You drop your line down the sea, you navigate carefully between fishes, you either hit fishes or go to the maximum depth you can go, then your line comes back up, during which you try to get as many fishes as you can, then they pop out of the sea and you hate to shoot them with guns to get money. You use that money to buy upgrades and you go to other maps with different fishes by catching different species. This is ridiculous fishing, and it's pretty good, almost perfect in the way that small games can be with their simplicity and amazing fun factor.
The style is great and the music is awesome, more notable is the lack of in app purchase, everything is already unlocked with no need to spend more money. You're going to spend time and effort to make the cash you need to progress but you always unlock new gear and new fishes to fish, it's always a little bit of a fun grind before the next thing.
I have some issue with the controls
I'm not a big fan of tilt controls when you want to carefully maneuver between obstacle and sometimes I feel like the control scheme of RF isn't the best it would've been. You need to tilt the ipad left and right to make the lure go down while you're dodging fish, then you need to tilt it again to go up while you're trying to get all of the fish (but not the jellyfish, it's true, they're worthless and will actively take money away from you) so it's a bit tricky at first. You get upgrades like a lure that drills down and electric items that kill stuff you bump into, but I've never felt like I could control carefully my lure as it went down and up. Some spots are easy enough but some are real mazes where jellyfishes form patterns that you have to avoid. Maybe a big left and right button on each side, you press on them to move in that direction?
When you get all fishes above water, you have to shoot them, and they go flying in the sky and slowly fall down. If they hit the water, they're gone and won't give you any money. The screen will always focus on the fishes that are the closest to the sea so you can shoot them before they hit it. This becomes problematic when you have huge packs of fishes and a small number of heavier ones that will fall rapidly. Maybe they're worth nothing compared to the rest of your catch but the screen is going to focus on them and after a while everything else you've fished will follow in one big clump.
Getting a bigger gun fixed this for me, but it doesn't occur every time, the fish composition needs to be a certain way for it to be a problem, so it's not a big deal, it's just frustrating when things go exactly the 'right' wrong way.
But these minor things aside, Ridiculous Fishing is ridiculous fun
The endless process of getting money to buy more things to get more money is something that fascinates me in video games and RF is really fun at doing what it does. Besides some minor weird story elements, the game is full of good style and ideas. Getting a screen full of pricey fishes zapped by a Tesla coil, shooting the catch of the day with dual miniguns, watching a flying fish go 800 meters in the sky, wearing a robe and a wizard hat, these are all things you can do in RF and I'll keep at it until I've catched them all.