Maneater Review – King Of The Sea

Publisher: Tripwire Interactive

Developer: Tripwire Interactive

Release: TBA

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, Switch, PC

Seals dart playfully in the ocean waters as sunbathers crowd the beaches to relax in the golden sands. For the bull shark that lurks in the dark waters below, this idyllic scene is a lunch buffet. With an insatiable hunger driving its actions, the shark devours the seals and humans, turning the ocean and sands red. Nothing is safe from this killing machine in the sea or on land. The shark needs to feast to grow large enough to exact revenge on the human hunter that killed her mother.

That’s Maneater, an open-water RPG by Tripwire Interactive that puts you in control of an enraged bull shark. This experience is dark and violent, but also surprisingly fun, delivering big laughs, a nice progression system, and plenty of visual variety in the six to eight hours it takes to grow from a baby that feeds on catfish to a legendary mega shark that can leap from the water and crush hunting barges.

The shark’s journey to adulthood is cleverly presented as a reality show that does a great job fleshing out the antagonist, a hunter named Scaly Pete who ripped the baby bull shark from her mother’s womb. Before tossing the baby to the sea, Pete cut her with a knife to create a scar he would recognize years later when the shark would be large enough to hunt. When the hunters aren’t telling their stories in front of a camera, the shark's life is periodically told through short narrative bursts by actor Chris Parnell. He does a fine job, but you don’t hear enough from him to truly sell the vision of the shark being recorded for a show.

The entire focus of the game is to eat. From the moment you gain control of the baby, you need to consume everything you see, be it fish, turtles, or even license plates. Everything you consume gives you experience points. The smaller snacks give you less, but if you are feeling lucky, you can take on a high-level alligator for a huge haul of XP. The shark grows as she levels up, and also evolves in unexpected ways.

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You eventually earn electricity coursing through your teeth, bone armor on your fins, and enhanced eyes that help you see more of the ocean’s secrets. These upgrades are silly in concept, but they help sell the idea of this bull shark being unique and capable of being the king of the sea.

The shark is easy to control when she’s swimming through open waters and even in tight caverns, but acts like an uncontrollable wrecking ball in combat situations. As she tries to keep track of her target, which can dodge and dart all over the place, her teeth gnash wildly, sometimes hitting flesh, most times catching nothing but water. Boss battles against orcas and sperm whales that have huge health meters end up looking like a chaotic mess – dogfighting at super speed.

Yes, it is annoying that even with a lock-on you lose track of your target so often, but the battles are rarely challenging. You just have to stick with your target, disengage to eat when your health gets low, then return to the chaos. You don’t have much of an arsenal to work with, just chomping, a tail whip to stun enemies, a dodge roll, and more chomping. The lack of variety in the move set isn’t that big of a detractor, however, as the amusement of eating everything possible doesn’t lose its bite.

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For a game about a shark, you also spend a surprising amount of time out of water, leaping over walls, soaring to nab collectibles out of the air, or beaching yourself to feed on humans. If there are homes or streets next to water, the shark explores them as you consume humans from within their safe zones. This action is handled extremely well, allowing the shark to bounce along the ground and lunge at people. They run away, but not very well. When the shark is fully leveled, a good 15 humans can be digested before needing to return to the sea before suffocating.

The world is divided up into themed areas, starting with a swamp and ending with the great depths of the ocean. Each area brings different species to eat, wildly different viewpoints both above and below the water, and a handful of missions. These assignments don’t have much variety or meat on their bones; you basically need to eat 10 of one thing, kill as many humans as possible, and then take on the apex predators of the area, which are basically the boss fights. If you eat enough humans, you increase your wanted level (much like Grand Theft Auto’s), which brings out different hunters tied to Pete. Each of the 13 hunters brings plenty of firepower and support. You need to go airborne to rip the hunters from their boats, or use your body to sink them. Once you've completed enough missions, you move on to the next area. As you grow, you can backtrack to previous areas to smash through fences that you couldn't before. All told, there's a nice loop of exploration and rewards that stretches from start to finish.

One of my favorite parts of this experience is tracking down landmarks, which brings a fair bit of humor, some great pop-culture references, and cool visuals. Each landmark is accompanied by a little voiceover from Parnell who tells you what it is. There are dozens to track down, one of which is the mafia’s underwater burial ground (you even get to take down the mafia here), and another shows you the vent where Godzilla comes from. I even found a cave that held Pennywise the clown.

Maneater is an enjoyable hunt that satisfies in its shark mayhem and story of revenge. The action is a bit repetitive and chaotic, but the goofiness of the violence ends up winning out. This is the first shark game I’ve truly enjoyed. It has cult classic written all over it.

Score: 8

Summary: Playing as a shark in an underwater story of revenge is hilarious and fun.

Concept: Play as a shark and eat everything you can so you can get revenge on the hunter that killed your mom

Graphics: The world above and below the sea has a lot of style to soak in. The bull shark and bosses also have a cool, unique flair to them

Sound: The underwater sound effects for action are a bit cheesy, and the voice of Chris Parnell is underutilized

Playability: Combat is loose, chaotic, and hard to decipher – but biting hapless humans sure is amusing

Entertainment: Maneater is weird, different, and just flat-out fun. I had to see where this story was going, and I thoroughly enjoyed its developments

Replay: Moderate

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Pong Quest Review – Mediocre Modernization

Publisher: Atari

Developer: Chequered Ink

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch

In the 1970s, Atari’s Pong captivated fledgling gamers across the world thanks to its ability to translate the sport of table tennis to two electronic paddles on a screen. Pong Quest evolves the formula, delivering a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler where all enemy encounters are Pong matches with power-ups. While this does effectively breathe new life into the well-worn title and prove that Pong is still fun nearly five decades later, the changes aren’t enough to warrant more than a short stroll down memory lane.

Strange happenings are afoot in a kingdom populated by sentient Pong paddles, and the king requests your help to venture into dungeons, retrieve magical orbs, and open the final area; it’s a story that’s as inconsequential and thin as you’d want from a lighthearted RPG built around Pong. Once you enter each themed dungeon, you have four randomized floors to work through, defeating NPC paddles in modernized Pong on your way to a challenging boss battle. 

Despite myriad twists to the formula, the enemy encounters are essentially simple matches of Pong: Two paddles line up on opposite sides and bounce a ball back and forth. This basic formula hammers home the timeless nature of Pong; I felt a tinge of excitement each time I entered a match and the high-energy battle music ratcheted up. 

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While Pong’s basic action of rallying back and forth is still fun, the thrill of Pong Quest’s battles comes from the unique powered-up balls you can use. Some of the special balls deliver exciting effects to attack with and defend against; I love one that abruptly curves toward one of the walls and another that adds speed-increasing oil slicks across the field of play for a few turns. However, some are too overpowered and take away from the enjoyment, with the Fire Ball as the most egregious offender. If you touch it, it rapidly eats away at your health, meaning it’s much better to just let that shot go past you, defeating the entire purpose of Pong. Other balls provide challenging scenarios to defend, but with a select few acting as winning weapons, you’re better off filling your inventory with those rather than experimenting with the more unique ones.

Efficiency is key in Pong Quest’s battles. Instead of winning by simply scoring more goals than your opponent, you must outlast them and whittle their HP down to zero. Unfortunately, your health doesn’t replenish until you reach the next floor, meaning things can get dire if you have more than a couple prolonged encounters. If you let a shot pass with no HP, you get booted from the dungeon and must start the floor over. Thankfully, one of the most abundant power-ups you can find is the Potion Ball, which replenishes your HP each time you use it. Still, when there are so many interesting abilities to experiment with, it’s annoying to have to constantly take up one of my limited inventory slots with boring-but-essential Potion Balls.

Each battle grants you experience, which eventually levels you up. Each time you reach a new level, you can select from one of three presented perks. These range from added HP and inventory slots to various markers on maps and added damage to opponents. While it always felt like the least interesting option, I leaned heavily into the extra HP option to increase my survivability in the dungeons and reduce my reliance on Potion Balls.

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In addition to battles, you can earn extra items by completing optional objectives. At the start of each floor, an NPC will ask you to go the extra mile by clearing out all the enemies, battling zero enemies, or visiting every room on the floor before leaving. A carnival barker also lets you complete puzzle-based minigames like setting up surfaces to ricochet into a goal, matching cards, or even exploring a dark room to find light switches before time expires. Sadly, none of these are particularly rewarding or fun, often granting you special balls you likely don’t have space for. However, the black hole challenges – where you wager a chunk of your inventory for bigger returns on Pong-based minigames, like knocking out an approaching centipede or collecting every coin on screen – are thrilling and the exact kind of twist to the Pong formula I was looking for. 

If you would rather forego the dungeon crawling and just play Pong, you can compete in local and online multiplayer matches. I like the option of stripping away all of the power-ups and visual flair to play classic Pong, but I wish there were more advanced options for the core multiplayer mode; it would be great to tweak the rules or set my own stable of special balls for the players.

I enjoyed my time with Pong Quest, but with unbalanced abilities, generic dungeon crawling, and repetitive battles, the experience struggled to hold my attention. Pong Quest delivers a fun and unique take on the well-known classic, but the novelty wears thin even before the brief campaign comes to a close.

Score: 7.25

Summary: Pong Quest delivers fun and novel concepts in small bursts, but is weighed down by generic dungeon crawling, unbalanced abilities, and repetitive encounters.

Concept: Take a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler and replace all enemy encounters with Pong matches fueled by power-ups

Graphics: Simple graphics harken back to the visual aesthetic of the original title, but the anthropomorphic Pong paddles are kind of creepy

Sound: High-energy battle themes help propel the action while you’re in a match, but the dungeon-exploration tunes are hit or miss

Playability: Whether you’re bouncing through a dungeon or competing in a match, Pong Quest keeps its controls as simple as can be, even if the power-ups feel unbalanced

Entertainment: While unique twists on the Pong formula make battles enjoyable at first, the repetition quickly wears on the experience

Replay: Moderately low

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Super Mega Baseball 3 Review – Its Own Brand Of Baseball

Publisher: Metalhead Software

Developer: Metalhead Software

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, Switch, PC

The Super Mega Baseball franchise doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a long-running series created by a company with deep pockets. That said, Super Mega Baseball 3 not only delivers solid gameplay that sticks close to the fundamentals and nuances of the sport, it also adds a dash of style that’s all its own. People think of tradition when they think of baseball, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do things a little differently to still give fans a good representation of the sport.

The age-old battle between pitcher and batter is very much alive in Super Mega Baseball 3. Pitching is particularly important to master; it consists of matching your pitching reticle (on the left analog) to a second moving reticle in the batter’s box. Even on medium difficulty (more on this later), nailing your pitches to paint the corners and avoid serving up juicy meat for batters can be difficult – especially when your pitcher has decreased stats because their stamina is low or because they’re tense due to their performance.

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Sometimes you barely hang on to pitch another inning. Other times, you walk a batter and give up a few runs, which leads you to dip into your bullpen unexpectedly before sending it into a full-on death spiral only four or five innings into the game. I like that I started to have success not only by getting better at the physical act of matching the pitching reticles but because I started to pay more attention to my pitcher’s own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if I had a good amount of stamina and velocity but not a good command of junk pitches, I had a better time if I threw power fastballs more often than trying to get the batter to swing at my not-so-accurate curveballs – even if that meant throwing less variety of pitches overall. It was simply the risk I had to take given my pitcher. Also factor in individual positive and negative traits, and Super Mega Baseball 3 can give you all you can handle, or not if you prefer, thanks to customizable sliders for fielding, batting, pitching, and player speed.

Upgrading your squad in the new franchise mode can be a lot of fun, and while the mode restricts some of the ways you construct your roster, at least developer Metalhead is giving you its own take on a mode that sports gamers are more than familiar with. Player development opportunities (PDOs) are a big part of the mode. They sound like performance-enhancing drugs – and sometimes that might be true – but they’re actually skill boosts you can buy to permanently affect specific players’ attributes. The twists are which ones can be purchased, how long they are available for, the extent of their effects are random, and they can come with negative traits. Furthermore, the money you generate to buy PDOs is tied to your payroll. The less you spend on veteran players with high salaries, the more you can spend on PDOs to develop new talent. It’s a nice tradeoff that keeps teams in check while still letting you build your roster in different ways.

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The downside of the franchise structure is that dropping and adding players to your roster is one-to-one, so to add a new third baseman, for example, you can’t drop the salaries of two lesser players to afford the single new acquisition. Also, pitchers must replace pitchers, and fielders must replace fielders – another restriction that stops you from being creative with your roster. Despite these stipulations, in a broader sense, I respect that the game isn’t trying to be a hardcore baseball simulator; things like offering your pitcher named Reef Sandwalker a teeth-whitening PDO for more velocity puts a unique spin on the mode.

Super Mega Baseball 3 could use some tweaks to its gameplay, such as the automatic triggering of small defensive animations to prevent your player from getting turned around on a routine fly ball or missing an easy tag, for example. But on the whole, it provides solid gameplay in a fun, stylish wrapper. Add in the series’ own touches, such as extensive customization options, cross-platform online play, and the abundance of co-op (online or off) opportunities, and you’ve got a game that makes an already-familiar sport stand out.

Score: 8

Summary: The game delivers the baseball fundamentals with its own sense of style.

Concept: Add a franchise mode and more adherence to real-life rules (such as the dropped third strike) to an already-solid baseball experience.

Graphics: The colorful, matte art style still shows off some detail such as the dirt at the plate and the background crowds.

Sound: Stadium announcers read off some funny advertisements if you turn down all the other audio sources, which is fine to do as you’re not missing a lot during games.

Playability: Despite the game’s arcade look, the pitching and hitting are nuanced, and can be challenging as you scale up the custom difficulty sliders.

Entertainment: I enjoy this game for what it does on both the casual and hardcore fronts, which is not an easy line to walk.

Replay: Moderately High

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