It’s been a mighty fishy week for me with school and all that but I took some time off to play the app Fish Hooks for half an hour. After I stopped however and went back to work I realized that I completely forgotten that I had ever played a game in the first place.

First to set up context, Fish Hooks is a show on the Disney Channel about three teenage fish, Milo, Oscar and Bea, in school and taking part in loads of wacky and zany adventures throughout the pet store that they all live in. Now to just give my quick thoughts on the show I think it’s manageable but not really my taste. That description I can say on Fish Hooks creator Noah Z. Jones other animated series Almost Naked Animals. Both of these shows seem to have outrageous worlds held back by a really mundane framing device. Fish Hooks framing Device being that the fish are in school. This isn’t to say that either Fish Hooks or Almost Naked Animals is bad, but they don’t have the framing device to sustain any real enjoyment from me.

But I was surprised to find out that Fish Hooks has become a real hit on the Disney Channel, with 81 episodes under its 2 seasons belt and a third season already in production. So, a cute little .99 cent app on the IPhone sounds like some harmless fun. And in a lot of respects it is but let’s just begin talking about the game.

The contextual story goes that Milo is challenged by Randy Pincherson to travel across the entire pet store, from tank to tank, in a bubble to claim Randy Pincherson’s trophy, which he made himself. By that contextual story you can already imagine the basics of the control scheme, basically each level is started once you pop Milo’s bubble and using bubbles, bouncing turtle shells and water currents you must navigate Milo past all the hazards and make it into the tube to the next level.

Now there are 55 levels in total in Fish Hooks, which includes all the special challenges where if you complete them you are able to unlock new characters to play as like Oscar and Bea.  In each level there are three apples, while not mandatory to collect, to gain the highest score you must collect the three apples on each level. If Milo ever falls off screen or touches any sharp coral, you lose and must retry the level. Thankfully there is a quick reset button which makes the game flow from one try to the next smoothly without much disconnect from losing.

The gameplay overall reminds me a lot of Cut the rope where you use various methods including bubbles to guide the piece of candy to the mouth of the green… thing. Thankfully in the games implementation it doesn’t feel like a complete Carbon copy like BearShark The Game did when compared to any jungle run game ever.

Finally the background music… is the same 15 second loop of a more high pitch Fish Hooks theme song. It doesn’t sound awful but it is repetitive and after a while it can get on one’s nerves. Really there is nothing wrong with this game. The mechanics work very well, the contextual story is well-written and even voice acted by the original voice actors which is cool, and the level design has a very standard and for the most part fair difficulty climb.

However while it doesn’t do anything bad, it also doesn’t really do anything to make it stand out from the other apps on the IPhone. Unfortunately do to the low entry barrier to designing games for the app store, the app store is completely homogenized mass of similar games and concepts. Although the low cost of the game, and the cute contextual story are maybe enough to warrant fans of the show to play it, but it really won’t win over non-fans like me.

If you are a Fan of Fish Hooks and have a spare dollar to spend then I think you’ll really get a kick out of this game but for non-fans like me I say get Cut the Rope instead.

SCORE: 7 Out of 10