You'll also need to buy local fishing licenses, but this is a holdover from the free game (where licenses were expensive and time limited)-you'll just buy the advanced license once and be done with it. Other lakes will cost money to travel to, with distance not relevant to expense (a lake in Missouri might cost several thousand, while one in Europe only 60).

You'll spend plenty of time here, even at higher levels, since it presents a free way to test you how well your gear arrangements work in practice. You have a 'starter lake' in Texas, stocked with a few bass and other fish.

The game world is littered with lakes, at least in North America and Europe. I usually ignore ambient noises in games, but The Fisherman continued to impress me long after I've normally turned the sound off in most games. Sounds likewise are addressed with great care, from the sound of your rod and reel to the local insect and bird noises, to the rain and weather effects. I'm hard to impress with graphics, but the lakes, the foliage, and, of course, the fish are all rendered to near photorealism (warning: the highest settings cause even my best computer to heat up dramatically). There's so much goodness here I don’t know where to start. There's no trading of objects, though you'll certainly quiz whoever you see for information about how to catch the local fare, and you certainly don't have to form a group to get to the best fish. Other than that, it's a completely solitary experience, with no need to compose a party or anything like that. While most MMOs are packed with people, this game basically sets up a server for each lake, with a population limit of half a dozen or so players, using as many copies of the lake as necessary (and you can set up your own lake if want). Now, you only play online, and there are other players, but this isn't really a multiplayer game. Having played both, Fishing Planet is pretty good on its own, although you'll probably have to spend money to get to the features which are far more accessible in The Fisherman. To be fair, The Fisherman is really just a 'paid' version of the free to play game Fishing Planet, so this game has had a long time for refinement. The Fisherman changes that, as it outweighs all other contenders. Pure fishing games, however, never seemed to work for me, getting too boring too fast being the primary issue. I've always enjoyed fishing in MMOs, whether it was mining in Eve Online or the more 'normal' fishing of Final Fantasy games.

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