When I saw the footage of aquatic murder sim Maneater from E3 last year, I had two responses. The first was that it looked really thrilling to play. The second was that it had the potential to be obscenely stupid. 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. But was I right about Maneater? Yeah, I was.
The core simulation here is a perfect encapsulation of how it feels to be a fool’s idea of a shark. It’s acrobatic, intuitive, and drivingly vicious, like Ecco The Dolphin after a long spell in prison. 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. 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.