Review for Maneater. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 22/05/2020
Did you know that only some sharks are oviparous? In all other cases, in fact, the egg remains inside the female's body and provides nourishment to the shark that grows by eating it and then, once "mature", is given birth. No, Maneater, of Tripwire Interactive, will not "bore" you with trivia of this type, but we assure you that it will tease you to inform you more about the fascinating world of the too stereotyped sharks ... as well as having plenty of fun, if you haven't already understood it from our preview of some time ago.
To have fun and have fun, we will take the features perhaps more in the shadow of these interesting toothed inhabitants of the abyss and we will draw the parallels with the identity of the game itself, in an attempt to transform them into a slight trail of blood to guide you along the way. Ready to dive in?
Sharks don't float
The only way that sharks have not to sink into the aquatic depths is to continue swimming, an effort that is necessary but no less commendable, and the attempt to Tripwire Interactive to rise above the most abstruse expectations of the title, purely implicit promises given by intellectual automatisms to which the game concept itself pushes.
"You are a shark" is certainly not a common way to start describing a game that on paper could lead many to think of a reskinned Goat Simulator, but Maneater pleasantly surprises, sometimes even managing to intimidate. In the first moments of the game we are in the role of a female shark, large and apparently peaceful and undisturbed: it is the intervention of a hunter to ensnare the waters and, with them, our underwater counterpart.
It is with this narrative pretext that we have the opportunity to learn to move in the water, first by groping and then with the relative tranquility that a slightly OP alter ego allows us. The feeling of dissonance between what we have the power to do and our excessive inability to do it is pleasant, the promise of an inevitable demotion of powers clear as two lights at the end of the dark tunnel, not at all punitive except in the brief sense of frustration due to being completely at the mercy of events.
It won't take long to finish the short tutorial section and end up hanging on the bounty hunter's boat who, unceremoniously, will gut the shark, killing it but revealing what it will be your real alter-ego for the rest of the game, the little baby who until recently found refuge in the fortifier maternal womb.
The indelicate removal from the belly mentioned above certainly does not reassure the little one who, before throwing himself into the water looking for safety, thanks the kindness of the hunter depriving him of a large part of an arm. This is where your adventure really begins, just off the scene of these quick but tragic events: you are the shark that survived, wounded, hungry, but I don't forget a revenge that becomes, for him and for you, the only real possible goal of this revenge flick turned into game.
The guys at Tripwire Interactive knew what they were getting into, it seems certain: as in many entertainment products there are "precensions" to be overcome, in this case the result of the inevitable cliché that a title in which a realistic animal is played triggers in the mindset of the average player. Maneater does more than he was previously required to do and, instead of falling into shelf quality to free-fall into the abyss of mediocrity, he continues to swim perfectly afloat.
His story has no right to exist, much less to be funny, but it is already from this apparent banality that much of the game structure manages to work: in fact, everything is “built” around the idea of a television broadcast, “Maneater” in fact, which follows the story of the antagonist / hunter mentioned above and his prey; the tones are always light-hearted, with dialogues that at times entertain with a sarcasm that vibrates from Borderlands, and that at times instead manage to give genuine moments of empathy for those who in all respects should be the villains of the story. All features that could sink into the slapstick, but never really do.
Eyes open
Many sharks that live in the open sea don't have the tiny pump behind the eyes that pushes water in the gills allowing them to breathe even when they are not swimming and, therefore, technically they never sleep, only moving more slowly and leaving a part of the brain switched off. Maneater demands the same level of vigilance in most cases.
The environment in which you will find yourself swimming, in Maneater, is well built and varied: while it cannot give the various biomes of an open-world, it works as hubs like Tomb Raider and others before him, a sort of wide- linear that allows freedom without forcing dispersion.
From the swamps of a recognizable bayou to the clean waters of a high-ranking port, the waterways hide many collectables and prey from us: if the former are limited to commemorative plaques and points of interest that cannot but snatch a smile, the variety of prey is really interesting, because it manages to constitute a sort of mechanics in itself: different types of animals, in fact, will provide us with different types of nutrients, an element around which the evolution mechanism of our shark, in what to all intents and purposes rises slightly above a banal XP hunt.
Level after level you will become bigger and more aggressive, unlocking upgrades and entire sets that, again, could be ridiculous but stop a moment before: we mention only one to make you better understand what we are talking about, namely the set " electric, ”which allows you to add a kind of elemental attack to your bites.
The alimentar chain
It is obvious to think of the shark as the top of the aquatic food pyramid: there are many films that have accustomed us to seeing it as a war machine, from "Deep Blue" to "The Shark", but even something as potentially lethal as a shark has predators: if sharks a few centimeters large, such as the cat shark, are obviously hunted by many other varieties of fish, there are documented cases of much larger sharks becoming dinner (or snack) of sea crocodiles up to 7 meters long or, why not, that time when a white shark was killed by an orca that grabbed him between the jaws and held him on his stomach until he choked. The world, however, is ironic, because one of the shark's deadliest predators… we are.
Maneater does not forget it and, if on the one hand we will find from the first areas predators able to skin us - so strong that they must forcibly be avoided, at least at the beginning - our actions against humans will trigger an inevitable hunt that, from two little men on a little boat a little bigger than us, it can degenerate (and it will) into one open hunt for us with submachine guns and explosives, complete with a "hitlist" of hunters that, from time to time, we will go to check and lighten.
Here, here perhaps we can find the first sore point of Maneater: if the hunter protagonist of the series has a personality so pushed but within the limits of the credible, this handful of hunters, even if introduced with a short video, are only NPCs with a weapon, offering neither a varied nor profound challenge but limiting itself to loop swim / dodge / jump out of the water / bite until the moment when we can rest our jaws around the perpetrator of so much violence towards us. They are instances that finish relatively quickly but not fast enough not to be a little "stuck" for the sake of it.
5 senses… plus two more
It is not universally known, but in addition to the traditional 5 senses, sharks have 2 additional abilities that already… they know about video games: the electro-reception and the “sideline”. While the first, thanks to the Lorenzini ampoules, is the ability to identify prey thanks to their electromagnetic fields, the second essentially allows the immediate detection of pressure changes in the surrounding water, in practice making instant the location of the preys.
There are incredibly interesting evolutions and Maneater presses on these notes, balancing videogames and credibility well: from time to time we will unlock this or that fin or tooth, which will make us more powerful and capable of facing dangers, animal or human.
The evolution path is well distributed, returning an effective and perceptible sense of growth of the shark, first of all in size, a logical choice given the immediacy that the visual output offers: we confess that seeing our alter-ego gradually become bigger, then go back to those evil crocodiles after a few hours of play from the beginning and return the favor of the thousand kills they gave us… it's a feeling that is truly priceless.
Maneater's symphony has one last (yes, again) absurd note of merit, namely the English voice-over: Thomas Christopher Parnell, who many of you will know as Rick & Morty's Jerry, offers here an extraordinarily entertaining narrator with truly off-scale charm capable of giving light and color to even the most banal of sentences. The rest of the dubbing also keeps up, especially in the case of our archenemy hunter.
Maneater starts from a base that had all the characteristics to result in a more explosive disaster than a Michael Bay film but without its spectacularity and instead surprises and succeeds in its intent. Moving like a shark is fascinating, the sense of progression is incredibly successful and the environments are believable enough to be enjoyable but without expiring like many others, too full of points of interest or distractions. The English dubbing manages to give even more power to the dialogues and situations, always on the edge of the slapstick but in excellent balance. Tripwire Interactive's title can be summed up in many ways, none of them taken for granted: if we had to simplify everything in one sentence, it would probably be "more successful than it had a right to be".
► Maneater is an Adventure-Action-Indie-RPG game developed by Blindside Interactive and published by Tripwire Interactive for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 22/05/2020
