Maneater sees you, as a rampaging bull shark, ripping through boats, flopping up on shore to gobble up those unfortunate enough to get in the way, as well as contending with an obsessive shark hunter who will stop at nothing to gut you open. It’s chaotic, often buggy, filled with repetitive open-world busywork, but still grants an overally enjoyable experience nonetheless.
During and leading up to the release of the game, I sat at the sidelines unsure if I wanted to purchase Maneater, hearing somewhat mixed opinions that while the game was fun, it was often a one-note experience. Thankfully, I found it $20 off its purchase price and proceeded to dive in. This was also after hearing that the game saw a patch that fixed some overheating menu’s to pop up on Xbox One X, something that even saw Funhaus and ex-IGN staffer, Alanah Pearce to be unable to even stream the game as it would shut down and relay the message that her Xbox One X was overheating when it was not. Thankfully, this error among several others was patched in the latest update, and while most of my experience was largely bug-free, I had one that soured my time with the game greatly, but more on that later.
I’m going to stress something first off, Maneater is a blast. Regardless of the issues I’m going to dive into, and the countless problems with it. While I don’t think it’s worth the $59.99 CAD price point (I snagged it at $39.99 CAD), It can most certainly entertain you for around 15-20 hours if you plan on 100% the game as I did. The journey wasn’t always great, but there is still something very satisfying here that Tripwire Interactive has nailed, even if the game isn’t remarkably well made.
Maneater sees you on a revenge path against Scaley Pete, a redneck shark hunter who killed your mother. As he pulled you from her gutted stomach, you bite off his hand and spark a revenge story on both sides. Who knew I’d be playing another two-sided revenge story this month? What follows is a very light narrative on your journey to bulk up enough to take Scaley Pete on. You’ll eat everything that moves in an effort to age into a Mega Shark, pushing through adulthood into a massive beast that takes no guff from any sea-worthy threat. You’ll take on a variety of sharks, orca’s, and even a sperm whale as you earn new mutations, such as having rock hard skin, or bio-electric current flowing through your body.
Narrated by Chris Parnell of SNL and Archer, you’ll learn a few interesting facts about sharks, but also a lot of various comedic bits that are largely hit and miss. There are some hilarious mission names like “I’m a cave for you”, “Please Hammer, Hurt them.” or my personal favorite. “Oh-oh, better get Mako.” that made me chuckle pretty good. The writing is very hit and miss as well with a lot of cringe-worthy lines that don’t always utilize the well-known comedian that well. Most of the best comedy comes from the Landmark locations where you’ll track down the boat from Waterworld, the Banana stand from Arrested Development, to a certain Pineapple under the sea. Tracking down each and every one leads to a few laughs, but also a great way to unlock the Shadow gear, which I’ll be talking about soon.
The core story sounds good on paper, and there is one particular cutscene that actually had me gasp at how dark the narrative got. But, apart from that and its wildly predictable ending, the overall story is barely there during most of the game. In fact, out of the roughly 15 hours to wrap credits, there are maybe 15 minutes of the actual story. It’s shame the infamy hunters that you can track down are not part of the story but instead just serve as specialized hunters that upon defeat, trickle out upgrades, and some of the nutrient items you’ll use to upgrade your bull shark.
Upgrading the shark is the most impressive part of the game and one aspect that certainly needs more variety should Tripwire make a sequel. You’ll use a variety of resources that you’ll earn from completing quests, defeating infamy hunters, and from the nutrient caches that you’ll find scattered all over Port Clovis and its eight locations. These resources come in four flavors and each upgrade will use a different type. You can even get these nutrients from various fish, that have the icons of what they offer above their name. Each upgrade will use more and more nutrients as you level it up, but where this upgrade system disappoints is you only have three distinct styles to work towards; Bone, Bio-electric, and Shadow.
Bone is your hard-hitting form, allowing you to deal more damage upon ramming enemy boats or using your tail whip like a sledgehammer. It’s more for brute force and as you level it up, it gets far more lethal. Bio-electric allows you to be fairly durable, with emitting an electrical current through your body, letting you lash out with waves of electricity and allowing you to emit an electric aura when you trigger your special ability. Shadow is built around speed, and while I’ll talk a bit soon on how that’s largely useless, Shadow is largely great for tail whipping poison attacks and unleashing a very potent poison aura that can destroy extremely tough water-based threats. I found that the Bone build was good for taking on the boats and Infamy hunters, and when the threat was water-born, I would alternate between the other two depending on the threat. While you’ll want to swap back and forth to different builds, you can only do that in the confines of your safe zone, a grotto, that allows you to upgrade and equip different parts.
Apart from the Jaw, Head, Body, Fins, and Tail upgrades you can equip to your shark, you’ll have a variety of Organs to equip as well. These are essentially perks, and while you can only equip three at a time, there are 11 to collect; Advanced Sonar, Hearty, Amphibious, Mineral Digestion, Adrenal Gland, Fat Digestion, Protein Digestion, Mutagen Digestion, Subliminal Evasion, Reinforced Cartilage, and Brutal Muscles. These allow you to earn more health back on eating certain things, taking more abuse, and in the case of Advanced Sonar, being able to identify more things when you trigger your sonar ability, not to mention the cooldown is greatly reduced. All these upgrades and organs allow you to make a build that works for the job at hand, but I just wish there were more options for your shark body as three builds can feel a bit shallow in what they offer.
Now, I mention speed not being an issue and frankly, this game can get extremely chaotic as you bounce from boat to boat or try to wrestle with several of the game’s fishy bosses, but the movement underwater to actually getting away or even just to traverse the world can feel lethargic when every fish and their dog can swim circles around you. This is vastly apparent on any of the Apex Predator bosses where they swim twice as fast as you and while you have a dodge and a boost, it’s incredibly frustrating how slow you are when you want to be so much faster. Even when you try to level up your shark and equip a build solely around speed, this game can be awkwardly slow for what it aims to do. Battles are also not made any better by a camera that loves to bounce around and the lack of any sort of targeting system. Sure, you can get the camera to focus on a nearby threat, but it’s just to show where they are, it doesn’t “lock” on to them in the way you would want it to and since you move far slower than anything else in the game, you can lose your target far too easily and have to refocus on them again and again. With combat being 90% of this game, it can get incredibly frustrating to have to work that much harder to do something that should have been made far easier.
Combat has you ramming into obstacles, tail whipping, and using a mostly homing attack to bite. In fact, this homing attack can be used to get a tiny boost as you move, making it a small partial dash. You can latch your teeth down on a successful bite and shake the right analog stick to shake them around in your locked jaws, flooding the water around you in an explosion of blood. If you get bitten and locked in their jaws, you’ll perform the same option to escape, but given the speed of some enemies, you’re likely to just get caught up in their jaws the second you escape. Swimming could also be better as while you’ll aim in the direction you want to swim towards, there isn’t an easy way to just hit the top of the water without either going really slow or splashing up into the air and then pushing slowly to hit the surface. I wish there was a hold button context to rising or lowering and not just the directional systems at play.
Despite anything the game tries to do, it can get repetitive very quickly. In fact, you’ll be doing roughly five things all the time. There are side quests that usually involve killing ten or fifteen of something, killing mid-bosses and apex predators, tracking down nutrient caches, license plates, and landmarks, defeating infamy hunters, and then once those are all completed in a zone, you’ll move on to a short cutscene with Scaley Pete and begin that same grind again in a new area. This repeats for seven of the eight areas. There is no change to the formula or order; every single area attached to the story operates the same way and is just your typical Ubisoft-type icon-fest that feels like they auto-populated the area with busywork that is largely not fun. Side quests lack any weight when you’re tasked with killing 10 turtles for the 15th time or chomping down 15 party-goers on the beach for the 30th. I wish I could say there is at least one entertaining quest but there is just not even that. 95% of this game is open-world busywork with all the boxes ticked off of what you see in every other game.
Where Maneater is fun is when combat works. When you have a handle on the camera, your abilities, and are in the flow of making the game work as intended. Sure, some of the poor choices of how the game plays and various glitches and camera issues do hold you back from time to time, but the game is fun more often than it’s not. Now, I teased at the start of the review something that greatly soured my experience with the game and frankly, contributes to what I’ve scored it. At the time of publishing, there are some substantial glitches and bugs that cause a variety of sound issues when earning achievements, achievements not popping correctly, but there was one, in particular, that was so frustrating that I almost stopped playing the game entirely.
Once I hit Caviar Key, the 6th area in the game, it failed to save or record my progress for almost 2 1/2 hours. I died at the Orca as I wasn’t fully prepared for the battle, with how the camera just couldn’t keep up with him and that of just how much faster and stronger he was, but once I died, it put me back into the 5th zone with half of it not done. I lost all that progress. I worked my way back to where I was and the game froze just before I was about to take the Orca back on, with knowledge on how to cheese the fight. I lost those 2 1/2 hours yet again. I was livid. I shut the game down, stepping away from it for a few hours and then rebooted my console, and thankfully that seemed to fix the issue. I reattempted those 2 1/2 hours again, and apart from three separate crashes and some static sound issues, the game was able to record my progress and it was largely smooth sailing from there on. But still. having to replay the game for 5 hours to get back to a point where it should have saved is brutal.
Another big piss-off is the fact that while each zone is interconnected, you’ll get periodical loading screens that just pop up without warning. I’ve had them in the middle of high level infamy bosses and just random moments when I am snacking down on a variety of fish. Having a quick bite to earn back some health is one thing, having it during a fight with 5 different boats each with laser-guided hunters all wanting a piece of me while a hammerhead shark is nipping at my tail is downright frustrating to no end. Again, the game is fun, but man do you really need to look past some stuff to keep it entertaining. I also want to mention how bad the camera can be and this is largely in small confined areas such as small tunnels that plague each section as you swim through grates or into caves. It’s very easy to get the camera caught up humping the wall next to you instead of having it let you see where you’re going. It’s not the worst camera I’ve experienced in a game, but it certainly has issues.
Visually, the game is solid. The human cast doesn’t fare so great, but they are done in a cartoony style so they are not horrible, but they could have been much better. The star of the show, the shark, is pretty much perfect. The parts you equip really make her stand out and the world she inhabits is pretty dang gorgeous too. The bloodshed of chomping down strays on the beach is stunning, even if there are people just standing there partying while you’re eating their friends; the AI is not great, let’s put it that way. The audio isn’t anything to write home about, and Chris Parnell is ok here but feels incredibly wasted as there are only a handful of good lines for the actor to read, often having to do much of the heavy lifting to a mostly poor script.
I know I have detailed a ton of reasons not to play Maneater, but there is a fun game buried among them. The story is good on paper, but the execution and minimal stay it has here is a bit lacking, but that one scene still sticks with me. If you can find the game on sale or cheaper than what it’s going at then you’re going to have some fun. The chaos you create either flopping up on land eating random people is intoxicating, and the fast-paced infamy battles are super fun when you get a good rhythm going. It certainly is a game you need to learn to live with its problems, but there is a very enjoyable game here that I hope Tripwire gets to revisit again, just maybe work out those bugs first.
Maneater was purchased by the reviewer and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.