Best Fishing Games

Why it's here: By day you free-dive a shifting blue hole with a harpoon; by night the fish you speared become the menu at a sushi bar you also run. It should not hold together, yet it became one of 2023's most-recommended games doing exactly that. What keeps pulling players back underwater is worth finding out.

Why it's here: A little boat, a hold that keeps growing, and waters that turn stranger the later you trawl. Haul your nets in after dark and something other than fish comes up with them. It takes the calmest genre on this list and quietly turns it into dread, and how it manages that is the real catch.

Why it's here: A fishing RPG from the comedy troupe Viva La Dirt League, built like a pocket JRPG where landing a fish is a turn-based battle and the whole valley is in on the joke. Whether its charm outlasts the fetch quests depends a lot on whether the channel already makes you laugh.

Why it's here: The open-world sport-fishing sim built by the studio behind theHunter: Call of the Wild, dropping you on vast, quiet lakes to read the water and pattern a personal-best catch. It is generous and genuinely relaxing, but its studio has stopped adding to it, so whether the final state is enough is the thing to weigh before you commit.

Why it's here: The sim that treats fishing like a competitive sport: a career across dozens of real venues, a tackle box deep enough to intimidate, and match rules timed to the second. It rewards the player who studies rigs and species, and asks the fair question of whether that study ever stops feeling like homework.

Why it's here: The specialist pick for one discipline done seriously: UK carp and coarse fishing, where the challenge is the patient craft of bait, rig and swim rather than reeling in a monster a minute. For anglers who fish this way in real life it is the closest a console gets, and for everyone else it is the deep end.

Why it's here: The gentlest way onto this list: coarse fishing on a handful of pretty British lakes, with tackle simple enough to grasp in an afternoon and no career grind demanding your evenings. It is the fishing game you play to unwind, and how much depth waits underneath the calm is the thing to weigh.

Why it's here: Fishing as a business, not a hobby: you skipper a commercial trawler out of a Norwegian port, financing bigger boats and better gear against fuel bills, quotas and weather. The fish are a spreadsheet you catch, and whether running a fishing company beats casting a rod is the whole pitch.

Why it's here: The bigger, colder sequel to Barents Sea, trading Norwegian fjords for the brutal Newfoundland grounds and far larger vessels, right down to a crab boat that costs a fortune. It is the most ambitious commercial-fishing sim here, and it wears both the scale and the rough edges of that ambition openly.

Why it's here: The free-to-play way in, and by far the most-played fishing game on PlayStation: a sprawling sport-fishing world with real tackle physics and years of added waters. The line it walks between deep simulation and aggressive monetization is the reason to read on before you download it for nothing.

Why it's here: The same sport-fishing engine as Fishing Planet, sold once instead of free-to-play: a single upfront price for a career-focused build without the storefront pop-ups. Whether paying to skip the free game's grind is the smarter deal, or the same grind behind a paywall, is the calculation to make here.

Why it's here: The only licensed pick on the list, built around the real B.A.S.S. tournament trail: qualify, sponsor a boat and fish a competitive bass season against the clock and a leaderboard. It nails the sport it licenses, and the question is whether the presentation around that sport keeps pace with the fishing itself.

Why it's here: A hand-built voxel town where you inherit a fishing boat and slowly bring a dying seaside community back with what you catch and cook, solo or in four-player co-op. Its heart is genuine and its launch was genuinely rough, so the story worth checking is what the patches have since repaired.