Game Review - Maneater

Game Review: Maneater by Tripwire Interactive
Score: +5/-2

I got the intriguing Maneater game free from the Epic Games Store this week -- If you don't already know, the Epic Games Store gives away full titles every week, and not cheesy indie titles either.

Swimming-underwater games are few and far between, and if you seek them out you may well have tried ABZU (also available from the Epic Games Store). Maneater looks and plays better than ABZU, plus it offers more excitement than swimming around as you get to eat a wide variety of things as a shark. Yes, including people.

And if you end up really liking this niche title, there's even a sequel!

Experience the ultimate power fantasy as the apex predator of the seas - a terrifying SHARK! Maneater is a single player, open world action RPG (ShaRkPG) where YOU are the shark. Eat! Explore! Evolve!

• +2 Points for the sheer novelty of not just being a beautiful diving simulator, but the opportunity to play a shark.
• +1 Maneater features lush environments easily on par with or better than most open world games. If you can suffer through the boring gameplay, you can swim and even leap out of the water to various beautiful open world environments.
• +1 Swimming as a shark is very well done, not clunky at all considering 3-D movement plus iconic "shark" things such as swimming at the surface and showing an ominous fin cutting through the water.
• +1 You can ultimately be "more than a shark" with bizarre mutations. Without this, honestly the game would have little to look forward to, despite the gross implausibility of it all.
• -1 The tutorial is solid, but once you are past that and into the start of actual gameplay, things simply bog own into boring grind right away. To evolve, you have to eat. And eat. And eat. And very quickly it gets really boring really fast.
• -1 The pacing is really slow and there's very little to hook you into wanting to discover more story.

Overall I think Maneater is a very niche game, yet one done very well. It is sadly killed by the story pacing, but if you are not playing it for that, but the rare experiences / genre that is simply so far in video games, then it won't matter so much.