Maneater looks like an interesting game. It’s an open-world RPG where you play as a baby Bull Shark. This in itself is a fascinating premise, usually, the main character would be a human or humanoid-like creature and a creature like a Shark would be the enemy. With Maneater, the main character is a Shark and the enemy is humans.
Maneater seems to have a focus on growing and evolving your Shark. Starting off as a Shark pup, you are let loose into a watery open world based around the Gulf Coast of the southern United States. Your main mission is to eat, grow and evolve as you explore this aquatic world and hunt down the man who killed your mother.
In the developer commentary video below, the developers talk about how you start off weak. After eating your way through various locations, you can evolve into an OP shark and just decimate things.
A lot of RPG games tend to keep you fairly week against enemies, usually to make the game more challenging. It sounds like Maneater just lets you go wild and become as overpowered as you can be.
Shark Combat
Combat in Maneater looks extremely fun. As well as using your massive jaws and teeth to tear apart your enemies, your Shark has other abilities to utilise. You can whip your Sharks tale to smack enemies, you can evade attacking enemies and you can jump out of the water on to boats and beaches and grab some unsuspecting humans for lunch.
RPG games usually let you play in a variety of different ways and Maneater seems to be no different. You can be a vengeful Shark and just attack relentlessly or you can take a bit more of a stealthy approach in your human hunting. One of the developers states in a dev diary: “We’re not trying to frame the Shark as evil, but if a player wants to wreck the joint, they have that opportunity.”
Bounty Hunters
Being a badass killing machine will have it’s drawbacks though. In Maneater there will be an infamy level. So the more you go around killing and wrecking things, the more you will draw the attention of Bounty Hunters.
These Bounty Hunters will stop at nothing to kill you, the more you swim around terrorising the human population, the more the Bounty Hunters will come after you.
It’s not just Bounty Hunters your Shark has to worry about though. Each location in the world will have an Apex Predator that you will have to face. It appears that each region in the world will have it’s own scary Apex Predator to kill. These fearsome creatures range from huge Alligators, Barracudas, Hammerhead Sharks and massive Mako Sharks.
It sounds like these Apex creatures will be pretty tough but don’t worry. The more your Shark grows and evolves, the more ferocious your Bull Shark will become. Meaning that these Apex Predators will be easier to take out. One of the PR videos I have seen mentions something called Bone Evolution. This seems to mean that your Shark doesn’t just get more abilities but actually evolves into an unstoppable killing machine. Bone evolutions look’s like you literally have stronger bones making your Shark more armoured and making it more difficult for Apex creatures to take a chunk out of you.
Locations
Maneater certainly has some very nice looking and varied locations. There are seven locations throughout the world. These range from areas with clear waters and golden sands to swamp and lake areas.
- Caviar Key
- Crawfish Bay
- Dead Horse Lake
- Fawtick Bayou
- Golden Shores
- Prosperity Sands
- Sapphire Bay
As well as the Apex creatures, each region will have a set of objectives to complete. Like all good open-world RPG’s, there will also be collectables to find with one of those collectable types being car license plates.
With the majority of the gameplay taking place underwater, there will surely be tons of exploration to do and loads of secret areas to find.
Sharkumentary
Maneater’s story is quite unique in that it is told through a documentary TV crew. The premise is that the TV crew have been following your Shark around and have collected a load of footage. They then made a TV show out of this footage with your Shark as the star.
As you swim around in the murky depths, there is a narrator who talks over what you are doing in the game. Imagine it is like being interacting in a playable version of a Shark documentary on Discovery channel.
One of the main bad guys in Maneater is a Sharkhunter called Scaly Pete. Expect to see Scaly Pete in a lot of cutscenes as the documentary crew film him trying to hunt you down.
The whole story of Maneater sounds very engaging as you evolve your Shark and seek out revenge on Scaly Pete.
Maneater definitely looks very intriguing and gives a unique twist on the open-world RPG format. The game will also be optimised for PS4 Pro and will run at 4K resolution.
Maneater is developed by Tripwire Interactive & Blindside Interactive and published by Tripwire Interactive. It is released on Friday, May 22nd, 2020. I’ve pre-ordered my copy.
