What people criticise in How to Fish: 100 negative reviews
Contents
How to Fish sits at 94.9% positive. But 2,241 reviews are negative, and that is a number worth understanding if you are thinking about buying.
We took the 100 most helpful English-language negative reviews (by other players’ votes) and counted what they are about.
What hurts most often
| theme | mentions out of 100 |
|---|---|
| Multiplayer and servers | 37 |
| Not enough content, gets boring | 25 |
| Bugs | 23 |
| Performance: FPS and crashes | 18 |
| Price | 18 |
| Cheats and toxicity | 5 |
| Controls and camera | 3 |
| Casino and RNG | 3 |
The total exceeds 100 because a single review often raises several themes at once.
The three main complaints
Multiplayer and servers — 37 of 100. The number one complaint by a wide margin.
It makes sense: in the game’s tag list Multiplayer (283 votes) and Online Co-Op
(257) sit first and second. People buy it specifically to play together, so any
connection problem hits the primary use case.
Not enough content — 25 of 100. Second most frequent. Read it alongside the measured playtimes: the median for people writing a negative review is 4.5 hours. “Bored” does not arrive after 20 minutes; it arrives after a few evenings.
Price — 18 of 100. The game costs $7.99. The complaint is not about the absolute sum but about the ratio to content volume — it almost always appears paired with the previous point.
What is almost absent from the list
Three themes you might expect in a game like this, which barely register:
- Controls and camera — 3 of 100. Patch 1.0.5 added X and Y axis inversion, missing at launch, and the complaint all but disappeared.
- Casino and RNG — 3 of 100. The mechanic singled out in the age-rating descriptor barely annoys players.
- Cheats and toxicity — 5 of 100. For a game with 100,000 concurrent players, that is low.
The loudest negative reviews
| Helpful votes | Hours at time of review | Text length |
|---|---|---|
| 1,056 | 1.8 h | 2,591 chars |
| 938 | 1.6 h | 287 chars |
| 147 | 12.0 h | 1,309 chars |
| 78 | 7.9 h | 79 chars |
| 59 | 2.2 h | 115 chars |
The two most upvoted negative reviews were written by people with under two hours of playtime — inside the refund window.
How we counted, and where the method breaks
We first took the 100 most recent negative reviews — and the method failed. Those reviews were too short: 125 characters on average, with 20 of the 100 under 20 characters. Plus the language mix: english 40, schinese 19, russian 17, turkish 5, polish 5, the rest smaller. You cannot count themes in text like that.
So we switched to the 100 most helpful English ones — average length 347 characters, nearly three times more.
What follows honestly from that:
- This is not a random sample. Sorting by helpfulness biases toward long, emotional texts.
- This is English only. Complaints from the Chinese or Turkish audience could distribute differently — we did not measure them.
- We tagged themes by keyword, not by reading every review. That approach does not catch irony or sarcasm.
This is 100 reviews out of 2,241 negative ones. A slice, not a census.
Frequently asked questions
What do people complain about most in How to Fish?
Multiplayer and servers — 37 mentions across the 100 most helpful English negative reviews. Then thin content (25) and bugs (23).
Does the game have many negative reviews?
2,241 out of 43,902, or 5.1%. The overall score is 94.9% positive, labelled Very Positive.
Do people complain about the controls?
Barely — 3 mentions out of 100. Patch 1.0.5 added X and Y axis inversion, which was missing at launch.
Is this the full picture of the criticism?
No. It is 100 reviews out of 2,241, English only, sorted by helpfulness. The sample is not random and we say so plainly.