Maneater
A single-minded machine of delightful destruction.
You’re going to need a bigger shark. When you start out in Maneater, the open-world bull shark adventure that’s all about wreaking bloody vengeance, you’re just a pup. You’re able to crunch through a few catfish and turtles but still at risk from barracuda and shark hunters. Progress in this game is marked by furious, joyous binge eating of everything in sight, allowing your shark to gain body mass, age up, and take on bigger and bigger prey. Like its hero, the game is a single-minded machine of delightful destruction, and a piece of undeniable, over the top entertainment.
The game guides you through this progression with missions. Spoiler, all the missions involve killing and eating things, and not much else. You’ll have to eat a certain number of humans hanging out on a beach, or take down a particular boat, or kill a quota of seals, grouper, or hammerhead sharks.
Every area also has an Apex Predator, a gnarly looking barracuda or orca say, that will provide a challenge. The game also fills the world with collectibles - nutrient caches to help you bulk up, landmarks to seek out, license plates to collect - that you can hunt down at your leisure. It might sound repetitive, and it can be, but it’s so much fun to launch your shark into a gang of screaming ravers or to savage an inflatable unicorn and its passengers that the urge to put the pad down just never quite seems to hit. It’s helped by the genius addition of a wildlife documentary-style narration provided by Chris Parnell - Jerry Smith from Rick and Morty, Dr. Leo Spaceman on 30 Rock - that talks you through every landmark, story beat and discovery.
This is no worthy exploration of man’s cruelty to the natural world, and I suspect marine biologists would have something to say about much of the science, but it’s the perfect distraction from a world gone mad, and weirdly therapeutic.
A salty, sometimes silly, chum bucket of fun.
Rachel Weber