The campaign starts you out off the coast of South Africa with a simple mission; catch 2 fish. Sounds easy, right? You shoot a fish and then real them in, but there is more to it than that. As the title suggests, you are not out fishing, but stalking your prey as a hunter of the depth. Going into the game with no tutorial, I fired upon the first fish that was unlucky enough to be in my sights, which was about 17 meters away. I pulled the rope in by scrolling the mouse wheel as fast as I could only to have the fish escape. The HUD was telling me to give the rope some slack, but I didn’t heed the warning. Attempt number two didn’t fare so well either. This time I tried to keep my spear meter at the bottom. Instead of losing the fish because it shook free of the spear, this time I gave the rope too much slack and it got away. Trying to boost close enough to the fish just startled them. It was obvious that there was more to Depth Hunter than just point-click-scroll. Slowly I began to learn that I had to stalk my prey, get in range, and hope for the best. In all of my experience with the game, I never caught a fish from a distance greater than 12 meters.
After catching the first two, Depth Hunter will proceed to give you several missions to complete. These include catching certain quantities of particular fish and catching so many within a time limit. But fishing is not your only objective. Sometimes you would be tasked with pulling out your camera and taking high quality images of fish, Mantas, Sharks, coral reef, and more. Other times you had to swim to the ocean floor to find sunken treasure. Treasure hunting proved to be one of my favorite missions because it was like a 3D hidden object game. Complete all the missions to proceed to the Bahamas and lastly Thailand in the Freeplay mode.
Fish Come to Life
Depth Hunter is not some cheesy Windows screensaver with fish swimming mindlessly from side to side. These fish are alive! Small fish travel together in school with one mind and one direction. Other fish are large and slow. Some of the prettier coral fish have an agility and speed that Spiderman would kill to have. Each species of fish has its own personality. The Yellow Tailed Snapper is fast and skiddish. Red Snappers are unintelligent and easy to catch. If you miss your shot at an Almaco Jack, then you may be stalking him from one side of the sea to the other.
The old saying, “There are plenty of fish in the sea,” is only partially true. While there are plenty of fish in the sea, they are not always the kind for which you are looking. On one occasion, I was tasked with killing 2 Hog Snappers. I fired and caught one. Then for the next 20 minutes, I looked for another one as I feared the worst; that I had killed the last of its kind.
