the Norwegian coast
Fishing: Barents Sea starts you with a boat you cannot afford to break, and you work up from there. Weather, quotas, crew wages, the price waiting at the dock — they all pull against each other. If you want pots as well as nets, the King Crab expansion is sold separately.
Fishing: North Atlantic — the same job, Nova Scotia
The follow-up, Fishing: North Atlantic, moves the fleet across to Nova Scotia and adds lobster and scallop work. Its expansion is named after A.F. Theriault, a real shipyard, and is sold on its own. That naming tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously this one takes accuracy.
When the fishing is the hook and the game is something else
These three outsell everything above put together, and not one of them is really a fishing sim. The cast is there to give the game a rhythm; the genre built on top of it is something else entirely.
DREDGE — trawling, and something underneath
DREDGE, by Black Salt Games, has the warmest reception on this page: Overwhelmingly Positive across more than forty-seven thousand reviews. You fish, you sell, you upgrade the boat. Then you push a little further out after dark, and what comes up stops looking quite like fish. Two expansions, Iron Rig and Pale Reach, are sold on top.
Every shop we track for it, coupons already applied:
Dave the Diver — dive by day, run a sushi bar by night
MINTROCKET's Dave the Diver is the best-reviewed thing on this page by a wide margin: Overwhelmingly Positive across more than a hundred and forty thousand reviews, Metacritic 90. Half of it has you spearfishing a reef that rearranges itself overnight. The other half is running a sushi bar.
Nice Day for Fishing — fishing as a tactics game
Nice Day for Fishing from FusionPlay swaps the reel-in minigame for a turn-based scrap. Very Positive. It sounds like a gag right up until you are forty minutes into a run and a fish pulls a counter you had not planned for.
Which of these do you actually play with other people?
The cosy corner has grown faster than the rest of the genre put together, and it is where a Steam score helps you least. Half of what you are buying is whoever else turns up in the lobby.
WEBFISHING — the lobby is the point
One person made WEBFISHING, and it has pulled Overwhelmingly Positive across more than fifty-seven thousand reviews — more than any other fishing-first game here. The fishing is kept deliberately thin. What people actually turn up for is hanging around a shared space with strangers.
Fischer's Fishing Journey — a small, kind one
Cutefish's Fischer's Fishing Journey is short, warm and cheap, sitting at Very Positive across roughly fifteen hundred reviews. Hand it to anyone who tried a proper simulator and gave up after an hour.
Moonglow Bay — a fishing RPG with a town attached
Moonglow Bay, from Bunnyhug, sits at Mixed on Steam and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is also the only one attempting a proper story, with a whole coastal town rebuilt out of what you haul in.
Two smaller, newer ones are worth a look if you fancy something none of your friends has played: Black Hole Fishing and Fishing Inc, both Very Positive. Only a couple of shops stock either one so far.
All fifteen side by side, at today's price
The last column is live. It reads the cheapest offer across every shop we track at the moment you open the page, coupon included, so expect it to have moved by next week.
| Game | Family | Steam verdict | Cheapest right now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ultimate Fishing Simulator | Rod simulator | Very Positive · 8,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2 | Rod simulator | Mixed · 2,000+ reviews | € (with coupon SEPGOC10) |
| Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour | Rod simulator | Very Positive · 900+ reviews | € |
| Euro Fishing | Rod simulator | Mixed · 1,400+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Call of the Wild: The Angler | Rod simulator | Mixed · 6,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Fishing: Barents Sea | Commercial boat | No Steam score on file | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Fishing: North Atlantic | Commercial boat | No Steam score on file | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| DREDGE | Fishing as a hook | Overwhelmingly Positive · 47,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Dave the Diver | Fishing as a hook | Overwhelmingly Positive · 140,000+ reviews | € (with coupon Gocdkeys) |
| Nice Day for Fishing | Fishing as a hook | Very Positive · 2,500+ reviews | € |
| WEBFISHING | Cosy and social | Overwhelmingly Positive · 57,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS10) |
| Fischer's Fishing Journey | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 1,500+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Moonglow Bay | Cosy and social | Mixed · 670+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Black Hole Fishing | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 500+ reviews | € |
| Fishing Inc | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 1,700+ reviews | € |
So which one do you actually start with?
I have never played a fishing game. Where do I start?
After the actual hobby? Ultimate Fishing Simulator is the safe first step: best rated in its group and the least money at risk. After a good game that happens to involve fishing? Get DREDGE and stop reading.
Does a Mixed score mean I should not buy it?
Not by itself, and this genre shows why better than most. A simulator aimed at real anglers collects reviews from two crowds at once: people who wanted a sport, and people who wanted a game. The score settles somewhere in the middle and tells you nothing. Go and read what the complaints are actually about.
Are the lake and reserve DLCs worth it?
Only once the base game has kept you busy for a few evenings. Fishing Sim World, Euro Fishing and The Angler all sell their waters separately, and grabbing them up front is far and away the commonest way to overspend here. The base games are cheap. The add-on stacks quietly are not.
Four names and you are done: DREDGE for a game, Ultimate Fishing Simulator for the hobby, Fishing: Barents Sea for the business, WEBFISHING for the company. Once you have picked, you can buy DREDGE key or buy Ultimate Fishing Simulator key from the full price list, with every shop coupon already counted in.
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.
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