The new title from Tripwire Interactive (Rising Storm, Killing Floor), is a slight departure from the FPS fare that they often deal in. Maneater will see you control a bull shark from its conception to its final evolution as you swim around its Cajun bays and bayous.
Whether you are finding collectibles, eating mahi-mahi or flopping around on a beach, massacring the humans on them; Maneater is your free game with PS Plus for January on PlayStation 5, so read this before adding it to your library.
Life’s a Beach and Then You Clear One
The opening hour of Maneater introduces you to the game’s main progression system. This sees you farm different mutagens from different creatures, which will allow you to upgrade the different evolutions you collect. Combining this with some genuinely difficult enemies like barracudas or alligators that attack wildly and ferociously, Maneater starts well.
Unfortunately, as you reach around the 3-hour mark, no enemy in the game will come close to bothering you ever again. As soon as you reach adulthood or even upgrade a couple of decent evolutions, you are equipped to thrash great white sharks around in your mouth like a dog-toy. Before you even discover 50% of the game’s map, you will likely be max level with every single objective quickly becoming terribly repetitive and trivial to complete with no motivation from the game’s systems.
Role in the Bayou
Despite the progression system being rendered irrelevant around halfway through the experience, it does have some interesting ideas. You begin to find upgrades for your shark from completing certain objectives or killing hunter bosses. These upgrades can be attached and swapped around on your shark, equipping you with different bonuses for different occasions.
The game features Grottos, small glowing caves that allow you to fast travel and more importantly equip or upgrade your evolutions. Here you can spend the different categories of mutagens and minerals that you’re eating will give you, such as fats, proteins, or a more mysterious green mutagen. Different evolutions require different resources from this pool, making for an early game reference when hunting prey.
Boring Food
Combat in Maneater is woefully shallow, despite being propped up by the difficulty of the first few hours. You will eventually gain access to special abilities dependent on your equipped evolutions, but this doesn’t make much of a difference.
Around 3 hours in you will ascend to adulthood and combat changes for the worse. The drastic lowering of the difficulty around this point, dilutes the combat system to the frantic press of one button. You will press R2 to quickly consume genuinely anything in your path, and even use the same action when finding the many collectibles dotted throughout the map.
The fights with hunters are especially tiresome and can consist of 15 minutes of pressing one button, whilst the camera struggles to keep up and display anything of worth.
Murky Waters
This version of Maneater is in fact a PlayStation 5 game. That is despite its visuals being more reminiscent of a PlayStation 3 game. Character models are very poor and animations even amateurish in some of the more minor cutscenes. The waters themselves are uninspired and repetitive, although the overland world can catch your eye at times.
The story that attempts to direct the game is so boring, pointless, and off the mark that it becomes tempting to skip these parts. It tries to mimic a documentary about a shark hunter and his son, whilst they try and find you.
In game, there is a narrator who sounds like he was taken from America’s Funniest Videos. For a time, this is a surprisingly effective way of directing you through the game. Towards the end of the game, you will likely be bored of the repeated quips and outdated humour though.
Fall from Grace
For Tripwire Interactive to release such a poorly designed and unpolished experience, it’s very disappointing. Although not with the pedigree of other studios, Killing Floor 2 in particular is a tight and beloved experience with a lot of fans excited for the future of the series. So, for Maneater to come out on a next-gen system and deliver this experience, it can be worrying for fans of the studio.
Some people may enjoy the simple collectathon focus at the game’s core. Additionally, the trophy list is satisfying and easy to achieve. This may be enough, especially as a free game through PlayStation Plus. However, aside from that, Maneater is unremarkable.
