Maneater

“Watch out boy she'll chew you up”

Shark lovers the world over have been clamouring for a title like 2006’s Jaws Unleashed for 14 years, there’s been nothing to fill the void except Hungry Shark on mobile, until now that is, with Tripwire and Blindside’s Maneater.

In many ways Maneater remains fairly true to Hungry Shark, despite having no affiliation. The premise of the game being to dine on the local food chain like a pre-diabetic fatty at an all you can eat shrimp buffet (disclaimer, there are no shrimp), in order to level up your shark from a puny pup to a mighty ermm… Mega Shark, perhaps the only thing that’s missing is a Gold Rush mechanic (the true Hungry Shark aficionado’s amongst you will know what that is).

It is of course unfair to liken Maneater entirely to a game that can be played with two thumbs, this comparison is reductive at best, but isn’t entirely untrue. Maneater has a lot of strengths and is for the most part an enjoyable experience.

Perhaps Maneaters’ biggest feather in it’s proverbial cap is the most important factor for a shark based game, the design of said shark. Seeing your shark level up and grow from a pup, to a teen, to an adult and eventually a “Mega-Shark” is incredibly satisfying and rewarding in equal parts. The feeling of increasing power is really tangible, to the point where you will find yourself gliding through the gulf with all the blase, “give a shit” attitude of a real life Great White in no time. However, ironically, this is the point at which the game becomes redundant and there are a couple of combinatory factors that will be touched on shortly, leading to this.

What really lifts the evolutionary experience is the addition of specific “mutagen” developments, throughout the course of the game you will gain access to 3 unique sets of enhancements, categorised under Bone, Bio-Electric and Shadow. The former sees you endowed with rugged bone armour plating, once you have the full set (Head, Tail, Fin etc.) it’s quite a site to behold, the same can be said about the Bio-electric and Shadow sets, each fully donned set of enhancements are aesthetically awe inspiring and even more glorious to behold in motion.

Equip the Bio-Electric set and when you dodge you pulse with electricity, almost warping ahead as a particle imprint of you is left behind, bestow yourself with the bone plating and you will spin violently as you dash, carving into wood, metal and flesh alike. These effects are incredibly pleasing to the eye but the real tragedy is they do very, very little to change how you play the game.

There is a combat system in Maneater, it’s not quite as simple as swimming in to your prey to devour them, Tripwire devs have given it the playful moniker “Shark Souls”, however, the reality is far from it. As Maneater is an “RPG”, again a contentious statement, predators and bounty hunters have levels, letting you know how good an idea it is to take them on. Take on a level 15 American Alligator as a level 3 pup and you will almost definitely find yourself belly up. Fighting predators boils down to a rinse and repeat ordeal of dodge and bite, and maybe tail whip (although it’s hard to recall a time where this ability had any real use). Every predator in the game, be they an Orca or a Hammerhead, essentially has the exact same attack pattern. They have their basic lunge and bite and their “empowered” charge, giving them the chance to grab you in a lockjaw and shake you like an espresso martini. Once you have this figured out, no subsequent encounter feels particularly tense (not to mention at any time you can just swim away, feed on prey and come straight back) and once you have levelled up and invested in to your mutagens, they are incredibly easy.

What does make combat in Maneater challenging, is the infuriating camera and horrendous lock on mechanic. During these underwater dogfights, your opponents will zip past you as you dodge an attack, you need to press R3 (on PS4) to lock back on to them, but if there are multiple predators around you it won’t always prioritise the correct one and there is seemingly no way of controlling this, to make matters worse there is no permanent lock on feature, pressing R3 only momentarily snaps your focus to your soon to be snack and to stay focused on them you will find yourself spamming the button whilst the camera spins around in a frenzied attempt to keep up.

For a reason beyond comprehension, the devs behind ManEater decided that being at surface level and being submerged should be two independent states. What does this mean? If you swim to the surface you will find yourself swimming in the classic “Jaws” fashion, your fin ominously cutting through the water as you stalk your prey, it’s again aesthetically pleasing, but you are locked in this position unless you press a button to manually choose to submerge again, when you are on the surface you lose practically all vision of what’s beneath you. This is frustrating enough when just traversing the map, but when it happens during combat, and it happens frequently enough, it’s hair pullingly aggravating.

It’s a shame that you are most prone to this affliction in the opening hour or so of Maneater, as you make your way through the swampy Bayou region, the water here is incredibly shallow, making it almost impossible to stay submerged, once you reach deeper waters, it’s much less of an issue, but these areas of the map aren’t accessible until some 7 or 8 hours in to the games campaign (you can swim practically anywhere from the start, but you will find yourself severely under levelled and unable to complete any missions as you need to progress through each region sequentially).

Whilst fighting other fishy foe can be frustrating and repetitive, it has a therapeutic quality to it, each creature you consume gives you one of or multiple types of nutrients which can be used to level up specific abilities and attributes like the bone plating for example, as well as giving you base xp towards growing your bull shark in size and power. But to initially unlock these abilities, you have to hunt your deadliest prey, man himself (and herself of course). Gobble enough sweet Sapiens and you will earn yourself a bounty, your prize being boat loads of angry rednecks armed to the teeth, eager to bag themselves a trophy. Kill enough of these cretins and 1 of 10 Bounty Hunters (they are so special they even get a name!) will enter the theatre of war, kill them and you will unlock a special something, (it could be something as significant as bio electric fins, or as benign as a nutrient boost when eating).

These fights are by far Maneaters’ most tedious affair. Bounty Hunters have 2 or 3 ways of attacking you, they can shoot you, they can throw depth charges and they can throw dynamite, even the special bounty hunters with their very own names wouldn’t dare break these rules of engagement, remaining resolutely nondescript. There are two ways to win these fights, you can jump up and grab a hunter straight off their boat or you can destroy the very boat itself, leaving it’s occupants flailing helplessly in the deep blue.

What makes this set up so tedious, is the bounty hunters shooting at you. When they take aim a reticule will appear on you with a rapidly decreasing circumference, signalling an oncoming volley, dodge at the right time and you won’t get hit, in theory it sounds like a fun mechanic but in practice it is sheer hell, because they NEVER STOP AIMING AT YOU. Seriously it’s like fighting 20 Roided up Rambo’s with access to such copious ammunition even Kim Jong Un would feel the bitter pang of jealousy. As a result, you will spend 99% of your time in these fights frantically dodging, if you are on the surface when doing this, the result is hilarious as your dodge sees you jump from the water and spin, spanning an incredible distance, over and over and over again. These encounters do see your otherwise largely redundant (albeit very cool looking) mutagen powers have a tangible effect. The Bone set is purpose built for taking on boats, ramming, and biting boats will have amplified damage but most importantly, dodging will now do damage as well. This is very useful, given that dodging is just about all you can do under constant fire.

Leaping out of the water is incredibly impressive, you can control your sharks body mid flight, allowing you to back and front flip through the air before plummeting back down and bizarrely you can actually triple jump, one jump will see you lift from the water but you can jump two more times quickly after using what one can only assume are pockets of warm air rising from the thermal currents in the ocean, one thinks. Either way Maneater isn’t a game designed to be taken seriously and it’s actually incredibly entertaining to leap some 20 feet in to the air before crashing back down on to a deck full of angry hicks. There are other ways of attacking Bounty Hunters and their respective boats, once you bite a large fish or human you can choose to fling them rather than chow down. Picking off a shooter in mid air before flinging him straight back at his buddies, or better yet one of their thrown explosives, is always fun but if you want to indulge in a little variety like this, you do so whilst being shot repeatedly and taking a “boat load” (sorry) of damage, because as before mentioned, they never, stop, shooting, at you.

Maneaters map is split in to 7 different locales, each area is distinct from the other to a degree and well designed, your travels will see you swim through murky, alligator infested swamps, underneath gargantuan oil rigs or through polluted waters, long forgotten since being turned in to a dumping ground. These different locales each offer a new biome of sorts, with unique wildlife to prey on, all of the creatures in Maneaters waters have been lovingly realised, the first time you come across a Sperm Whale or an Orca, is quite something, then inevitably you eat a lot of them and the magic is lost.

There is a thin narrative accompanying ManEaters 10-15 hour playthrough, but with the exception of 2 “boss fights” (“more boat fights” would be more fitting), it has 0 impact on your journey and will largely be out of sight out of mind for the better part. The concept of the plot is a TV Reality show, in which you are just as much the star as your arch nemesis, Scaly Pete, a veteran shark hunter with a French Louisiana drawl. The show is following him when he kills your mother and pulls you (in graphic fashion) out of her stomach, tossing you in to the river, but not before marking you with his knife (and losing his arm for the pleasure). Thus begins your epic quest for revenge, or rather, you scoffing your face for hours to get cool upgrades and scoff your face with bigger things without becoming the scoffee in the process, with about 5 or 6 cut scenes interspersing the action just to remind you that there is in fact a reason behind all of this.

Rather unexpectedly, Maneater actually delivers some poignant moments in these brief interruptions, as Scaly Pete gets lost in a reverie, grieving for his late father, or when he clashes with his son over his perceived weakness, whilst under that “scaly” (ok I’ll stop) exterior he really cares.

By far the best thing to come out of this “TV Reality show” theme is Chris Parnell’s (best known perhaps for his voicing of characters in Archer and Rick and Morty) wonderfully sarcastic narrative, a welcome addition every time he chimes in to provide an observation regarding the Bull Sharks dietary habits or the local populaces lack of regard for the environment. Only Parnell can tell us why he agreed to commit his name to Maneater, but any one who decides to play the game will surely have a richer experience for it.

If you have read this far, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game is not fun, incredibly boring and at times infuriating, but that’s not entirely the case. Being a bad ass shark, leaping 20 feet in the air, flinging half eaten humans in to the stratosphere and looking like evolutions’ irrefutable proof that God absolutely doesn’t exist are all thrilling, but they are cheap thrills and more importantly quick thrills, they wear off and once they have you need something with real substance to sustain you. Maneater just doesn’t have that substance.

This substance Maneater so craves and frankly so deserves, would best come in the way of mission variety, the things you can do, the inventive ways in which you can wreak havoc. Missions in Maneater solely revolve around eating, that’s it, it never ever gets more creative than that. Each locale has roughly 3 or 4 “missions” that are mandatory to progress the “story” and every one will see you having to eat 10 turtles, or 15 cat fish, or 5 divers. There are no caveats, no restrictions, no time limit, just go there, eat a bunch of that. It’s baffling, to think that you have a story about a freak of evolutions’ blood fuelled rage against humanity and you are repeatedly reduced to eating fish to pass checkpoints? Throughout Maneaters 7 locales, humans are omnipresent, as are their buildings, their theme parks, their boats, their homes. How hard would it have been to have missions where say, you had to bring down a Ferris Wheel? Or perhaps destroy 5 boats in a port in 2 minutes, to draw out the attention of one of Scaly Pete’s henchmen. This premise was a treasure trove that Tripwire failed to properly plunder and as a result we have a game that has so much potential and leaves us wanting so much more.

There are of course things to do other than the core missions, but they really only serve as filler, you can find car licence plates dotted around the map and find “locations” around each biome, like sunken ships, under water museums and crashed roller coaster cars with their unfortunate passengers skeletons still strapped in. The latter diversion is actually quite entertaining, again mostly due to Chris Parnell’s accompanying anecdote, amusing as always. You can also find gates that once broken will give you access to a network of sewer pipes, opening up new areas of the map and helping you find crates packed full of nutrients. Exploration is certainly encouraged in Maneater, but once you have fully evolved your Shark, there is really very little motive to do so.

This feels like a game we need more of, a mostly original concept (how original can you really be these days), full of new things for gamers to do and things to see and explore, but a lack of creativity and depth have dug Maneater an untimely watery grave. When you first begin playing, you can’t help but think that this might be the best game you will play for a long time, by the 5th hour you are starting to simply go through the paces, enjoying the spectacle that is watching your shark evolve and morph in increasingly grotesque ways, but by the 10th hour you are just pushing for the end credits, so you can write your review.

5.8/10