How to Fish Review: A Co-op Hit With a Solo Problem

How to Fish review, and the short version is this: it's a fishing game where the fish shoot back, and it's much funnier with three friends than it is alone. Dazed Games' physics-based co-op shooter launched August 20, 2026 and turned into one of the summer's bigger indie spikes almost immediately, with the two-person studio announcing 1 million players inside 48 hours and Steam's charts backing that up with a 373,971 concurrent peak. Very Positive at 94% across more than 27,000 reviews is a real number, not a marketing line. But a review built only on that headline stat would miss what's actually going on in the review section underneath it, where a meaningful slice of players are saying the same thing: great with a group, rough alone, and thinner than it looks after a few hours.

How to Fish review: the verdict up front

Recommended, mostly for groups. Rating: 7.6/10. The physics comedy and the trick-shot economy genuinely work when you've got backup; solo players and anyone chasing depth beyond a weekend should wait for the price to drop further.

Key takeaways

This How to Fish review is built from what's actually in the review section, patch notes, and the community, not just the headline Very Positive score:

• How to Fish launched August 20, 2026 at $7.99, discounted 38% to $4.95 for launch week, and sits at Very Positive (94.4% of 27,028 reviews) as of this writing
• The physics-driven combat and trick-shot money multiplier are the game's real hook: melee kills, quickscopes, and mid-air "dogfight" kills all pay bonus cash once you learn the system
• Solo play is a genuine weak point. Enemy health and weapon balance don't scale down for a one-person party, and several bosses are reported as close to unbeatable alone
• A cluster of Steam reviews describe the core loop wearing thin after the first few hours, separate from the game's overall Very Positive score
• Dazed Games has patched near-daily since launch (1.0.4 through 1.0.9 in the first week), adding 8-player lobbies, private lobbies, and difficulty settings

Overview: what How to Fish actually is

You and up to seven friends crash a boat into a small island after a night of drinking. The only way home is to learn how to fish, which the game explains to you almost not at all: a rod, a knife, and an NPC named Melvin running a shop are basically the entire tutorial. Everything from there is physics-driven and mostly self-taught, which is either a design philosophy or an accident, and Dazed Games hasn't clarified which. Given how the game plays, I'd guess the former.

It's built in Unity with a deliberately blocky low-poly look, full controller support with correct PlayStation and Xbox button glyphs, and Steam Achievements. Windows only, no Mac or Linux build. The premise sounds like a one-joke pitch, and for the first ten minutes it kind of is: cast a line, catch a fish, sell it, repeat. What changes that is the physics layer underneath, where rods, weapons, and creatures all interact with ragdoll-style momentum. That's the same mechanical DNA that made Pratfall a breakout co-op hit earlier this year, and it's clearly the influence here, just filtered through a shooting-gallery fishing sim instead of a slapstick obstacle course.

Ragdoll physics let you climb, fall, and generally misuse the terrain in ways that clearly weren't the primary design goal but end up being half the appeal.

Gameplay: the trick-shot system, and where it strains

The best thing in How to Fish isn't the fishing. It's what happens once you're armed and the money multiplier kicks in. Killing creatures in specific ways pays a bonus on top of the base reward: a small bump for a standard aimed kill, more for melee, more still for quickscoping or no-scoping, and a large payout for a "dogfight" kill, which is landing a shot while both you and the target are airborne. None of this is explained in the UI, and none of it is confirmed in Dazed Games' own patch notes. Players figured the whole system out themselves on r/HowToFish, and one review I read described hitting a 6x multiplier on a seagull at 20fps with a sniper rifle, which is a pretty accurate summary of what a good session looks like: chaotic, a little dumb, genuinely fun to describe to someone afterward.

That's the part that works. But the system leans hard on the game scaling for a group, and it doesn't adjust when a group isn't there. Steam's negative reviews return to this constantly. One player with nearly 15 hours logged wrote that bosses are close to impossible with fewer than three competent people, since weapons and enemy health don't scale down for a smaller party. Another put it more bluntly: stuck on the puffer fish boss solo, joined by a friend with maxed weapons, still couldn't finish it. If you're planning to buy this alone, read our How to Fish beginner guide first. It covers the albatross fight in more detail and it's honest that dynamite alone, a lot of players' first instinct, reportedly underperforms against it.

Note: Weapons can overheat during sustained fire, and multiple players have asked how to cool one down after a boss fight goes long. It isn't documented anywhere official, but pacing your shots instead of holding the trigger down noticeably helps.

One of the game's stranger vignettes: a seagull, caught rather than fished, headed for the grill. This is where the physics-comedy tone earns its keep, and also where it starts to feel like a novelty you've already seen.

Repetition is the other recurring complaint, and it's worth taking seriously rather than waving off as "just a short game." Several negative reviews describe the loop, fish, kill, sell, upgrade, as funny for the first ten minutes and then flat: the same fish species, the same islands, the same shop rotation, without much reason to keep going once you've seen the trick-shot system once. That's a fair criticism of a game whose entire pitch is chaos-first novelty. The physics comedy covers for a genuinely thin progression structure, and it covers for it well with friends in the room. It covers for it a lot less on a fourth solo session, which is the tension this How to Fish review keeps circling back to.

Launch-week polish is uneven too, which is normal for a two-person studio moving this fast but still worth flagging plainly. There's no separate audio/video settings menu as of patch 1.0.9. Reddit bug reports in the days after launch included crash-on-launch issues, a mouse sensitivity polling bug, and at least one save-corruption report (since patched, with autosave now running every minute plus manual save triggers). None of these are dealbreakers on their own (this is still a two-person studio shipping patches days apart), but they stack. One Steam reviewer made a point worth repeating: a 94-95% positive score is generous for a game this rough around the edges, fun as it is underneath.

How to Fish review: final verdict

The Good

• Physics-driven fishing and combat produces genuinely funny, unscripted co-op moments
• Trick-shot money multiplier rewards creative kills once you understand it
• Near-daily post-launch patching, including 8-player and private lobbies
• Runs comfortably on modest hardware; full controller support out of the box

The Cons

• Solo play is close to unplayable against several bosses
• Core loop wears thin for a lot of players within a few hours
• Trick-shot values are undocumented; everything is community-tested, not official
• Missing audio/video settings and a string of early bug reports at launch

Buy this with people you already plan on playing games with tonight, not as a solo pickup. The trick-shot economy and the physics chaos are legitimately funny in the way a good couch-co-op game is funny, and $4.95 for launch week is a fair price for what it delivers in a two-to-four-hour group session or three. It's not built to hold up as a 20-hour solo game, and reviewing it as if it were misses what Dazed Games actually shipped. Watch the official release trailer before buying if you want a clearer sense of the tone; it undersells the multiplier system but nails the physics chaos.

Rating: 7.6/10

Frequently Asked Questions

Is How to Fish worth buying? Yes, if you have at least one other person to play with. At $4.95 during launch week it's a low-risk buy for a few funny co-op sessions. Solo players should temper expectations, since bosses scale for groups.

Is How to Fish good to play solo? It's the game's weakest mode. Multiple Steam reviews describe bosses like the albatross and puffer fish as close to unbeatable alone, since weapon damage and enemy health don't scale down for a one-person party.

How long is How to Fish? There's no official runtime, but Steam reviews cluster around a few hours to a couple of evenings before the loop repeats without new content. It's built for repeat co-op sessions, not a long single playthrough.

What are the biggest complaints about How to Fish? Repetition after the first few hours, weak solo balance, an undocumented trick-shot system, and rough launch polish (no separate audio/video settings, some early crash and save bugs).

Does How to Fish run well on lower-end PCs? Yes. The low-poly Unity art style is light on hardware, and multiple Steam reviews specifically note it runs on older or weaker machines without trouble. Windows only, no Mac or Linux build.

What's the trick-shot multiplier in How to Fish? A money bonus for creative kills like melee, quickscoping, no-scoping, or hitting something mid-air. It's real and confirmed by many players, but the exact numbers are community-tested, not listed in official patch notes.

References

• How to Fish on Steam
• How to Fish | Release Date Trailer (Dazed Games, official YouTube)
• Dazed Games official site
• r/HowToFish: community subreddit where the trick-shot multiplier values and several complaints in this review were sourced
• How to Fish beginner guide: this site's tips guide for players still deciding whether to buy solo or with a group