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It's casual, short and highly repetitive, but man, if you like sharks you gotta play this game!

Sharks are my favorite animals. I hate and love them at the same time and for me they are the most fascinating animals on this planet. So, admittedly, i was already kind of biased when I started this game. Basically, your enjoyment of Maneater is highly dependent on your infatuation with sharks, or at least with movies about them like Jaws, Deep Blue Sea or 47 Metres Down.
The story of Maneater is written and told in classic b-movie-manner. Actually there are only two characters apart from the shark: Main antagonist shark hunter Scaly Pete and his son. But surprisingly they are better written and voice-acted than you'd expect. They kill your mother and you, the baby shark, just goes after them to get revenge. In order to do so, you need to grow and mutate until your are ready for the final face-off.
The gameplay is extremely casual and simplistic. You just swim around, eat to grow and fight other sea predators and groups of shark hunters. Some may think that this gameplay loop is quite repetitive, and they are right. But what do you think does a shark do all his life? He swims and eats, so basically the game gets it absolutely right and does even more with the different body parts that you can "put on", which grant you various abilities and strengths, like higher speed, damage resistance or stronger attacks. Besides, they make your shark look cool as f*ck. Getting increasingly stronger and more ferocious is great fun.
But even for shark lovers the game has some obvious flaws. The biggest one is the very idiotic human AI, when you attack swimmers and beach-goers: Instead of getting as far away from the water as possible, they just run around in circles or even just stand in one spot, screaming and flailing their arms above their head while patiently waiting to be devoured by a 5 meter bullshark that jumps out of the water and bellyflops over the beach. It might add to the cheesy b-movie flair, but it also takes you out of the experience a bit.
Combat is also not exactly the best. The good soundeffects and animations make eating all the defenseless swimmers and sea creatures pretty satisfying, but the actual fights are little more than mindless button mashing. Apart from that the shark controls pretty smooth, though. The controls don't require much precision, so Maneater is one of those games that is best enjoyed with a proper controller. The visuals are not exactly state of the art, but at least the game runs very stable for the most part when you max out the grafics, without any significant crashes or framerate drops.
In addition to its casual and repetitive premise, Maneater is very short (about 12 to 13 hours for a 100%) and wastes a lot of potential in basically every area, wether it'd be storytelling, gameplay or visuals, but for any serious shark enthusiast there is no way around this game. I'd say it's the best shark "simulator" so far, so if you always wanted to be the most vicious animal on planet earth, then give Maneater a try!
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MANEATER
Genre: Open-World-Action-Adventure / RPG
Release: Q2 2020
( ) 0/8 Simply one of the worst games ever made. Don't waste any money on this.
( ) 1/8 Bad. Seriously flawed with barely any redeeming qualities. Worth a couple of Cents at best, if at all.
( ) 2/8 Sub-par. Only for hardcore-fans of respective genre / series. Don't pay more than 5 bucks.
( ) 3/8 Meh-diocre. It‘s okay. Don't pay more than 10 bucks.
( ) 4/8 Decent, but not for everybody. Don't pay more than 15 bucks.
(X) 5/8 Good game, Must-play for genre- / series-fans. Worth 20 to 25 bucks max, if you are not a fan.
( ) 6/8 Great game, universal recommendation. 30 bucks would be a steal for this.
( ) 7/8 Outstanding game, a milestone of it‘s respective genre. Definitely worth its full prize.
( ) 8/8 Simply one of the best games ever made. Get this, the prize doesn't matter.