Six years on, Maneater’s shark still has nothing to do but eat

Maneater is a game about being a shark, and it never pretends otherwise. Tripwire Interactive’s 2020 action RPG puts you in the body of a female bull shark, cut from her mother’s body and left to grow up angry in the waters off the Gulf Coast. You eat, you evolve, you settle a score. Six years and a sequel announcement later, the pitch still holds up better than most of what surrounds it.

Trailer, via Tripwire Interactive.

Port Clovis and the Eight Regions

The open world is Port Clovis, split into eight regions: Caviar Keys, Crawfish Bay, Dead Horse Lake, Fawtick Bayou, Golden Shores, Prosperity Sands, Sapphire Bay, and the Gulf. Each has its own apex predator, larger and meaner than the standard wildlife. The variety is real:

• muskellunge, barracuda, alligators, sperm whales, orcas, and other sharks
• human hunters ranging from town drunks up to the Coast Guard
• a full day/night cycle across bayous, resort beaches, industrial docks, and open ocean

You hunt fish and turtles for proteins, fats, minerals, and rare mutagenics. Feed enough and you enter underwater grottos to unlock abilities and grow. Bone plates, shadow armor, and bioelectric spikes let you tailor the shark to how you fight. The combat is loose but physical: charge enemies, soar out of the water, whip with your tail to stun. You can use a swordfish as a spear.

Scaly Pete and the Cajun Queen

The plot is a reality television crew following shark hunter Pierre “Scaly Pete” LeBlanc, voiced by Carlo Mestroni, and his son Kyle, played by Raphael Grosz-Harvey. They harpoon a pregnant bull shark, and Scaly Pete cuts out the infant and disfigures it with his knife so he can identify it later. He loses his right hand to the pup on release.

That is the engine of the whole game. The shark eats her way up the food chain while Scaly Pete and Kyle tear themselves apart on the boat, the Cajun Queen, arguing over whether Scaly Pete’s father died to a megalodon. Kyle dies in an explosion that sinks the boat. Scaly Pete loses a leg and comes back armed with military-grade firepower on his father’s patrol boat. The shark, by then a megashark measuring 10 m (33 ft), wins.

Truth Quest and the Long Tail

Truth Quest, the downloadable content, arrived in August 2021 and sends the shark to a mysterious experiment site to confront a radioactive monster causing chaos around Port Clovis. The game shipped on Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in May 2020, on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 that November, on Nintendo Switch in May 2021, and on iOS and Android in December 2025.

Sales passed 14 million units. A sequel, Maneater 2, was announced in September 2026 for a 2027 release.

What Actually Works

The joke is the point, and the joke is that the game plays it straight. A shark with armor plates and bioelectric spikes should be ridiculous. Maneater commits to the bit so completely that the ridiculousness becomes the appeal, and the revenge structure gives the eating a shape beyond simple escalation.

The weak part is repetition. Eight regions of hunting and evolving is a lot of the same motion, and the upgrades widen your options more than they change the loop. The film crew framing is the sharpest thing here, and it gets less use than it deserves.

Maneater is a power fantasy with a clear spine and a thin middle. It earns its sales and it earns a sequel. It does not earn a longer campaign.

action RPG · game review · Maneater · Maneater 2 · shark game · Tripwire Interactive