It's a concept so simple and enticing that it's shocking no one has done it before: a game that lets you roam the seas as a bloodthirsty, superpowered shark. While there have been titles that let you play as these doll-eyed predators, none have given players the kind of wanton freedom to devour everything and everyone in sight quite like Maneater does.

An open-world shark title is precisely the sort of goofy fun that we need in the world of video games. However, while it does a lot right in making you feel like an invincible murder-fish, Maneater has an assortment of technical and design flaws that cause the game to sink rather than swim.

Watch Out Boy, She'll Chew You Up

via Tripwire

The story of Maneater - yes, somehow this has a story - is about our titular shark and her experiences with a shark-hunter known as Scaly Pete. Pete is such a world-renowned shark-catcher that he's gotten his own Deadliest Catch-style reality show, which is the framing device for the game's plot. He ends up catching a giant shark, and as he guts her he discovers that it was pregnant with the shark that the player ends up controlling. As if killing our mother wasn't bad enough, he then cuts and scars the baby shark protagonist so he can identify her later. Our character then bites off Pete's hand, escapes into the water, and the quest for revenge begins.

The game as a whole has a goofy sense of humor that's pretty hit or miss, but is mostly tolerable and occasionally amusing. Saturday Night Live alum and Rick & Morty voice actor Chris Parnell is the narrator both for the fictional show - which is appropriately titled Maneater - and for our deadly exploits underwater. Most of his lines are only worth a slight chuckle, although there's a good joke snuck in every so often.

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Swim And Tear

Your goal in Maneater is to do as the title suggests: eat every man, woman, and sea creature within biting range. You swim throughout the waters of Port Clovis - which seems to be an amalgamation of Miami and New Orleans - eating humans and sea life, bashing stubborn prey with your tail, and trying to grow big and strong so you can get vengeance on anything with a pulse.

There are two main environments in Maneater: under and above the water. While underwater, you swim around eating fish and sea mammals and getting into fights with other tough deep-sea predators. You can skim the surface of the water in order to catch nearby humans and attack fishing boats. The actual combat isn't very deep, but controlling a shark as they rip through enemies can be pretty satisfying. Especially once your shark has grown up to become an adult with insane evolutionary abilities and can tear through boats and predators like a knife through butter. As you progress, your shark will even be able to stay on land for long periods of time which will allow her easy access to every golfer or beach-goer dumb enough to be near the ocean.

To further hammer home that this is Grand Theft Auto starring a shark, you can become wanted by eating enough humans, which will cause shark hunters to appear on jet skis and fan boats. In typical open-world game fashion, there are plenty of side missions, as well as objects to find across the map, such as crates of nutrients, famous landmarks of the area - which often tend to be pop-culture references to properties like Arrested Development and even a shout-out to Waterworld - and constantly spinning discarded license plates.

Gathering these collectibles as well as eating anything and everything you see will gain you more nutrients and mutagens to put toward leveling up your shark. There's a variety of silly abilities you can acquire and equip, such as electric teeth or advanced sonar. Once you've leveled up enough, your shark will transform from a young pup to the aquatic equivalent of Jason Voorhees.

Shallow Water

While Maneater provides the player with some ample opportunities to be a destructive apex predator, most of the actual story missions on the way to building your super-shark are pretty dull and repetitive. Throughout the campaign, there seemed to be only two objectives: destroy a target or eat a certain amount of something. Destroying a target typically means a boss fight with another predator, which can be exciting as you have to dodge and attack a bigger, more aggressive sea creature like an alligator or barracuda.

But as for the other objective, it feels like more than half of the missions are just "eat x number of something." Sometimes, I would complete a quest that told me to "eat 10 humans" only to swim to the next one and be told to "eat another 10 humans." As for other missions, you can substitute humans with catfish, seals, king mackerel, etc. I get that sharks exist to do nothing but eat and swim, but doing nothing but eating and swimming can become boring rather quickly.

The waters of Maneater can get pretty choppy for reasons other than marine massacres. The graphics aren't amazing, but the underwater portions can also be pretty breath-taking with well-animated sea-life, gorgeous sea caves, and ocean floors. But when the action picks up, the framerate takes a nosedive. It's very common for things to dip below 30 FPS and start to stutter, which can make combat feel less fluid and more cumbersome.

Nothing Is Safe, Not Even Your Save File

via Tripwire

Poor framerate is far from the worst technical problem with Maneater. One day, I turned the game on to discover that my entire playthrough had been completely wiped as if it never existed. So, hoping this was just a one-time glitch, I soldiered on, starting from scratch, re-leveling up my shark, and making it close to the end of the game. After a long day of playing, convinced that I had done enough for my progress to be safe, I exited to the main menu. However, there was a nagging voice in the back of my brain, screaming that something was wrong. Sure enough, I checked my save files and found this:

About 15 hours of progress completely lost. Around seven hours had been deleted prior to that. I learned the hard way that Maneater's auto-save functionality was completely busted with a massive bug that keeps erasing save data. What's worse, there was no manual save option.

Thankfully, Tripwire Studios has issued a statement on this matter, and a day-one patch is on the way to hopefully fix these problems. However, as someone who lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 hours of their life trying to be the best underwater killer I could be, this bug definitely negatively affected my time with Maneater.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Maneater can be a rip-roaring good time. Hopping around on golf courses while masticating retirees with my souped-up electro-shark was fun enough that I could somewhat forgive the game's lackluster story campaign. But it inevitably gets monotonous doing the same thing again and again, as well as hard to play with the annoying framerate issues. What tipped it over the edge was losing all the progress I spent hours making over a bug or design flaw that should have been caught much earlier in the game-making process. I know you probably shouldn't trust a shark, but I trusted this game to at least retain my save data. I believed in you, Maneater, and you broke my heart.

If the upcoming patch completely irons out the save data, framerate issues, and other technical problems then this could make for a decent bout of fun. Mindlessly chomping on fish while leveling up your shark to be even more murderous can make for an enjoyable albeit frivolous time. As of right now though, until Maneater's problems are definitively dealt with, it might be safer for players to stay out of the water.

A Playstation 4 copy of Maneater was provided to TheGamer for this review. Maneater is available on Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Maneater
Maneater

Maneater is an open-world RPG in which you play as the ocean's deadliest predator, a Great White Shark. As expected, you get to cause mayhem to civilization, even evolving into a massive, nightmare version of the shark.

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