Call of the Wild: The Angler - South Africa Reserve

Buy this one if your ideal evening is a spreadsheet of lure colours and water conditions, and walk away if you want a fishing minigame with a win button. I sort sims by decision density, and The Angler in its South Africa Reserve sits in an awkward bracket. The moment to moment inputs are simple, cast, retrieve, manage tension, but the layer above them, deciding where to stand at what hour with which rig, is where the actual game lives. That layer stays invisible for the first two or three hours, which is a large part of why the Steam score sits at Mixed, 64 percent positive across roughly 7,600 reviews. Plenty of people bounced off it before the systems opened up, and I do not entirely blame them. Structurally this is the Call of the Wild design language pointed at water. Expansive Worlds released it in August 2022 under Avalanche, and it hands you a large continuous map, a rod, a modest tackle box, and a species list that runs from fish you will land in your first ten minutes to ones that can eat an entire session. Progression follows the standard sim shape: catch, log, earn, unlock better rods, reels, lines and lures, then repeat with tighter margins. What keeps it honest is that fish are not slot machine payouts. Species respond to place and conditions, and a rig that is wrong by one component will get you nibbles and nothing else. The problem is that the game rarely tells you which component was wrong. That brings me to the tutorial, which is the weakest hinge in the whole build. It teaches you buttons rather than reasoning, and a sim like this needs the opposite. My advice for anyone starting cold is to stop treating it as a hundred hour completion grind, because framed that way it is exhausting. Treat it instead as a run of two hour projects. Pick one species, work out the water and the time of day it wants, build the rig for it, go and get it, then log the result and pick another. Done that way the game is genuinely beginner friendly, and the late game, where you are shaving margins on rare catches with gear you actually understand, arrives a lot sooner than the review score suggests. The South Africa Reserve matters because new water is close to the only content lever a fishing sim has. A different map changes the shape of your sessions, the routes you walk, the spots worth returning to at dawn, and the mental map you rebuild from scratch. That last part is the good bit. Relearning a body of water is the closest this genre gets to a build order. The AI, if you can call fish behaviour AI, is convincing enough at the level that counts: fish feel like they are reacting to conditions rather than to a hidden dice roll, and once you accept that, a failed session stops feeling unfair and starts feeling like bad prep. Co-op is the underrated half of the package as well. Online sessions with a couple of friends turn a solitary logbook game into a shared expedition, and Steam Cloud plus achievements mean your progress travels with you. Full controller support, DualShock and DualSense included, makes it a reasonable couch option too. What holds it back is polish and reach. A Mixed rating across nearly 7,600 reviews is not a rounding error, and my read is that the technical side and the pace of new content have both tested people's patience over the years. There is also no meaningful mod ecosystem here, which for me is the real ceiling. Sims of this type usually get their second life from community tools and content, and what the studio ships is what you get. If you need something infinitely extensible, that is a fair strike against it. If you want thirty or forty good evenings of slow, deliberate problem solving with a rod, it holds up fine.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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