Review: Tasty Fish

Melbourne indie game developers Dime Studios have burst onto the scene this week with the release of Tasty Fish for iOS.

When starting a new game, Tasty Fish offers just one piece of advice: “Stay alive!” You do this by tapping the screen to move your school of fish, avoiding sharks, to a new location on-screen. You also earn points by collecting the bubbles that arise from the sea floor; gathering consecutive bubbles means more points. Some bubbles contain fish which populate your school and ultimately give you more survivability, while others may contain a tasty cash reward.

All the while, you’ll be keeping your school of fish out of harm’s way from marauding sharks, nipping crabs and tricky fishing vessels. As the game progresses, the pace becomes more frantic with increased encounters with enemies, gradually — and sometimes dramatically — reducing the number of surviving fish, until they’re all dead.

To aid in your struggle, lifelines and exotic fish are available for purchase using the coins you earn, each of which offers different benefits such as clearing the screen of enemies or creating extra fish to swim with the school.

Only three exotic fish are available for purchase currently, with more to come though content updates. The game developers have decided on a free release, however Tasty Fish could easily be successful as a paid app. Like , I’d recommend paying the $0.99 to double the coins you earn in game — to speed up unlocks and also to support the developers.

The visual style is very clean and cute, lending itself perfectly to the game. While the audio — particularly those to telegraph incoming enemies — is well used, I found that the music did start to grate quite early on. Aside from that, this is a very polished app which Dime Studios should be very proud of for their debut.

Tasty Fish is available now for free from the iOS App Store, and is soon arriving in the Google Play Store.