Grab your favorite beverage; the Xbox has its first fishing simulation game. While fishing sims are an often mocked genre, few things beat the tranquility of making the fish lunge for your carefully chosen lure, or the excitement of hauling in a big one. Pro Cast Sports Fishing Game provides these with some nice perks such as upgrading your equipment, but in an imperfect environment with sub par graphics and some truly stunningly awful audio.

Pro Cast starts out by letting you choose from 3 main characters; a hip raver-type guy with yellow glasses, a chubby bearded German sportsman, or a young woman with an exposed navel ring. This choice has no real effect on the game, it's just who you'll be looking at when you land a fish. After that it's time to turn off the music. The rest of the audio is ok, with a cheerful man over pronouncing English phrases as an announcer and some decent splash and reel in sound effects, but the music is incredibly horrible. In Free Fishing Mode you are treated to a loop of what sounds like the collaboration of two musicians, one being a club kid and the other being a monkey with an out of tune piano. After you've saved yourself from the music then it's time to go fishing.

You can choose between Free Fishing, Arcade, and Simulation modes. Free fishing is basically a practice mode, where you go to a spot and just cast with no pressure. Unfortunately, Free Fishing is rendered irrelevant in Simulation Mode, which offers the same stress-free fishing with the added bonus of getting points for each fish caught based on their rarity and size. Simulation is also where you can enter Tournaments. You have to buy your way into a tournament using points that you gathered from fishing. Once in, you fish, looking for the biggest and rarest fish you can find, and as long as you land in the top ten you can progress to the next round. Arcade mode lets you compete against the computer for how many fish you can catch in a short period of time. This can net you big points.

Points are used in the Fishing Store, where you can buy new lures, rods, reels, boats, and lucky caps. When you start the game you have a pretty narrow selection of lures, which can make Arcade Mode and the tournaments difficult at first. Once you buy some new line and a few more lures, however, you should be ready to go. Pro Cast is not a difficult game, almost all the challenge in finding a fish, then teasing it into biting. Once you have the fish hooked it's almost impossible to break the line and lose the fish. Bigger fish put up more of a struggle, but the tension bar gives you plenty of warning when you are pushing things too far.

Unfortunately, Pro Cast Sports Fishing Game doesn't really live up to the promise of the Xbox. The graphics are not very eye catching; in fact, in some cases it's downright drab. While it's nice to see some clutter like seaweed under water, the fish themselves are rather simplistic. Almost all the fish are bass or relatives of the bass, so they look very similar to each other, and the only model differences in a species are for size. When you land a really large fish, a giant comical spray of sphere-shaped water greets you. When you are on the boat just zooming around, the environment looks nice, with decent water effects and foliage. Once you go underwater to follow the lure, though, be prepared for a sparse area with maybe a few rocks, or a log, and lots of blue fog. The areas you are allowed to fish in are rather claustrophobic; you are not allowed to have free reign of the lake but instead are kept in small areas by a glowing red barrier.

Sadly, there is no multiplayer component to the game at all, which really tears a chunk out of the replay factor, but it's still a good, relaxing game to pick up after a long day at work. If you have an Xbox and have been dying for a little fishing simulation to relax with, Pro Cast Sports Fishing Game can fill that niche. However, this is a fairly simplistic game and is not for the hardcore sportsman looking for a super realistic simulation.