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For anyone out there who may be unfamiliar with the Discovery Channel series Deadliest Catch, here's all you really need to know: crab boats, Alaska, high mortality rate, hellish conditions (but, you know, with ice, sleet, rain and towering waves instead of fire and lava) and a bunch of insanely fearless guys hoping to making boatloads of cash. In short, the show is as engaging, exciting and shake-your-head-because-you-can't-believe-what-these-guys-have-to-endure-worthy as anything on television. Sadly, you will not find anything even remotely close to any of that in the game that bears its name.

It's Good to Be the Captain

There are three modes in the game: career, multiplayer, and missions. Missions are basically mini-games that require you to do the same tasks over and over again in slightly different ways. One mission has you racing through checkpoints in a motorized skiff. Another requires you to dock your ship without hitting anything. But by far the most enjoyable (and by enjoyable I mean tear-your-hair-out-unbearable) missions are the ones that make you drive from point A to point B (in real-time across vast stretches of water) to either rescue a crew from a sinking ship, confront Russian fishing boats that have crossed into U.S. waters or get an injured crewmember to safety. Believe me, those all sound a lot cooler than they actual are. You can unlock more missions by either completing available ones or reaching certain goals in career mode.

For those looking to try their hand at captaining a ship in the world of competitive crab fishing, career mode is the way to go. There are five real-life ships to choose from, each of which can be painted and renamed in whatever ungodly way you see fit. After you have beautified your boat, you must pick five individuals (real crab fishermen/fisherwomen) to be your crew.

Since maintaining peace and unity aboard your ship is essential to not only your success but also your safety, it is important to choose your crew wisely. Also, payment percentages relate directly to experience, so the better a person is at their job, the higher their cut will be at the end of the season. This means that you won't always be able to afford the five best people, and that directly influences the chances of accidents and injuries once you take to the sea.

The micromanagement of crewmembers, supplies and finances is easily the best part of the game, and, by that, I mean it is the only part of the game that isn't utterly unbearable. Ironically, the worst part of this crab fishing simulation is the simulation of crab fishing.

Wanted Dead or Alive... Or Just Playable

At the start of every new season, you usually have a solid 36 hours (around 40 actual minutes) to chart your course and travel to your first fishing location. The ship's radar provides all the information necessary to be as efficient and successful as possible. Setting waypoints on the map allows you to use autopilot or "fast-time." Autopilot can only be used when you aren't in map mode, and basically just requires you to manage the ship's speed in real-time. Fast-time is used in map mode to basically speed up the passage of time during travel. Generally, fast-time is the only way to maintain your sanity, unless you (as a player) have enough money to not have to work, have no friends or family and/or have the patience of a dead monk.

When the game finally starts rolling and you go to set your first pot of the season, you realize within about eight seconds what a disaster it really is. It feels, looks and plays as if it was thrown together in an afternoon (in fact, it has been in development since 2005), was never play-tested and then shipped to retailers. It is by far one of the finest examples of a video game designed without gamers in mind that I have ever seen. I guarantee you if Infinity Ward were given the chance to throw the Call of Duty 4 engine at this scenario, it would be a ridiculously fun and intense game the likes of which we have never seen before. In fact, just thinking about that game is about 985 times more enjoyable than the game as it stands now. 

Instead of being able to experience the sights, sounds and sensations of 40-foot waves crashing down around you while you're trying to avoid being knocked overboard by a crane while at the same time fetching bait and unloading giant crab pots, you get to watch your crew (who adhere to the same three or four animations regardless of the severity or calmness of the weather) take their sweet-ass time getting into position, positioning the crane over a crab pot, hooking the crane to the pot, craning the pot onto the loader, unhooking the crane, opening the pot, removing the marker buoys from inside the pot, setting the bait, closing the trap and finally dumping it into the water.

Then, once you have set your pots and let them "cook" for at least two days, you have to retrieve them. The retrieval animation is even more excruciating as it is followed by one of three additional animations – re-bait, stack (put back on the boat) or store (dump back in the water without bait). You will have to go through these processes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times if you want to be the most productive boat on the water. And believe me, watching these sequences even five times, let alone 100, is enough to qualify the game as a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Next-Gen Gaming at Its Last-Gen-iest

As if the game weren't unbearable enough with its tedious gameplay and total lack of danger, excitement and everything else that makes the show enjoyable, the developers decided to reward those people foolish enough to shell out the $60 for this game with easily some of the worst graphics of this entire generation of games. The ships are nicely designed and detailed, and are far and away the best-looking part of the game, but at a certain point, the little pluses become moot. All I can really say about the character models and animations is that they are barely decent, and believe me that is a huge compliment.

It's also quite sad when your frame-rate is choppier than the water in your game (Ayoo!), but it's even more embarrassing when the frame-rate chunks up during perfectly calm weather as well, which it does regularly. Coastal mountain ranges and icebergs are nothing more than crude blobs, with the icebergs being the better looking of the two. According to the official website, the game has, "the best wave effects in a video game to date." That's a bold statement considering that the quality of the water fluctuates between passable and horrendous for the duration of the game, and even reaches laughable when you see a towering wave turn into a jagged blob instead of crashing across the deck of your ship the way it should.

Catch and Release

If you're looking for an exciting, high-octane, high-seas adventure, I suggest becoming an actual crab fisherman. Sure, the micromanagement can be somewhat fun, but there is absolutely no depth to it, and you will be over it in a relatively short amount of time. The gameplay is beyond tedious, the graphics are embarrassing, and unless you are looking for some way to kill a whole bunch of time doing very little, you will want to toss this sucker back as soon as you can.

Review by: Jake Gaskill