It’s hard to imagine how Deadliest Catch became sufficiently popular to merit its own Xbox 360 game, but the fact remains that the game exists, and thus, it’s necessary that I talk about it.

There’s not so much of a plot to this game–you’ll play as, apparently, the steersman of the biggest crab-catcher in the Alaskan fleet–the Northwestern.  You’ll be backed up by Hansen brothers Edgar and Sid, and the rest of the Northwestern crew as you hunt crab and assist Coast Guard operations throughout the Bering Sea.  You’ll deal with bad weather, strategic crab hunting issues, the successful use of such valuable equipment as plotters, ship autopilot, and advance reports from the Alaska Department of Fish And Game to decide where to hunt, how hard to hunt, and how long to hunt.  Stay out too long and you may run out of fuel, adrift in the Bering Sea.  Not long enough and you’ll lose opportunities to get “on the crab”, lose cash and go bankrupt.  You’ll hire a crew, keep the boat maintained, and do plenty else besides.  Down the line, you’ll also get the opportunity to take over other boats like the Cornelia Marie, and you’ll get to hunt different seasons of crab including King and Opilio (or snow crab, in case you don’t watch the show).

This is not necessarily a BAD idea…nor is it necessarily a bad game.  The biggest problem here is that it should have such limited appeal as to render it almost unplayable.  First, you have to enjoy the show Deadliest Catch to such an extent that you follow it nonstop.  You have to know the cast.  You have to know one captain from the other—after all, if you’re on board the Rollo and you’re looking for Phil, well, you’re in entirely the wrong place and you’re going to be really surprised to discover that Phil’s been on the Cornelia Marie all this time.  And even assuming you’re sufficiently enrapt with the show to think that a game for it would be a great idea, you’re then going to have to resign yourself to the fact that, as far as gameplay goes, you’re basically just setting a waypoint, proceeding to that waypoint, laying pots, letting them soak and then taking your haul back to processing at Dutch Harbor or somewhere.  And then, when you’re done, you do it again.  And again, and again and again, until the end of the season.

Playing Deadliest Catch felt like nothing so much as a job—except I wasn’t getting paid.  Worse yet, I had to pay to GET this job.  Oh, sure, it plays smoothly enough; everything’s nicely laid out and fairly intuitive, and there was plenty of help from both the narrator and regular video clips from Sig Hansen to get me started, but still; I was basically just working a job and punching a clock, except at the end of the season, I wasn’t going to come away with twenty to fifty thousand dollars for being a crewman.

I confess that it was fun for a little while, and handling the controls of the big crab boats is interesting in a whole lot of ways, especially running the bow thrusters for small changes in attempting to dock.  It’s a very faithful and realistic simulation, even if there’s not a whole lot of action involved in the whole affair.

If you can’t get enough Deadliest Catch and want a fairly accurate simulation of piloting a crab boat, then the game should be exactly what you need.  Otherwise, there’s no reason to board this one.