Fish Fist: Punching Fish with your Fist – Review

Fish Fist is an arcade style game with a colorful 16-Bit aesthetic. The goal is simple: punch fish. Players have a stationary arm located at the bottom of the screen. Tapping anywhere will launch the arm forward thus punching a fish in that vicinity. The trick is to time your punches sort of like a crane game only there aren’t any cute stuffed animals to be won. There are several kinds of fish and obstacles thrown in for good measure. For example, fish bombs explode when punched and poisonous ones slow down your arm’s reactions.

Exploding isn’t the only way to die, however. Every match is a race against the clock and the momentum of pulverizing fish elongates both your score and health. If one does die players have the option of paying coins, dropped by fish, to continue your game, or you also have the opportunity to watch an ad in order to go forward. Also, before I forget, every five matches or so a random trailer will pop up. Most of them you can skip, but at the same time it left a mark of distaste in my mouth. It’s not like this is new for free to play games, but others use commercialism in a better way.

Speaking of which, you can also buy coins with real money, or, and here’s the kicker, watch a trailer to earn 20 gold. I did this on a loop and earned more than enough coins to buy new fists, of which are cool and add a little zest to the gameplay, but they aren’t much to get excited over. It would normally take forever to earn enough coins to do so because the drop rate is so low and yet here’s this free way to earn coins very easily. I watched a movie and was overflowing with so much gold by the end that I thought I was Scrooge McDuck.

Fish Fist is fleeting fun. Conceptually it’s hilarious, but I found the joke wore thin quickly. As a game of skill, the reaction time between taps and punches weren’t great and the flood of ads just killed whatever interest I had. It’s not worth much of your time even as a free experience.