Apple / games / HOOKED INC: FISHING GAMES
REVIEW
Hooked Inc turns idle fishing into a tidy little tycoon loop.
Lion Studios' free-to-play trawler sim is structured, generous in its early hours, and frank about where the wallet door lives.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Hooked Inc: Fishing Games
LION STUDIOS
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
Hooked Inc lives in the busiest aisle of the App Store: free-to-play idle tycoons where you tap a thing, watch a number go up, and eventually decide whether the number is going up fast enough to keep tapping. Lion Studios — the casual-games arm of AppLovin — has been shipping in this lane long enough to know which corners to cut and which to keep sharp.
The first ten levels are the pitch. Casting feels weighty, the cash counter rolls satisfyingly, and the upgrade screen always has one more thing nearly affordable. After that, the meter quietly tilts toward whether you’d like to wait or pay. It’s an honest tilt, as these things go, and the game is better for not pretending otherwise.
What it’s not is a fishing game in any literal sense. There’s no skill cast, no line tension, no species ID. It’s a tycoon sim wearing a fishing hat — which, if that’s what you came for, is precisely the point.
The first ten levels are the pitch — after that, the meter quietly tilts toward whether you'd like to wait or pay.
FEATURES
The loop is the genre's standard, executed cleanly. Tap to cast, haul in a fish, sell at the dock, upgrade the boat, repeat. Once enough cash piles up you hire a crew that fishes while you're away, which is where the "idle" half of idle-tycoon kicks in. Offline earnings roll up in a summary when you return.
Progression branches across boat tiers, gear upgrades, captains with passive bonuses, and a prestige reset that trades current cash for permanent multipliers. New fishing grounds unlock at preset cash thresholds — Arctic, Tropical, deep-sea — each with its own sprite set and a fresh batch of upgrade walls.
Monetisation is the LionStudios template: a banner-style ad after most upgrade screens, opt-in rewarded videos that double offline earnings or grant a temporary multiplier, and a paid bundle store with boats, gem packs, and a no-ads option. Push notifications nudge you back when offline cash is "ready to collect".
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The first few hours are paced well. Upgrades land at a satisfying clip, the prestige meta has a clear shape by the time you hit it, and the art direction — chunky 3D fish, sunny water — holds up next to the bigger names in the category.
Rewarded ads are honest. Skip every one and the game still progresses; tap them and you get the advertised multiplier without a bait-and-switch. The no-ads IAP, when it's offered in the bundle store, is priced in the range a casual player can rationalise.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Past the early grounds the upgrade walls thicken in the way every idle tycoon's do, and the rewarded-ad cadence ramps to match. By the mid-game it's the difference between a five-minute session and a thirty-second one if you don't watch them.
There's no cloud save tied to Game Center on this build that survives a reinstall reliably — recurring complaint in recent App Store reviews. Lose the device, lose the prestige run. For a game that asks for weeks of compounding progression, that's the wrong place to be thin.
CONCLUSION
Worth installing if you want a clean idle game to dip into between other things and you're disciplined about the rewarded-ad funnel. Skip it if you bounce off prestige loops or you've already put hours into AdVenture Capitalist or Idle Miner Tycoon — the shape is familiar. Watch for whether Lion Studios ever lands a durable cloud-save story; until then, treat the runs as disposable.