![]() But that's a complement as much as it is a complaint. When you get into long fights, such as early struggles with alligators or confrontations with human bounty hunters, it's really hard on your hands - you're constantly wrenching yourself through neckbreaking turns while hammering multiple buttons, and I started blistering in the course of a single day's play. You will become familiar with this sight. Also, at least until you up your stats a fair way, it feels like you can never quite wring enough speed out of the fish while swimming underwater, and end up frustratedly mashing the lunge and bite buttons to speed up your stately progress with little surges of motion. The control scheme is well-thought out and swiftly grafts itself to muscle memory, but it can be a bit hit and miss - your shark has an irritating tendency to stick to the surface like glue, shrouding everything beneath it from the suddenly-elevated camera, and it can be too easy to mix up diving and jumping, resulting in some momentum-killing belly flops. You can lunge, leap, roll, thrash, and do this completely mental thing where you use your tail to welly things in your mouth fifty feet into the air. ![]() Apart from anything else, you'd be missing out without the gritty haptic rumble through your hands as your shark GASHUNKK-GASHUNKK-GASHUNKKs its way through fish, turtles, humans and the hulls of boats. And you'll absolutely need to play with a controller, as you're zooming around in three dimensions, flipping from the water and jackknifing in order to do murders or avoid them. You play, as you've probably gathered, as a shark. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. ![]() Maneater has moments of brilliance, but they're islands in a lagoon of bollocks-infested water, and it gets increasingly tiring to swim between them. But what could have been great in a game that was nasty, brutish and short has been stretched into an open world plodder weighed down with lacklustre mission design, endless repetition, and a confused, blundering disaster of a message. It's acrobatic, intuitive, and drivingly vicious, like Ecco The Dolphin after a long spell in prison. The core simulation here is a perfect encapsulation of how it feels to be a fool's idea of a shark. But was I right about Maneater? Yeah, I was. I wrote all about this in my preview, and tbh it's worth a read before you carry on, so I don't need to repeat myself too much. The second was that it had the potential to be obscenely stupid. The first was that it looked really thrilling to play. When I saw the footage of aquatic murder sim Maneater from E3 last year, I had two responses. An ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark, which long outstays its welcome when stretched into a repetitive open world game.
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