Maneater (PS4)

Some games aren’t about intricate stories, diverse goals, or competitive gameplay. Some are just about giving you a chance to do something you can’t in real life, and much like how Bee Simulator taps into the strange but interesting desire to live life as a bee, Maneater provides a chance to go wild as a shark. Higher production values means Maneater outshines the humbler honeybee game in what it can offer, but it takes things a step further as well. By choosing to embrace the fact most players will come to the game looking for a ridiculous power trip, Maneater is unafraid to throw in strange and interesting additions to your virtual adventures as a bull shark.

One of the most interesting choices is how the game chooses to present its plot, Maneater actually referring to an in-universe reality TV show similar to the kind you might find on Discovery Channel or History Channel. In this show, a camera crew follows the shark hunter Scaly Pete as he catches and kills his prey in the fictional Port Clovis bay. After catching a particularly troublesome shark, he finds its pregnant with a pup, marking the baby with his knife so he can catch it once its grown. The little shark bites off his hand though, making a break for freedom and filled with the desire to avenge its mother and its mutilation. This newborn shark is the one you take control of during the adventure, and while you participate in and follow its growth as it travels between seven distinct areas of the Port Clovis region, Scaly Pete and his show are what really carries the adventure. Rather than being a shallow quest for revenge, you routinely get check-ins with Scaly Pete, and while he seems like a clear cut villain at first, the game takes an unusual turn and actually makes him somewhat sympathetic. He’s still boorish and unrepentant about how he treats aquatic life, but we begin to learn about his family life and actually see a slightly soft side to the shark hunter despite still being fit for the antagonistic role.

The televisions series Maneater isn’t just a chance to get to know your surprisingly interesting enemy though, it colors the entire experience with a sarcastic sense of humor and barefaced acknowledgement of how awful the people of Port Clovis are. A narrator chimes in frequently to keep the game from being just sound effects and understated background music, introducing new areas with scathing commentary on how self-absorbed the people living in the area are and pointing an unrepentant lens at how happily these people pollute the waters. While the degradation of our waters is certainly concerning in real life, the cavalier attitude towards filling the ocean with debris and trash manages to let different areas of the undersea play area feel distinct, there even being areas flush with radioactive substances and waterways choked with garbage. The game does achieve some area diversity with other ideas like having a bayou be the starting area and channels serve as a good break away from the openness of the ocean areas, but the game still scatters enough chances to beach yourself to cause some terror and places plenty of interesting and quirky landmarks to keep giving your narrator topics to be smarmy about.

When it comes to how Maneater plays, it’s not quite as creative, but it’s still serviceable nonetheless. Your shark’s movements takes a bit to get used to, not only because locking onto potential prey or aggressive opponents is difficult and unreliable, but because the swimming controls themselves are a little funky. You can jolt up and down a bit in the water and point your shark around with the right control stick to change depth, and at first, even though you’re a small fry, you can definitely feel the limitations of your body. Acclimatizing to it will occur with some commitment, but the speedy swim is surprisingly slow and pulling off a successful jump out of the water with any height remains difficult until you start getting the upgrades that let your shark literally do extra jumps in the air. The most important part of the game though, sinking your teeth into whatever you want to tear into, is fairly easy, your shark lunging at whatever you’re pointing towards. Be it easily eaten fish, an angry enemy shark, a hunter in their boat, or unsuspecting humans on a beach, biting is rarely a problem, but how easy eating them is varies.

Maneater, surprisingly, features role-playing game mechanics, your shark leveling up by completing quests, finding items, and consuming prey. This is how your shark goes from a whelp to a colossal terror of the sea, and the other aquatic life all have their own experience levels that determine how easily you can consume them. Low leveled fish are perfect fodder for feasting, the player recovering some life, gaining some experience, and collecting materials that go into the upgrade system where your shark can gain some incredibly unrealistic abilities. Flesh made of stone, teeth with electrical shocks, and other strange upgrades make you a more efficient killer or help feed into other things like how much health you gain from a kill or how long you can survive outside of the water without needing to go back in to breathe. You can always fight above your weight class, but you’ll be hit harder and deal less damage if there’s a big level difference and you’re lacking in upgrades. At first, an alligator is an intimidating challenge, and barracudas can actually be a bit pesky. Later on though, you can face off with other sharks and even take on the likes of orcas and sperm whales as you grow to absurd sizes. You pack a tail slap to help if your teeth can’t dig in and thrash your foe about for damage, this attack mostly useful for smacking a smaller animal at things like the special boat equipment that electrifies the water. Your teeth are always your best tool though, and this can sometimes lead to combat boiling down to chaotic biting as the camera whips around and struggles to keep up with it all.

There’s a lot of dumb fun in Maneater and it definitely scratches that itch to be a man-eating shark at points. There’s always the option to drop whatever you’re doing and start attacking beachgoers, drawing in hunters to face off with and continuing to build your infamy, but even this visceral and simplistic fun shows one of Maneater’s weaker sides. There are special hunters that will only attack your bull shark once she’s caused enough trouble, and even at max level, it can be tedious to try and draw out these special hunters, their mutation rewards one of the few ways to unlock new abilities and thus leaving you without some of the most interesting ones until you put in a lot of time provoking people. Later hunters are fairly tough too, meaning you can’t feasibly fight them until you’ve bulked up considerably, and even when it comes to unique underwater prey like the area specific Apex Predators that are twists on the local predators, your fights boil down to a lot of teeth gnashing and very little else. You might retreat to eat and some dodging can help you avoid their own biting, but the battles take a long time to evolve into something more involved and even then it’s mostly just adding things that don’t shift the action around much. It is still fun to see your attacks gradually tear down a mako shark until it’s nothing but a head inexplicably still fighting you, and the animations for eating things are often flashy and satisfying, but few fights really pack the punch you’d hope to find in a game that goes on for quite a while.

Each region of the Port Clovis area has plenty to do to match its open world design, but despite being able to search for nutrient caches, landmarks, and license plates, the quests that tie into story progression are surprisingly bland. Many take the shape of going to a certain area and eating a certain amount of a creature, and while the game will usually stick something angry in that area to put up a fight, snatching up a bunch of sea turtles in your mouth for the fifth time isn’t really more interesting than it was the first. The ocean has enough busy work to work towards, but save a few skirmishes with capable hunters or big animals, Maneater can’t really concoct much to do with its structured content. It does seem to be relying a fair bit on you finding your own fun, and going buck wild as a bull shark does satisfy some primal urges, but the quests you need to do to get to new areas and get upgrades are surprisingly dull.

THE VERDICT: Maneater promises an over-the-top shark game and delivers on it fairly well. Irreverent humor crops up constantly, the shark itself is a perfect killing machine, and the game has no qualms against throwing in absurd scenarios like fighting off a sperm whale or giving your shark electric teeth. For all the fun touches it has though, the RPG progression necessitates engagement with quests that can’t match the level of creativity found elsewhere, and most of the structured content outside of checking in with the surprisingly interesting antagonist boils down to boring busy work. You can make your own fun in Maneater and occupy your time with tasks on the side, but the progression is a drag, meaning the fun touches are mired by the consistent need to do vapid quests rather than reveling in the visceral action inherent in the shark play.

And so, I give Maneater for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. Maneater finds itself in a pickle where some of its worst content is its required content. If you want to explore more of the ocean and find more humorous situations or you want to have your exciting rampages where you fight off shark hunters or face off with the toughest sea creatures around, you need to first build up your shark to the point it’s tough enough to do so, and that requires the bland trips to bite into a certain type of fish a certain amount of times. The side activities are definitely good at diminishing the time you’d otherwise spend just making bland forward progress, the player able to focus on the less pressing goals to take a break from chomping down on a set amount of beachgoers, but because the combat is so simple as well, Maneater still doesn’t exactly shine even when it’s in its element. It’s thrilling to just be this powerful aquatic hunter at times and that carries a lot of the moments where the player is in charge of what they wish to do, but considering all of the thought put into area design and the quips of the game’s narrator, it’s a shame that the main quests are so brainless. Mindless carnage is definitely part of the appeal of being a shark, but eating 12 groupers is not the right kind of mindless.

Much like its unofficial cousin Bee Simulator though, Maneater is a fine fit for providing the main reason you’ve come to play it. Maneater won’t draw in the crowds with its RPG mechanics or progression systems, it’s here to give you a chance to go wild as a man eater, and with video game systems that back it up and enhance it at parts, it delivers on that just enough that it can still entertain despite requiring plenty of moments were exhilaration is put aside in favor of practical tasks. After playing Maneater you will probably only remember the sense of humor and insane moments the shark attacks allow for, but that doesn’t change the fact you had to push through a lot of plain play to get to those standout moments.