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Maneater: With Sarah Chalke, Judy Greer, Philip Winchester, Marla Sokoloff. An enterprising young woman navigates the professional waters of Beverly Hills in order to land the hottest producer in town, fully unaware that she is about to get in way over her head.
- (588)
- 2009-05-30
- Comedy, Drama, Romance
- 240
Maneater is a 2009 television miniseries starring Sarah Chalke. It was directed by Timothy Busfield and written by Suzanne Martin and Gigi Levangie. This miniseries aired on Lifetime on May 30, 2009 and May 31, 2009.
- A sea full of creatures with combat as shallow as a puddle.
- Would You Rather Be Eaten By:
- Maneater Review Screenshots
- Verdict
By Dan Stapleton
Updated: Sep 24, 2023 10:50 pm
Posted: May 22, 2020 1:00 pm
Through a few millennia of hard work and dedication Sharks have earned a name for themselves as nature’s perfect killing machines, and Maneater’s titular sea monster certainly lives up to that reputation. Roaming the Gulf of Mexico as a pissed-off bull shark with an insatiable appetite for human flesh and mutagens like a one-shark Sharknado is certainly a campy thrill. Its limitation, though, is that it’s just as single-minded as its predator protagonist: the vast, vast majority of what you’ll do in Maneater are “go here, kill X of this animal or people” objectives by way of combat that’s as deep as a puddle, broken up by some amusing exploration and gathering of collectibles. I’m not saying it should’ve made us jump through hoops like a circus seal or anything, but there simply isn’t enough gameplay variety to justify the massive amount of chomping you have to do to reach megashark status.
Our shark anti-hero has her own personal Captain Ahab in the form of a sleazy Cajun shark hunter with his own ‘Deadliest Catch’-esque reality series (also called Maneater), which serves as a framing device for the roughly 15-hour story. That said – and I don’t mean to shock you here – their rivalry and your nemesis’ gradual descent into deformity and madness doesn’t end up as an especially thought-provoking tale. This game is entirely tongue-in-cheek, of course, yet the shark hunter plays his vendetta a little too straight to be memorably goofy.
The narrator (Chris Parnell of Rick & Morty and Archer fame) who follows you around with mostly made-up shark facts, however, nails it. In his role as the show’s unseen narrator, Parnell comments on whatever you’re doing and whichever fish you’re encountering. As you move from area to area he satirically lays into beachfront resort development just as hard as he ridicules the kind of messed-up person who’d hunt sharks. “Sharks are responsible for just three percent of shark hunter deaths. Alcohol and poor firearm discipline account for the rest.”
A giant shark
A dinosaur
An enormous snake
Murder hornets
Coming across each new animal as you move across the map’s zones is great, especially since it deliberately gives little to no regard to what animals would actually be at home in the Gulf of Mexico. However, one extremely odd omission stuck out to me: dolphins are one of the few animals with a reputation for ganging up on and beating back sharks, and they somehow didn’t make the cut in Maneater. I can understand why there are no giant squid or octopus in play, as that might be technically (tentacally?) challenging, but the absence of dolphins serves no porpoise.
As neat as the animals are, their ecosystem doesn’t seem as lifelike as those in games like Far Cry or Red Dead Redemption because they – and humans – are crowded together in these waters without ever interacting with or even seeming to be aware of each other. You’ll never witness an alligator chomping on a turtle or a pod of orcas attacking seals, and the legions of shark hunters will never fire a shot at any other sharks. Aggressive sharks and whales might team up against you without noticing how unlikely their alliance is. And you can conspicuously swim right up next to a seal without it realizing that their toothy death is imminent.
Once you get the hang of the timing, though, it’s usually not very challenging unless you’re up against multiple big animals in a confined space, especially since your bull shark can outrun pretty much anything in the water and can regain health by snacking on nearby small prey. In other words, if you bite off more than you can chew you can bail and then return to the fight, over and over again if necessary, to whittle down bigger fish. I died a handful of times learning my limits but after that it was rare that I went belly-up.
I wouldn’t call combat bad, since it does have its moments, but it definitely suffers from a lack of variety and balance over a 15-hour playthrough. Even after you develop into a massive, mutated megashark your options for dealing with the leviathans of the deep are very similar to those you had when you were just a pup tangling with crocs in the shallows.
What changes things up, at least a little bit, is when you come up to the surface to eat some man.Early on I felt like an underdog, but once I crossed over into the adult phase the balance swung drastically in my favor. My first encounter with a great white shark was a colossal letdown – by doing what felt like a natural amount of side activities on my way there I was already a couple of levels above it, which meant the “emperor of the sea” was a complete pushover for my bull. A few other predators were like this even when they had a level advantage – especially once I got some bio-electric bodyparts that essentially turned me into a giant electric eel and let me stun as I attacked. That ability had several boss-level fish – buffed-up “apex predator” versions of a zone’s meanest beast – go down with barely a fight. And yet there were a few, like my first encounter with an orca, that made me work for it with moves like literally slapping me out of the water with its tail.
What changes things up, at least a little bit, is when you come up to the surface to eat some man. You’re frequently given objectives that involve consuming five to 12 people, and once you exhaust the supply of hapless swimmers, pedal-boaters, and inflatable raft occupants your only option is to hold your breath and launch yourself onto land to chase them down. It’s admittedly hilarious to flop around like… well, like a giant angry fish out of water as you move from one beachgoer to the next to devour them. Since they don’t actually run from you (let’s assume they’re paralyzed with fear rather than having terrible AI) it’s as if every power pellet that Pac-Man swallowed screamed in terror before being shredded into a shower of blood and gore.
One of the biggest payoffs is when you get the Amphibious upgrade that lets you spend a lot more time out of the water chomping on human snacks and hunting down collectibles. But of course, once you’ve done that a few dozen times with little variation to make each one memorable, it does become a chore – aside from that one time you get to eat a whole rave.
That kind of behavior will – after you chow down on four or five people – bring the shark hunters out after you. Fighting boats full of drunken idiots by leaping out of the water and grabbing them one by one is funny at first but gets a little tedious quickly, even when you earn and start using variations like tossing a victim into the air and whacking them back at their friends with your tail instead of simply gulping them down. Even once I’d gained access to higher-level attacks like ramming and spins and the boats got a bit bigger, I’d have killed for a friggin’ laser beam attached to my forehead. (If that’s an unlockable, I never found it.)
It’s absolutely fun to play as mutant Jaws on steroids! Maneater chews the metaphorical scenery as often as it has you devouring humans and the diverse aquatic inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s some good dumb entertainment – for a while. But if you’re wondering whether its shallow combat and simplistic upgrades can sustain that exciteme...
Maneater is a TV mini series about a Hollywood script writer and a fashion consultant who marry and face hardships. See the episode titles, dates, ratings and plots of the two-part story.
Maneater is a 2009 TV show that follows a thirtysomething single woman who tries to find a husband in the Hollywood scene. The series has two episodes that aired in May 2009 and star Sarah Chalke, Philip Winchester and Maria Conchita Alonso.
May 30, 2009 · Maneater is a 2009 comedy drama romance series about a Hollywood script writer and a fashion consultant who marry and face challenges. Part 1 is the first episode of the series, aired on May 30, 2009, and has a rating of 7.4/10 on IMDb.
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Maneater is a 2009 TV series that follows Clarissa Alpert, a shallow and spoiled woman who wants to marry a famous producer. The series has two episodes and is rated NR by IMDb users.