While crab fishing might be the world’s deadliest job, Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm does a great job of turning what can be considered an intense and demanding experience into a fine slurry of tedium with a god amount of boredom sluiced in, and that’s just for starters. After playing the game seemingly for weeks, it’s hard to really know what the developers were aiming for here. Is it a crab fishing sim? Maybe an exaggerated, arcade style take on the prestigious crab fishing industry as a whole? Hell no. Alaskan Storm can amount to what can be considered mind numbing, slightly hypnotic assembly work. Forget your Halos and your Killzones kids; it’s time to take the mantle of the world’s most exiting vehicle of destruction: a 48-foot crab fishing boat! Yeeeeee-haw!
For those who may not be privy enough to have caught the show while they were snowed in over a weekend, the show follows a handful of crews with embedded cameramen as they brave the Bering Sea in search of crab. I’ve always drawn similarities between fans of the show and NASCAR fans. They’re not into the show for the love of seeing who catches the most crab, it’s all about who’s going to go overboard or be killed off. While the show does a great job of casting doubt as to the fate of each crewmember before every commercial break, Alaskan Storm seriously fucks the formula up. If you come into this game with a hard on for danger and excitement, Alaskan Storm will only leave you flaccid and doubting whether you can trust another game again.
The game’s main menu features the show’s theme song “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi, which serves as a chilling reminder of the danger ahead but also serves as a grim reminder that you could be playing Rock Band instead. A season mode makes up the main part of Alaskan storm where you’re tasked with hiring a crew from a random list of fishermen and taking your sea-farin’ lot out to catch either King or Opilio crab, depending on the season. Sure, it would sound fun if the game didn’t dumb it down about twenty notches for everyone involved. Staking out a fishing spot is as easy as looking at your map, bringing up the year’s crab survey, and badda bing, you now know where all the crab are. The rest of the time you’re trying to take a handle of the boat, which handles like a twenty year old paraplegic burro, dropping crab pots, and issuing your crew simple commands. Between all of that, be ready to try to keep your touchy crew happy enough to keep working in between the fifty or so mechanical breakdowns you’ll experience in the middle of the ocean.
The issues come from the deep and slap you in the face as soon as you leave port. For a game that only renders water, some waves, a boat, and five low-res bearded clones, it’s a technical marvel this game can only seem to run as choppy as the waters you’re trying to navigate. The framerate is never constant, no matter what the conditions are. Add to the fact that the game’s soundtrack consists of NOTHING but the sweet sound of silence with a delicate backdrop of constantly cackling sea gulls, and well, you can see where this is all going. Thank god for custom soundtracks.
It’s bad enough that even though your crew might consist of a bunch of non-descript crash dummies that can’t throw a hook to save their lives, or that you’re tasked with the arduous task of driving that hulking crab boat everywhere, or even the soundtrack of constantly looped squawking birds, but it’s another thing when a game removes any kind of fun just for the sake of it. If you were like me and if you ever played The Sims, there was some measure of sadistic joy to be found in trapping your sims and watching them die. The same should hold true for Alaskan Storm, if my assumptions of the fans is correct. If this is a crab fishing sim after all, there should be all sorts of accidents with awesome ragdoll effects and other industry buzzwords describing the flopping of a human body. What you end up with are crew members who stand around looking bored before inexplicably flopping onto the ground. All of a sudden, we have an emergency. Wait, what? Seriously, this is like Burnout without the crashes for god’s sake.
If there is any merit to even renting this game, it would come with the awesome vids of Captain Sig that pop up as a sort of tutorial or to explain just what in the hell is going on. Of course, you have to remember that Sig is just a crab fishing captain, he’s not an actor. The resulting hilarity is priceless as hell as you watch Sig deliver his lines with the charisma of a faux wooden door or as he pauses as whatever he’s reading his lines from gets changed…in mid sentence. The whole thing reaches William Hung levels of awesomeness. You can’t fault the guy for trying, right?
I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like to test this game. To play it after it’s been released is like waking up after being in a coma for two weeks. You’re wondering what the hell happened and where the fuck you are. The game is like a visual lullaby, slowly hypnotizing you into some tedium induced trance only to have nothing but a bunch of virtual crab and a beat up boat to show for it. Sure, there are mission modes, but they’re even more abysmal than the season mode and not even worth mentioning here. Alaskan Storm is a lesson in management, very boring restaurant manager kind of management and unless you’re wanting to kill time until death arrives, avoid this at all costs.
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