Reviews
[Review] ‘Maneater’ is a Shallow But Entertainingly Gory Shark RPG
The Jaws theme is renowned for how much it does with so little. Driven by two notes, repeated at a hastening pace, John Williams’ famous theme suggests the slow approach and frenzied attack of a stalking shark. The legendary composer creates dread, anxiety, fear. Two notes.
The minimalism that defines Maneater is not nearly as compelling. The open-world RPG, out today, casts players as the hungry and homicidal fish in question. It’s a novel take on a familiar formula and there’s a lot here to like. But, to borrow a metaphor from another generation’s blockbuster, it feels like too little butter scraped over too much bread. Even accounting for the hundreds of limbs you’ll sever with razor-sharp teeth, it feels like something’s missing.
Maneater has attracted plenty of games media attention on the strength of its unique premise. What if you were the killer shark terrorizing a beach? What if your presence ensured that it wasn’t safe to go back in the water? What if you were the reason they were gonna need a bigger boat? And, Maneater does a pretty great job of making this fantasy a reality.
Swimming is simple and intuitive, and I never got tired of breaching the water’s surface for a front flip and cannonball splash. Maneater makes your mouth the gun — with distinct, bite-y lunges bound to each trigger — and the resulting actions feel, appropriately, like a speeding bullet finding its mark. These actions feel best when you are the predator, stalking your prey. Less so when your target can fight back. Combat — both with other carnivorous sea creatures and with human hunters — consist mostly of lunges and the camera often struggles to keep up. I don’t think I lost any battles because of this, but I consistently needed to take a moment to reposition my viewpoint.
Those problems aside, Maneater’s brand of marine melee mostly works. As you grow from (ahem) a baby shark into a massive monster, you can take breaks from the main quest to chew through a hierarchy of named hunters. To draw them out, you’ll need to cause mayhem, GTA-style, chomping innocent beachgoers and splintering waves of the hunter’s stooges. Thrash long enough and the hunter will make an appearance.
The resulting battles are easy at first because, as it turns out, no human is much of a match for a bull shark’s mouth full of knives. After a lengthy bout turning the water red, I was surprised how simple it was to leap into the air, lunge at the hunter, and X them off the bracket. As your infamy increases, hunters will come prepared with better defenses, which make these fights harder and more rewarding. Though, given that there are only 10 named hunters, I do wish that each battle was more unique. That said, one of the coolest things about these fights is that you get to decide where they take place. Losing repeatedly in the open ocean? Take the fight inland. The honeycombed tunnels beneath one of the game’s Venice-like port towns proved much more friendly for sharky stealth than the expansive gulf.
Hunter battles are a highpoint among the activities on offer here. Elsewhere, Maneater suffers from its campaign’s lack of focus. There is a story — our shark is on a quest to avenge her mother’s death and take down the hook-handed Cajun reality star fisherman who murdered her — and the little that is here is pretty good. The problem is, there are no story missions. Instead, you’ll complete a checklist of bog-standard open-world quests — kill 10 turtles, eat 10 humans, sink a hunter’s boat — until the game decides it’s time to dole out a bit of narrative. As many games do, Maneater treats cutscenes as a reward. But, I’ve rarely seen a reward so disconnected from the process of earning it.
What Maneater lacks in story or structure it makes up for in the simple joy of Chris Parnell’s presence. The comic actor, of Rick and Morty and “Lazy Sunday” fame, serves as narrator, dishing out real shark facts and fictional behavioral details on the “Florida Man” archetypes who hunt her. Some of these border on low-hanging fruit classism, but generally Parnell’s running commentary punches up, skewering the wealthy who demand beachfront property and the land developers who ensure they get it, habitat be damned. The folks at TripWire have loaded the map with interesting details and dioramas to find, and I enjoyed knowing that Parnell would always have something to say about whatever I found.
And Maneater’s setting ensures that the process of exploration is consistently rewarding. The world’s coasts, creeks, and canals are populated by real-world creatures that are often a thrill to encounter. As your shark gains mass and levels, aquatic lifeforms that once seemed fearsome become fodder. I loved returning to early areas and tearing the alligators that harassed my baby self into scaly ribbons. Though, the game’s gore does become slightly less palatable here. While years of violent games have numbed me to the sight of a virtual mutilated human corpse, seeing the bloody stump where an orca’s dorsal fin used to be made me feel bad.
Still, this highlights what makes Maneater unique and, more generally, is how it manages to find the fun despite its structural issues. You may have played a million open-world games. You may be sick-and-tired of checklist design. You may have been sick-and-tired of it for a decade. But, Maneater is just different enough, and just funny enough, and just gory enough, that for a while, you may manage to forget that it’s otherwise beached in the shallows.
Maneater review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Maneater is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Games Store.
Reviews
‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review]
Hollywood has been stuck in a trend where a recognizable property — any recognizable property — holds more value than an original idea. This has led to a trend where a slew of acclaimed films have transitioned over to television and become limited series, because why not?
Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.
Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations.
This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.
On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.
Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.
It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film.
Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.
Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.
What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.
This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.
These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when.
Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.
Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.
If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.
The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.
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