1. Elite Dangerous - PC2. Soldier of Fortune - PC3. Star Wars: TIE Fighter: Defender of the Empire - PC4. Star Wars: TIE Fighter: Enemies of the Empire - PC5. Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter: Balance of Power - PC6. Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance - PC7. Phoenix Point - PC8. Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter - PC9. Descent II - PC10. Inbento - Switch11. Ori and the Will of the Wisps - XB112. Doom Eternal - PC13. Serious Sam 2 - PC14. Black Mesa - PC15. Descent 3 - PC16. Darksiders II - PC17. Resident Evil 3 (2020) - PC18. Overload - PC19. Final Fantasy VII Remake - PS420. Trials of Mana (2020) - Switch21. Persona 5 Royal - PS422. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered - PC23. Sublevel Zero Redux - PC24. Final Fantasy XII: Zodiac Age - PS425. Maneater - PCManeater is a game with a simple premise; you are shark, eat and evolve. But sometimes the simplest things are the most fun. The game is one giant exercise in catharsis and carnage that executes on its premise perfectly and ends right before it would drag, giving you a well executed power curve and an end game of feeling like the most badass thing in the sea. The designers achieved exactly what they set out to do, and we all benefit from it.
Now, the game has a fun framing story. There's a Deadliest Catch-esque reality show called Maneater, and the game starts off with the show's camera crew following around Scaley Pete the shark hunter. The show includes the slightly shaky camera angles, the occasional boom mic falling into the shot, and the random hashtags in response to things people say in an attempt to be hip. It also features Will Parnell as the show's narrator, and this serves as your primary feedback through the game. Obviously as a shark you don't do any self introspection. But the narrator is happy to describe what you're doing in a bunch of well written anecdotes about sharks and the game's environment that are just slightly exaggerated for parody.
You start off (after the intro) as a baby shark and need to eat your way into maturity. Eating creatures restores your health and gives you resources; fat, minerals, protein, and in rare cases mutagens. Consuming resources in general serves as your exp bar, while individual resources are used to upgrade specific body parts and organs. Progressing the story will move you through the lifecycle; baby, teen, adult, elder, and mega. Each jump in lifecycle gives a noticeable increase in capability, and when you hit elder many of the previous enemy creatures can now be nommed on like the food creatures, rather than needing to get involved in an attack duel.
The game has a fairly simple loop to it. The world is divided into several aquatic areas that are shoreline adjacent (bayou, harbor, seaside golf course, etc), each of which has a home base (where you go to upgrade yourself), three primary objectives, three repeats of each of the primary objectives, an apex predator, three kinds of collectables, and finally a trigger to move the story forward. In two instances that trigger includes a boss fight (once midgame, once end game). The missions all involve destruction, and are in three categories. The first is a population reduction; eat X of a certain creature in a certain area. Once you do it a total of four times you unlock the apex predator that normally eats those creatures and you need to duel to the death. Winning the duel gives you an equippable mutation. The other two are to eat a bunch of humans/kill a specific enemy, then repeat several times. The repeats are optional, but they also give you lots of mutation resources, so they're worth doing. The collectables are to find license plates (bragging rights only), to find crates of food (woo resources), and the third is to find various landmarks; these are a source of various cute jokes and finding all of them in an area unlocks a mutation.
One final thing to mention is your interaction with humans. As you nom them (and they are the most valuable in terms of food) you build up a panic meter; filling it causes shark hunters to come after you. They will infinitely respawn but can be evaded; think of them like GTA's wanted meter. But there's a twist; killing hunters builds up your infamy meter, which is a long term thing. Every time it ranks up a unique hunter will spawn, who tends to be better equipped than what you're facing. Killing the unique hunter unlocks a mutation. Additionally the shark hunters are now permanently upgraded in damage and toughness. It's always at the right level that unless you go out of your way to grind their level up early it never feels overwhelming; rather as you get more deadly they get a bit tougher to compensate, but you will stay on top because you are the best shark.
On the mutation front you have five body slots and three organ slots. The body slots have one of three options, one optimized for damage, one for speed, and one for defense, with each being useful in different situations. You get a set bonus for equipping the same parts (starting with two), and so you're encouraged to stay homogenous. They unlock approximately one per zone; defense parts come from killing apex predators, speed parts from finding all landmarks, and damage are at various unique hunter kills. There's more zones than parts, though, so a handful of those award organ mutations instead. Organs are your sort of catch-all passive benefits. All of these are upgraded using one of the three main resources, with the two highest levels of upgrade also needing some mutagen resource.
The game controls well, though some of the jumps to get to humans/collectables can be tricky. As a hint, equip the speed parts when you want to do those, as they make a noticeable difference. Your primary attack is naturally to bite, and you can also do a tail swipe. You can do a dodge in all four lateral directions and can do a dash forward. Chomping a prey animal lets you keep nomming, while sometimes in fights you can grapple which is a similar thing (though you can also be grappled in return, so be prepared for that). Humans come at you in boats, and you can either smash them to pieces or jump up and nom them off the deck. In fact, you have pretty decent ground mobility; it hits that sweet spot of feeling that yes, this is not what a shark wants to do but still being able to do things like scoop up humans and hit collectables. Just make sure you pay attention to your air meter, since you need water to breathe.
The whole thing took me about 9 hours, which is about right for an experience like this. At that point you've seen everything there is to see, and there aren't really any tricks left for combat. You power your way through and show that you are the biggest, baddest thing in the sea. And speaking of the sea, they did a great job with the environments. They're pretty to look at, and they do a good job in the underwater caves of using differently colored plants to indicate where room exits are, so it feels natural while still being good signposting.
Not much more to say; you can basically tell if you're going to enjoy the game or not based entirely on the trailer.
