I ve got two completely separate takes on Maneater. It s almost as if I split into two people when watching the gameplay footage released at E3 — two fizzing outlines of myself, roughly tethered to my physical form like a bad 80s special effect.
One of those outlines, the crackly red one, loved it. I think he s my inner nine year old, who used to entertain himself on long journeys by imagining a shark zooming alongside the car, crunching oncoming vehicles in its jaws and doing sick flips over roadsigns and overpasses. Maneater is his game. The ghastly fluidity of the game s protagonist – a ten foot bull shark – is immensely satisfying to watch. It whooshes along like a brutish Ecco the Dolphin, slamming into hapless swimmers from below, then propelling them fifty feet into the air before grunching them with a sound like a kilo of raw chicken cartilage in a hydraulic press.