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Maneater shred video5/10/2023 ![]() The vast majority of the game’s locations are realistic and a little dull, and then you stumble on Spongebob Squarepants’ house and any pretense of the game being serious goes out the window. Then there’s the story of Scaly Pete, which is violent and tragic and it’s not clear if you’re supposed to hate Pete, pity him, laugh at him, or some combination of the three. The game has a narrator who is ostensibly narrating the reality show Scaly Pete is on, but while most of his comments are sarcastic there’s also a bunch of material about the ecological problems humans provide and a few shark facts. Jaws Unleashed played the material absurd and over the top, but Maneater tries to be a bit more serious…most of the time. Of course Maneater isn’t the first shallow action game, but it’s also surprisingly bland for a game about a killer shark. Orcas don't hunt in pods in this game but they can bounce you out of the water, which is at least a change from most combat. It’s a small move list and combined with the simple and monotonous enemies and repetitive gameplay scenarios it makes for an experience that doesn’t change much as you play. You can swim, thrust forward, bite, tail whip, jump out of the water or on land, and dodge and that’s pretty much it. What you don’t get are any new skills, aside from certain evolutions giving you the ability to use a chargeable super move that doesn’t do a whole lot, or changes to how your shark plays. The sameness would perhaps be less of a problem if the game had a bit more complexity, but the RPG elements are minimal here, with a basic leveling system that I hit the cap of by the 7th of 8 areas in the game, and a set of “evolutions” that function like equipment, with upgradeable bonuses to specific attributes like bite damage or the amount of health you get from eating, which function more or less like equipment in a light RPG game. ![]() This is the same moveset you'll be using in the same ways throughout the entire game. ![]() The game starts with a tutorial that teaches you a basic moveset for your shark. The boats and weapons the hunters use change as you advance your levels of infamy, but their behavior and the strategies you use against them don’t, except for a total of three boss battles, all of which feature the same basic added mechanics. Certain areas require advancing up enough infamy levels to kill a specific hunter in order to advance, though you can lure them out and kill them whenever you want. If you kill more than a few humans at a given time then hunters will descend on your area like cops in a GTA game, and if you kill enough of them you’ll get a named hunter with a short intro cut scene to fight. Each area has a slightly different array of aquatic life to eat, a different aesthetic and theme, and a boss “apex predator” of the area, but it all plays out the same way. In the first area you swim around, complete a set of straightforward objectives like chomping a bunch of a specific type of fish in a specific area, flopping up on shore to kill some humans, locating landmarks or whatever, until you complete a list of objectives, trigger a cut scene featuring Scaly Pete, and then move on to the next area to repeat the process. Everything works in Maneater, and on the PS5 it can look lovely at certain points, but the game is overly simple and doesn’t change substantially from beginning to end. Maneater feels like an overly faithful remake of a PS2 game, which is ironic because the most famous PS2 era shark game, Jaws Unleashed, is a much better game in many ways. The problem comes with how shallow the whole thing is, pun intended. You eat a lot of sea life and people, discover hidden caches of protein and various landmarks around the relatively compact open world, and even get to do a little customization of your shark along the way. You do indeed take control of a baby shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo) and grind it up into a mega predator in order to avenge the mommy shark. Maneater technically makes good on this idea. Seems like the perfect set up for a great video game! A shark fin, a pool of blood on the ocean's surface and a South Florida City. During the course of the game you hunt prey, both finned and two-legged, and build up your shark into a giant powerhouse of the deep to exact revenge on Scaly Pete and reclaim your rightful place at the top of the food chain. Pitched as a ShaRkPG, you play a baby shark ( doo doo doo doo doo doo) cut out of her mother’s stomach by a vicious reality tv shark hunter named Scaly Pete, and marked as the trophy for a future episode.
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