Before games were only AAA or Indie, there was a middle ground. In this middle ground sat games of all kinds. It was a weird happy place that had everything from licensed titles to brand new games with brand new ideas. These were the B tier and it was a glorious mess of nonsense.
These B tier games were priced less than the average AAA title and you this enticed you to try something new and interesting. Granted, it could sometimes turn out to be a total garbage pit but for some people your garbage pit could be their game of forever. Anyway, Maneater, the Tripwire Interactive open world RPG where you play as a shark and eat people, reminds me of the age of Majesco and Topware.
Maneater is not particularly complex and it’s open world is actually pretty small but it hits just the right notes that there is something magical about it. The smile I had on my face as I crept up on some unsuspecting beach goers out for a swim was massive. I was acting out Jaws and it was perfect but then it got better. So much better.
The game kicks you off as a massive bull shark. She’s full grown and just a brutal beast. You kill a few swimmers and then take on your first shark hunter and OH NO! he kills you, guts you and pulls out a baby shark from your belly. This baby shark is able to escape, by biting off the shark hunter’s arm. From here on out, you’ll play as the baby shark and obviously the point of this all will be to get powerful enough to take on the hunter that killed your mom.
Baby shark isn’t very strong and you’ll struggle against larger predators but not for long. As you chow down on fish, turtles, and the occasional person the baby shark will get bigger and bigger. As you gain experience you’ll also evolve and be able to pick evolutions which work as a sort of loadout, and make you look infinitely cooler as well. Want to look like a living dinosaur skeleton, there is an evolution for that. Or maybe you want to be the Nicola Tesla of the ocean and shock everything around you with an electric discharge, there’s an evolution for that too.
Baby shark will grown and evolve until she becomes a mega shark and she’ll do this by terrorizing the sea life and people of the different districts in this faux version of Louisiana’s section of the Gulf of Mexico.
The game progression is literally just a checklist that needs to be completed to a certain percentage before one can unlock the next area. These objectives range from taking down the area’s apex predator to taking on hunting boats and destroying them. And when I say take on the hunting boats, think the ending of Jaws where the shark sinks the boat but instead of the shark getting blown up, the shark wins and gets to keep destroying everything in its path.
It’s all kinds of dumb but it also just feels right. It’s dumb fun that has a dumb story that allows you to do dumb things (at one point I flopped across a golf course eating the course patrons). It’s dumb and it is dumb that consistently escalates to a new level. But it’s perfect in that way. 10-15 hours of playing and you’ll have had your fill (and probably completed everything in the game). It gets right what it needs to and then gets out before you really start to get bored of the repetition.
