We stayed exclusively in the Milanese offices of Koch Media, to try the new hands on of Maneater, a game that for sure will have ... some bite !! In Maneater, we will be called upon to embody one of the greatest terrors of the abyss that human perception could have imagined. A human-eating shark.
To tell the truth, our protagonist will not feed on human flesh alone since, throughout the game, we will be called upon to take advantage of all the more or less lethal aquatic fauna that will happen to us within range.
Maneater, title developed by Tripwire Interactive e Blindside Interactive, in fact, it will put us in the shoes (or perhaps it is better to say in the skin) of a baby shark, whose mother was captured by a sadistic professional hunter, gutted and robbed of her baby.
The raw intro makes us immediately understand Maneater's tone: hungry violence conveyed by jaws bristling with serrated fangs. Like those of the "baby shark" who just after being ripped from his mother's womb, severed the arm of the mongrel hunter, without sparing himself splashes of blood and pieces of battered skin, a real counterattack to human violence against animals. marine. A sort of ecological fable in an extremely brutal version.
It will be this poor orphan (certainly not defenseless) that we are going to check during the game.
From what has been understood during the test, the main campaign will see us busy growing and facing various environments, to finally arrive at the final battle with the bastard who made us orphans. To finish the lunch of which, as babies, we only ate an appetizer. In the meantime, we will be busy surviving in various aquatic environments (in the test, we were engaged in a brackish swamp in Louisiana), facing more or less natural enemies, gorging ourselves and… Evolving.
Yes, because in Maneater our shark, by collecting the right power ups, will be able to evolve, acquire new skills and change its appearance and size. We will be able to go from a simple baby shark to a real armored sea monster, able to pulverize a fishing boat with a few, terrifying, bites.
In terms of gameplay, we find ourselves commanding our new shark in a whole series of aquatic environments (but it goes !?) made in a very detailed way. In the build that we were able to test the environments in question were an urban marine coastal area for the tutorial and a bajou, a brackish swamp typical of the Louisiana coasts.
Swimming through these ecosystems, which can be freely explored in a sort of "open world with macro areas" (a bit like in Metro Exodus so to speak) we will obviously also meet all the forms of life that inhabit them. And we, as good super predators, will be free, and encouraged, to devour them without too many compliments.
Some animals will provide us with energy, some rarer will provide us with power ups and others, usually the most dangerous, will provide us with "genetic material".
It will therefore be by collecting energy and various genetic material through our predatory activity, we will be able to grow in size and performance and also develop peculiar mutations, such as improved sonar or stronger jaws, which will give us the skills necessary to continue our adventure and also to be able to reach areas that were initially inaccessible.
In our wanderings, we will also encounter submerged caves, which will serve as a save point, a safe place to rest and points of departure and arrival for rapid travel through the maps.
Maneater will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, and presents itself as a really interesting, dynamic title that, for once, shifts the focus from humans to animals. Definitely (and with reason) vengeful beasts!
► 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
