I’ve always loved fishing games, ever since Gone Fish’n on the Amiga (1988). The last fishing game I highly praised was Dredge. Loved that game. With Dave the Diver I was really looking forward to another fishing game, but I got something totally different.
You start out as Dave, diving for fishes in ”the blue hole” to use as ingredients in your newly opened sushi restaurant. Here we have two games in one. The first game is the fishing part, and the second game is the sushi restaurant business. Both are quite fun and entertaining. As the story progress though, the game will fan out into many more mini games including, a rhythm game, farming simulator, business simulation, an adventure game, a shoot’em’up, a puzzle game, a racing game, a memory game and a variant of Fruit Ninja.
This game is the king of minigames, and it keeps giving you new minigames all the way through up until the end.
I kind of like the fishing part most. Searching for a rare fish, diving deeper to get to more dangerous and exclusive fish. Fighting off a shark or two. The other minigames doesn’t really do it for me, but it surely keeps you entertained.
The story is quite bad. I like the setting with the blue hole and the sushi restaurant. I also like the characters, both Dave and Bancho are awesome, but the writing is so boring and the dialogue is so bland. I find myself just skipping through dialogue, catching the essence of what the game wants me to do, but having no energy to actually read any of it.
I like the graphics, the 2D but 3D voxel type, and I find great enjoyment in the cutscenes. They are very well animated. It is just sad that they repeat so often. If they had made the game shorter, they could have stuck to only showing the same cutscene once. That could have been a little nugget of reward for finishing one part of the game.
Yeah, the game is too long. The minigames are too shallow. The story is uninteresting. The ending was definitely unsatisfying. Apart from that the game was GOOD.
I rate this game as GOOD.
Replay 