Maneater places you into the fins of a giant shark that terrorizes swamps, beaches, and a variety of locales that sadly turns into a slog with every passing hour of gameplay because the participant tears their manner via wave after wave of fish, shark hunters, alligators, and a variety of repetitive challenges that may convey nothing new to the desk. Over the course of our 10-plus hours with Maneater, we undoubtedly felt a sinking feeling as we realized that the game exhibits you almost every part it has to supply when you end the minutes-long tutorial.
Maneater is an action role playing game that sees your shark attempting to gain revenge for the lack of its mom by the hands of a shark hunter named Scaly Pete. On your quest for vengeance, you will chew your manner via a whole bunch, if not 1000’s, of aquatic life in addition to human beings sadly sufficient to be in your manner. Your shark will stage up, gaining unusual new mutations that actually separate it from a variety of its fellow big sharks seen within the leisure business.
The aesthetic of Maneater plunges you into what is essentially a B-movie plot with one of many strengths of the game coming within the type of the narrator, actor Chris Parnell. The actor’s Hollywood resume consists of the likes of Rick and Morty, Archer, Saturday Night Live, and 30 Rock, and whereas he presents up fairly a number of hilarious one-liners describing landmarks and the overall adventures of your nice white shark, he cannot break up the monotony of the boring gameplay that requires you to persistently hammer on the bumper in your controller.
The story has you following together with the offspring of a shark who terrorized the beachside throughout your time with the tutorial, snacking down targets as you utilize vitamins and mutagens to stage up your killer of the deep into rising from “baby” to “elder.” Maneater seems like a video game that prides itself on missed alternatives, with each time a participant expects some new gameplay mechanic, they’re left wanting. Every undersea battle devolves right into a wrestle with the game’s digital camera, as we discovered ourselves merely hammering away on the “chew button,” frantically hoping that the goal reticle would keep on an enemy alligator lengthy sufficient for us to get in a variety of hits to stage up to a degree the place the enemy creature would require us to hit the button much less typically.
An ideal instance of the game’s missed alternatives comes within the type of shark hunter bosses. In the same construction to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption collection, when your shark eats sufficient people, they grow to be increasingly of a risk, with stronger hunters being despatched your manner. These bosses mainly don’t have anything that separates them from the traditional shark hunters you encounter exterior of a short paragraph of again story connected to their profiles within the pause menu and a fast five-second intro that has them holding one thing like a cellphone or a bottle of liquor earlier than leaping right into a battle. To offer you an instance of their lack of uniqueness, we discovered ourselves eliminating these bosses and solely discovering we had completed so after checking their profiles within the menu to double-check that they’d actually been eaten.
The Apex Predators aren’t a lot better, merely being bigger variations of the creatures of the deep that you’ve got encountered earlier than. Encountered alligators within the bayou? Well, get able to combat a much bigger alligator because the boss. Tore via barracuda close to the golf course? Here comes a much bigger barracuda. On and on it goes till you merely resign your self to the limitless purgatory of button mashing to make a battle go that a lot sooner.
Don’t get us flawed, watching your shark develop from a “toddler” to a “megalodon with bone fins and electrical tooth” is a sight to behold, however it in the end would not really feel definitely worth the repetitive hours that one has to place in, to say nothing of the game-crashing glitches it’s possible you’ll encounter alongside the best way as we did. The thought of enjoying as a large shark is an efficient one, however Maneater simply is not in a position to capitalize on it.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Maneater is scheduled to launch for Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch on May 22nd. A PlayStation four code was supplied by the writer for the aim of this assessment.
