I actually had high hopes for Maneater when I first heard about it, but because I wanted it to be in the “so bad it’s good” category because games like that are among my favorites. That’s why Conan on Xbox 360 is still one of my favorite games. But then they ruined it by actually trying to make a real go of it and now that means I have to take it seriously as well, and it is pretty flawed.

So if I were to make a shark game, I’d make it stealth based, right? Like jaws, and it’d play like Arkham City or something. Like the shark would be swimming around, you could sneak up on unsuspecting beachgoers and like, snatch one down and chomp him up and then everybody’s looking around, going “WHERE’S JEFF!?” “I don’t know, I took a bite of my funnel cake and when I looked up he was gone,” and then you go up and grab someone else while the rest of the friends aren’t looking. That’s what I would make. Maneater did not go that route. I’m not gonna begrudge them that, because they can make whatever they want. But the reason I’m saying this is because of the combat and overall gameplay that I’m going to talk about in a bit.

As the story goes, you play as shark who was cut out of its mom by Scaley Pete, a stereotypical cajun hunter with a stereotypical PETA approved vendetta against sharks and typical disregard for animal life. Apparently the shark is pretty salty (rimshot) about getting Bambi’d and decides he’s gonna treat the entire coast like a church-going family visiting Cracker Barrel on a late Sunday morning and eat everything in sight. He’s not even going to sit on overpriced rocking chairs or look at old-fashioned toys and candy first and go “wooooow, I didn’t know they still made that!”, he’s just going straight for the main course. So it’s a story of revenge, plain and simple. This shark is pissed and he’s gonna work his way up the shark hunter ladder, wasting everybody he can until he gets to Scaley Pete himself. The presentation is actually really clever because they do the whole thing like one of those Shark Week or Deadliest Catch shows, so these guys are talking to the 4th wall and there’s narration and all that. They’ve even got a time slot that they advertise, which oddly enough made me feel like I should actually be playing the game at that time, because TV is sneaky and tricks you into doing things.

The graphics are mostly great. The shark looks awesome and animates well, and each area you visit looks really good, and you’ll see lots of different environments, from the boggy swamp to a posh boating community to amusement parks and more. The humans are probably the worst looking part of the game – they just aren’t very well animated and they looked more like the NPCs in Grand Theft Auto 3 to me than anything from this gen. But then you don’t see them for very long before you chew them up and reduce them to large pockets of blood in the ocean. It may not be a big deal for some but I did enjoy that the game changed from day to night, so I was able to ruin people’s romantic sunsets and nighttime parties by eating them alive. The ocean in this game is bizarre because everything looks normal on the surface, and then you go underwater and there’s entire buildings and bridges and roads, like there was some apocalyptic event that left civilization in the ocean, then subcontractors just came and built over it.

Being that this called is a Shark PG, and yes – they “dolphinately” made that joke – Progression is standard but still interesting since it’s a shark and not a typical rpg character. You start as a baby shark, do doo doo do do doo, then throughout the game grow into a teen shark, who thinks everything is lame and conformist and all his thoughts are unique and original, to an adult shark whose looking less like a shark and more like Mickey Rourke, to an Elder shark, and so on. You get XP by killing everything, getting collectibles like treasure chests and license plates to level up, all the usual crap that’s in everything now. You can get new gear that grant set bonuses and special attacks by killing this top 10 list of hunters, which you get to fight by eating lots of humans, raising your threat level enough to get hunters to come after you, and then you eat enough of them that the next top 10 guy you’re scheduled to fight makes an appearance, and they get some intro showing who they are, like they’re some badass to be afraid of. What I find is hilarious is that you can basically just make a beeline for the guy, jump on the boat, drag him off of it and eat him, and then you get your prize. Gear is upgradable with all the resources you pick up, and they add a huge advantage to your shark, so it’s worth investing in those.

It may not be a big deal for some but I did enjoy that the game changed from day to night, so I was able to ruin people’s romantic sunsets and nighttime parties by eating them alive.

There’s not much in the way of sound. Lots of chomping, you hear totally unrealistic growling and hissing from animals underwater. I will say though, that when you start eating humans, they start screaming their asses off. Like it is blood-curdling. And half the time they’re on land, so I’d have to jump the shark – no pun intended – onto the dock or beach or whatever, start eating people or whipping them with my tail, and their legs and arms are flying off and then I’m chasing stumpy people around, then quick have to get back in the ocean to keep from suffocating, then jump back out and do it again. I will say that it was really satisfying to be swimming along, see someone fishing at the edge of a boat with one other person, jump out of the water, eat the person at the edge, and leave again all in one move. If you’re slick you can make it look good, though most of the time you will not be graceful doing this.

The combat is probably the weakest part of the game to me. It just doesn’t feel focused, and I’m fighting with the camera too much. In fact I fight with it so much that I do consider it another enemy type in the game because it got me killed more often than the actual enemies or my own skill would. You’re supposed to be able to click the right analog to get it to lock onto a threat. Problem is that half the time it would just center the camera and not lock onto anything. When it did work, it wasn’t fast enough to track the enemy to really be of any use, or it’d track, like, a turtle or something instead of the thing trying to kill me. Which I like turtles a lot, especially if they’re ninjas and like pizza and hang out with rats and reporters in yellow jumpsuits, but I’m not trying to focus on them. At least not in this video.

On top of that if it weren’t for the little red arrows indicating where the enemy was, I wouldn’t have any idea where they were at. And the combat mainly consists of you and another fish or shark or gator or whatever that just lunge toward each other, hoping to score a bite. It’s like really unintentional jousting. Also since going to the top of the water makes the game think you want to stay up there to travel faster, I’d have to actively hit X to submerge myself more while trying to track the enemy and see when I’d need to evade an attack, or else I’d stick to the top of the water, and the camera would shift to a higher travel-friendly viewpoint so that I couldn’t see below the water’s surface, totally blinding me. The whole thing is disappointing and when I’m concentraing more on the controls and the camera instead of the actual combat, it’s because it needs to be fixed.

I played the xbox one version of this. There’s several major bugs I came across, ranging from frame rates that dropped, to the game not autosaving, also when I died once it not only not saved, but also started a totally new game at the opening cutscene and tutorial as if I had restarted completely. It also totally crashed mid-fight and kicked me back to the xbox home screen. Like getting toilet-breaking diarrhea from eating too many Cheesy Gordita Crunches from Taco Bell, bugs in video games are normal and totally expected. In this case patches are very much expected. That said, these bugs are too major too have been included with what is otherwise a finished game. When a game’s not that fun to begin with and you get your progress set back or the game crashes, it’s just that much harder to even want to restart it to keep going. For the record I’ve also heard of issues with the PS4 version as well.

I was really hoping to have guilty pleasure fun and I did enjoy some of my time with the game, but between the bugs and the fine-at-times-but-really-crappy-at-others combat, I didn’t really feel like I got my money’s worth out of it and after awhile I felt like I was forcing myself to play through this game. And really, once you’ve cleared the first area, you’ve basically seen everything the game has to offer.