Maneater is really a shark simulator survivor game developed and published by Tripwire Interactive. You are taking the reins of the shark while you eat, swim, and fight the right path through the game’s many waters. The Maneater Switch edition brings the game to a mobile platform for the first time.
This may be the type of game that will have sustained me through long car rides and waiting rooms like a kid. It’s simple in concept but tough when you’re actually playing. As a shark, you have a few tricks your sleeve to consume fish, people, and other things comes your way. There’s a plot, but this isn’t truly the type of game where you remember what is happening within the story between cutscenes. Instead, your primary focus is biting, breaching, and slapping things around to amass nutrients that make you stronger, mutations that give all types of advantages, and ultimately, survive against bigger and stronger enemies.
The game might have stopped at just being a static shark character. But I really understand the system of leveling up and growing. It adds both a motivation structure towards the game to keep you completing objectives and exploring the world for collectibles and bigger fish to fry. This was the sport aspect that kept me most motivated to keep going, much more than the mission objectives themselves. This is because I discovered myself very quickly outmatched by some nasty alligators. They took me out almost immediately initially. Still, as I kept respawning and finding out how to fight them better, how you can heal along with other smaller fish between bouts, and that I needed to gain levels before you take them on, it became achievable.
I was actually rather impressed by the visuals of Maneater as well. The graphics tend to be higher definition than I'd have expected. Where I figured they could be somewhat blocky or polygonal, it’s fairly smooth. The environments too are pretty fleshed by helping cover their enough to appear different from one another. However, they think too large and empty with increased interesting things within the good distance compared to the immediate environment.
The controls are quite frustrating, unfortunately. Foremost, the only way to swim up and down is by using the right stick. It’s not natural, also it makes navigating, especially during fights, awkward and hard. Also, the dodging and slapping moves appeared to stop working after a point, which is far too simple to go into breaching mode with only one method to get free from it, pressing Y. It had been very distracting the majority of the time, particularly when I rarely ever actually breaching purposely. If only there have been a button command to breach the same way there is to submerge so that it couldn’t get forced on me constantly. I appreciate that theoretically, there are so many different moves that you can do, but ultimately it simply felt like I only used the biting and couldn’t even get other moves to work.
The voiceover also quickly became grating. It’s essentially narrating what you’re doing but kind of giving odd shark facts? But they’re not necessarily interesting facts? Progression also felt too slow. There are not exactly schools of fish swimming around to munch onto help build your nutrients up, therefore it all is dependant on finding caches and attempting to fight impossibly tough enemies for bigger experience boosts. The first progression is locked behind reaching a certain level, but reaching that level was hard and not particularly fun or natural. And that insufficient fish itself just made the sport feel even more empty than the lack of exciting environment already contributed.
The Maneater Switch edition is the type of game that, like a kid, I'd have played in a friend’s house and thought it was so cool but probably have rarely played basically owned it myself. It’s interesting and unique a good enough concept with a few gameplay elements that keep it from being only a straightforward game or perhaps a straight-up simulator. It’s polished in some regards but rather empty in others-fun for some time, but ultimately, not the most captivating thing on the market.
The Maneater Switch edition is available on May 25th. These days it is available on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
