FishMoto

Given that I learned to ride a bike on my mother's bright pink flowery bicycle, you might think my primary fear was that I'd be spotted.

In reality, I was gripped by the fear that grips anybody setting out on their first ride: that of losing my balance and breaking my arm on the tarmac.

It's a principle FishMoto builds an entire game around, taking the challenge of keeping things smooth and steady to new extremes.

But rather than taking place on a bike outside your house, FishMoto is set underwater. With an electric catfish. In a bowl. Strapped to a couple of springs, mounted on top of a set of wheels.

Yes, while actually taking charge of said catfish is a serious business – levels are increasingly decided by the most minute of moves – there's no escaping the fact that FishMoto's setting has been lifted straight out of Nutsville.

The idea is to guide your fish around each stage as he seeks to rescue his brethren, who for reasons unknown have been bagged up and left floating in the water. Once they're all onboard you can make for the exit, the idea being to post the quickest time possible.

As you move through the levels, however, merely managing to survive long enough to make it to the finish line is the real test.

To put it bluntly, controlling the bike is a complex process. There are buttons both to accelerate and brake, pads to tip the bike backwards and forwards in midair, and the ability to flip the direction of the bike to accommodate the increasingly labyrinthian layout of the stages.

Your natural inclination is to keep things ticking over slowly. The very design of FishMoto's stages, however, makes such prudent play impossible.

As well as inclines that require a fair bit of pace to climb, there are jumps to leap over, loops to circle round, and all manner of contraptions to ride over, through, and within.

This is no typical left-to-right affair, either. You'll often need to double back on yourself to pick up all the fish in each stage, with FishMoto playing with your expectations from start to finish.

But whether you're on the flat or doing a 360, the principle remains the same: keep the catfish as level and secure as possible. This means either correcting the bike as it tips back or forth mid-flight or picking up enough pace to ensure the bowl doesn't fall out of the saddle when gravity tries to take hold.

The whole thing is a delicate affair. The slightest touch is enough to crack the catfish's bowl wipe open, leaving him flipping about on the sea floor as if trying to win an amateur breakdancing contest.

Likewise, should he come free from the bike at any stage it's also Game Over, making each and every level a case of trial and error – learning, over and over, how you need to approach each obstacle based on a succession of slip-ups.

Clever cod

It's the question of whether this approach works that really defines FishMoto. There is, essentially, only one way of completing each stage, and that's the way the developer has intended.

The location of the fish themselves tends to result in you following a set path rather than exploring, and some of the jumps and loops can only successfully be approached from one direction. It leaves you needing to pull off move after move without fail, almost to order.

It'd be unfair to suggest that this is in any way easy, of course. There are no prompts to push you into any course of action – you have to deduce that for yourself – and actually tackling what quickly becomes a dance from platform to platform is a trick many won't master.

Thanks to the array of controls on offer, it's likely most won't make it past the first few stages. The instant reaction when things start to go awry is to panic. Keeping your cool is difficult when contending with the sheer number of buttons on offer.

It's a design that crosses the thin line between challenging and plain unaccommodating too often.

Play undoubtedly looks spectacular when you manage to pull a few moves off by the skin of your teeth, but FishMoto is simply too clever for its own good, lacking the balance it charges its players with perfecting.

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