Experience the ultimate power fantasy as the apex predator of the seas - a giant Shark! Terrorize the coastal waterways. Tear swimmers and divers limb from limb, give the humans a reason to fear you! https://store.steampowered.com/app/629820/Maneater/_
Maneater is an open world action RPG, where you play as a bull shark that’s really angry at humanity. You spend most of your time eating your way through the food chain, from fish to humans and beyond. There’s a funny voiceover man in the documentary framing of the game, so it’s less macabre.
Maneater isn’t a game I’d normally go out and play. It was actually a Humble Choice purchase from before I knew you could skip months. But I’m glad I didn’t skip it, because it’s actually quite good fun.
So the action RPG part is quite fun actually- you unlock skills from doing… stuff. Like beating bosses, side quests, etc. and then as you level up you can equip more skills. You probably get more powerful too, but more importantly you get bigger, which is super cool when you’re a shark. That’s the other part, you’re a shark! Just as a concept I think that’s cool, and swimming around eating stuff is a nice unique gameplay element. “Open world” I guess. There are several areas that you can go through, in a roughly linear order, with lots of different quests to do in each area. So yeah I guess that’s a fair description.
The narrative framing of this being a documentary, and the inclusion of Chris Parnell as the narrator is just fantastic. It’s really funny, it’s quite dark, and it’s altogether just good. Although it does come with the sickest burn I’ve ever received from a video game.
Which for a person writing a blog with a T-Rex skull as it’s logo, yeah… But other than that, the story is both gripping and entertaining, and I wanted to find out how it was going to unfold.
As with most “open world” games, if you want to do everything it’s likely to get a bit bland. The side quests do get a bit repetitive as they’re all variations of the same couple of themes- eat this stuff, defeat this enemy, collect these collectibles, rinse and repeat.
Longevity wise, to do “everything” in the base game you’re looking at about 10 hours worth of gameplay. That’s not including a lot of just swimming around eating stuff which you could do for as long as you like.
Ultimately Maneater was a lot of fun for what it is, good story, decent gameplay, funny. The DLC looks like it’ll be even better than the base game, but I haven’t tried that yet.
