Fish Out Of Water – Retrospective

I've shared before that one of my favourite mobile game developers was Halfbrick Studios, most famous for Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. They did make a lot of other games though, and my favourite aside from the big two was Fish Out Of Water, which came out on April 10, 2013.

I first heard of this game from Jetpack Joyride, as they introduced alternate skins for all the game's vehicles in 2014, and the Profit Bird's alternate, Mecha Micro, was a reference to this game. I tried the actual game out once I found it out, and I really liked it, and I've been able to play the original version again on my 1st Generation iPad! (It's still available today but only under the Halfbrick+ subscription service)

The gameplay is quite simple. The goal of the game is to throw a group of fishes as far or as best as you can. There's six fishes in total and every round you throw three of them, and in the end you get judged by a group of five crabs who give you a score depending on your performance, taking into account how far you threw them and how many times they skipped along the water.

The game is absolutely brimming with personality. All of the six fishes are very distinct in both looks and abilities. There's Micro, a blue whale which can be thrown very far but skips very little; Olympus, a square yellow fish which is probably the most balanced; Rocket (my favourite), a triangular red fish who is extremely fast and very good at skipping; Finlay, a purple dolphin who is very fast and swims across the water (though every time she enters or leaves the water it counts as a skip); Errol, a green pufferfish who is also pretty balanced but much bouncier than Olympus; and The Brothers, a pack of four tiny sharks which don't go very far but accumulate a lot of skips.

They all have two alternate costumes each, which are adorable, but also give them all slightly different physics. These are very fun to play around with, especially since sometimes you do actually want to switch them around, but more on that later.

Aside from the fish, the five crabs which judge your results also have quite a lot of personality, and they all rank you based on different criteria. Distance Dorothy rates you based on distance, Reasonable Ré takes into account all factors including the harshness of the weather, Skippy Steve rates you by your skip count, Nice Natalie generally always gives a higher score, and Hard-To-Please Harwood usually gives you a more critical score.

Along with them there's also Oscar, the yellow crab which guides you at the start of the game and sometimes gives you tips, and a small clam called Zeus who at the end of each round gives you a fun fact or silly fact about himself, the fishies, or the crabs, similar to Sensei's Fruit Facts in Fruit Ninja.

There's a tad bit more to the gameplay aside from just throwing fish. The weather changes every 10 minutes, which always changes the frequency and height of the tides, but sometimes there's more extreme weather like large waves, geysers appearing, bouncy jellyfish popping up on the surface, or parts being ice when it's snowing.

There's a boost bar in the top that allows you to speed up fish, and you can refill it with yellow boosties that your fish can collect when you throw them.

The game also has missions, a bit similar to Jetpack Joyride. You get one at a time, once you complete it a new one appears, and after completing three you move up to a new level, and you get rewarded a random set of gems which you can use as power ups or to buy the aforementioned costumes. Some of these involve getting a certain number of skips, reaching a distance, staying above or below a line, getting to a certain speed, or sometimes more unique stuff like going through rings, amongst many others.

Ultimately the game doesn't have much progression unless you set goals yourself like unlocking all costumes, but even that can be achieved with not that much time, at least relative other games with similar systems. After realizing that I definitely understood why the game didn't catch on as much as Fruit Ninja or Jetpack Joyride, but something about it keeps bringing me back. I think I find the gameplay itself just plain fun, and the missions do keep it interesting enough for me! Plus the personality and general feel of the game definitely helps.

By the way I highly suggest checking out the two Behind the Scenes videos from Halfbrick about this game, they're quite short but I find them very interesing.

As of writing I am in Level 79, gotten a high regular score of 9.9, with my best Pro Score being 113,103 points, and I've unlocked all 16 achievements (excluding the ones relating to the leagues since the servers are dead in this version). Even though this isn't exactly a game I play actively, it's definitely the type of game that I can easily pop in for a bit every day, and I just so happen to really like those games.

Oh! And one more thing I feel like mentioning. This game was the final part of a bit of a Halfbrick tradition, as it features an achievement called "Tee hee three", which you get for skipping a fish exactly 69 times in a throw. This follows up "Tee hee hee" for getting a score of 69 in Fruit Ninja, and "Tee hee two" for getting 69 coins in Jetpack Joyride. I got it with Rocket just a few days ago and it was the last achievement I had left. Nice.