Fishin' 2 Go

If you hadn’t figured out that Fishin’ 2 Go was about fishing from the title and the icon featuring a fish, you’d catch on pretty quickly when presented with the plethora of fishing terminology and bait types thrown your way when you boot it up.

Much like the real thing, Fishin’ 2 Go requires a fair degree of patience and perseverance before the activity bears fruit (or in this case, fish).

The early signs aren’t great - the graphics are what you’d charitably call unremarkable, and the sound is sparse, with a tendency to drop out without warning.

If you’re unfamiliar with the sport, there’s also a steep learning curve. The first few fish will invariably snap the line, or slip away without even breaking a sweat, and you’ll need to repeatedly dip into the dense 'help' section before you get a handle on things.

Some kind of tutorial would have made learning the ropes a little easier, but this barrier to entry does mean that once things start to click the gameplay itself feels a lot more genuine and realistic.

This is mainly thanks to the intuitive control system that requires you to hold the handset as if it were a fishing rod: flattening out the phone relaxes the rod, and pulling it up tenses, while you reel the line back and forth by rotating your finger on the touchscreen.

It’s an extremely engaging system, but not since WarioWare Twisted on the Game Boy Advance has there been a portable game so adept at keeping the seats around you free on public transport.

Thanks to these controls, there’s an oddly compulsive enjoyment to ticking each species off your list one by one.

The 100 different species available to catch also means there’s plenty to keep you going, but only if you're also willing to put in the hours waiting for their first big bite.