Maneater
PC, PS4, Xbox One
On the banks of a litter-strewn bayou, two chubby humans push an inflatable flamingo out into the water. Mere metres further out to sea, a juvenile shark has been grinding away for hours, completing arbitrary objectives that seemed to have been dropped into the ocean from an unreleased Tony Hawk’s game circa 2001, and now, with a sigh, turns its attention to the bipedal silhouettes wading nearer.
Welcome to Maneater, an open-world game that might be said to be groundbreaking, first in the sense that it centres around a shark’s adolescence and ascendancy up the food chain, and second that said shark is also the star of a reality TV show. Truthfully,
Breath Of The Wild won’t be losing any sleep over it, but you have to hand it to the developers for at least delivering something novel.
Maneater’s underwater sandbox exists at the polar south of Abzû. Where the latter focussed on exploration for its own sake, here the world map is cluttered with collectibles and missions. Its developers liken it to GTA with a protagonist who just happens to be a shark, referring to a heat system that brings hunters after you as you feed on humans. It’s a comparison which reveals itself to be increasingly generous the more you play. In truth it’s more like an underwater Far Cry, placing the emphasis on harvesting the area for upgrade resources via a handful of mission types, which vary only in the targets they ask you to mash the attack button near.
What adds interest to the grind of seeking out ten catfish to eat, or beating the apex predator of the map region, is an evolution conceit in which the component parts of your various meals become fuel for growth, upgrading stats and gaining new abilities like sonar. It would be a cold-blooded being indeed who felt nothing the first time they ate an alligator after being terrorised by them for so long as a younger shark. And the bizarre cable TV presentation lends a cockeyed charm, with a voiceover narrating your actions and handycam-style dispatches from your various hunters building a plot of sorts. But they’re not enough to offset the repetitive missions, and a limited control set that allows little variation in combat against human or sea-dwelling foes.
Before long, you’re cruising the polluted waters as dispassionately as your avatar, killing without feeling, and then setting the next objective marker in a similarly dead-eyed manner. In that way at least, Maneater is a success. But its bayou is throttled not just by plastic bottles and rusty cans, but by endless identikit markers and missions, and a lack of creative execution. Plenty to sink your teeth into, then, but for a game where you play as a shark, we expected more bite.