Recent reviews by Obtuse Aang

Interesting story so far. It's not done yet, but I look forward to the rest.

So far, there's only been one or two choices that have been hard for me to pick between. This could just be my personality, or it could be because we're in the first half of the episodes. Either way, I'm enjoying myself so far.

The game is a buggy mess, the menus are not intuitive, and halo 1 and 2 suck on legendary difficulty.

I am not getting achievements for the things I am doing. I completed every single mission of Halo 2 on legendary difficulty with a friend. In the menu it shows 15/15 completed, but the in-game achievement tracker says I've only completed 6 levels. I only played legendary difficulty. The game contradicts itself without even bringing steam into the equation. Garbage. This should not be a problem. I suffered (and it was suffering) through the legendary difficulty and didn't even get credit for it. No way in hell am I doing that again. Worst still, my friend only got credit for around 8 of the missions despite playing them all with me.

I've seen early access titles with fewer problems. This amount of bugs should not be tolerated. I HIGHLY do not recommend. That's not even considering the fact that the first two games are tedious and terribly balanced on legendary difficulty.

I 100%'d the base game (no DLC). I think it's worth about 20 bucks, definitely not 40. I got it on sale for 8 bucks. I didn't rush and it took ~11 hours to 100%.

I don't remember what other shark game I played as a kid, but this game scratched that itch I didn't know I had. So, if the thought of playing a shark and swimming around killing stuff sounds fun, then I'd recommend the game. If you need more substance than that, then this game will probably be a disappointment.


The game progresses from region to region by accomplishing the main story missions. The story is framed as a nature documentary following a shark and hunter. You play as the shark and grow by eating... a lot. That's basically it.


It's a goofy game that doesn't try to be realistic. It's fun and satisfying to play as a shark and to be a menace to society. I think the shark animations are great and the game looks good.


These will contain minor spoilers about game mechanics, missions, objectives, and evolution/mutations. It won't contain spoilers for the main story.


There are three types of collectible objectives in each region (with one exception). The collectibles come in three flavors: license plates, caches, and landmarks. They all boil down to items that are just sitting there waiting for you to swim up to them. There is nothing complicated or fun about collecting them.

The most "complex" ones are found in the underwater pipes. This requires you to navigate narrow tunnels with one or two paths. It's hardly challenging or engaging.

They also block some of them by placing them very high up or behind grates with age locks. These require you to get bigger before coming back to collect them. They're not interesting and just create a bunch of backtracking or fast traveling later in the game as you revisit the same regions to clean up the objectives you couldn't get before.

I wanted something more. Simple puzzles would've been nice. Just something to make it feel like I was interacting with the world rather than just swimming until I reached a destination.


There's very little variety. There are missions to eat humans, eat 10 fish of a given type (e.g. catfish), kill an apex creature, and watch cutscenes. I think that's basically it.

There's boss or "apex" creature fights that are essentially the same enemy as the normal variant but with more health, a higher level, and a fresh set of paint. I would have liked to see unique moves or stages in the fight to make them feel more important. They didn't feel any different from a side mission.

There's also main missions where you are required to kill a certain amount of creatures. I think there's three per region. You can be 8 hours in, at the level cap, and as big as possible and the game is like, "hey go kill 10 parrot fish lol." Garbage. In the beginning when we are growing, sure. Maybe this could be framed as us causing harm to the environment as well as fueling our growth. Instead it lasts throughout the whole game! WHY?! The "challenge" of these missions is that the fish you are required to kill have body guards (aka sharks and things that would normally be eating them). So you have to kill the few normal enemies then eat like 10 nearby fish. Fun... In the last region of the game, all three of these missions were the exact same. Go kill 10 hammerhead sharks being guarded by whales. They didn't even have the decency to change the fish you have to eat 10 of. It's just so lazy. Offensively so, in my opinion.

Part of it being a game is that you essentially play as a shark with the mind and intellect of a human. I would have loved to see the story play into this. Especially since we grow and develop so quickly and are clearly the odd one out when it comes to marine life. It would have been really interesting to have some complexity in the missions beyond eating things. For example, maybe we could have disrupted society in some way like turning off power for the city, or outsmarting humans trying to capture us. Oh well, I can dream.


There's only three sets of upgrades you can choose from. That's shockingly little in my opinion. There's the bone, shadow, and electric sets. That's it. I would have like to see more options. I felt no real incentive to mix and match either. I just put on what I could when I unlocked each piece from the set I cared about and that was that. There's no creative builds here.


My wrist would have snapped or I'd have a jacked right arm if I played this game as intended. There is a thrashing mechanic where you have to quickly move your mouse left and right to kill your food. They really need an accessibility option or something. It's immersive to feel like your violently tearing apart your enemy... at first. Then it becomes super repetitive and tiring. I ended up using AutoHotkeys and a macro to move my mouse with a button click. I would have dropped the game after a couple hours without this macro.


The humans and marine life are just sacks of meat for the player to eat. That's all. Humans will scream, but generally make no effort to get away from you as you eat their friends and family. It really doesn't seem hard to program more urgency into them getting away from the shark that's sitting firmly on land eating someone right in front of them. I'm literally flopping around on land eating one after another and the most they can do is casually stroll away screaming.

Fish are basically the same. You will never have to chase down a fish. All fish are comfortable with death and have made their peace with dying. They must believe in fish god or the fish afterlife because they make no effort to escape the shark eating half of their school.


The story is framed as a documentary and you therefore have a narrator the whole game. I thought it was fine. I didn't care one way or another about it. It's clearly a goofy world where people would rather die than miss out on their beach time. I think it would have been cool to get more of this story framing in the game. Something like wild or goofy interviews with locals so that we could understand why they must swim.

There's borderlands style intros for some hunters that are very... weird. It's like the studio wanted to add some character to the enemies, but that's where the character ends. Plus the intros have almost no sound. It's odd. I'd expect them to be grunting, for their gadgets to make noise, or something even if they aren't fully voiced. It's very odd, like some kind of uncanny imitation of another successful franchise.


I definitely have more to say about what I didn't like and what I hoped for, but ultimately it was fine. It was worth what I payed for it and a little bit more. Although the more I write this review, the more I'm questioning why I chose to 100% this game. I think it had something to do with the desire to turn my brain off and just do repetitive tasks until I see 100%.

Maybe due to budget or management, this is what the game ended up as. But, as a player, I was hoping for more variety in almost every facet of the game. I would have preferred half the playtime and a focus on more variety. Who knows. Maybe they did what they could under their constraints and just copy-pasted until they felt like it had enough play time.

It was entertaining enough, but I have no desire to revisit the game just to play it again. I may get the DLC on sale eventually just to 100% it as well, but I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting for that moment.

It's eh. Nothing to write home about. I think it's exactly what you'd expect.

I don't like restricting purchases by level. It's annoying to not be able to buy certain basic shelves until I've leveled up enough. Find some other mechanism to allow the user to feel like they are progressing. Flavor it with something like meeting a person who can help you get more interesting ways to display items. IDK, just do something interesting.

Customers are lifeless. Robots in human skins walk in smelling like crap and you sell them over market price garbage.

The gimmick that separates this from something like a grocery store simulator is the pack opening mechanic which is eh in my opinion. I don't care about these cards, so I just stare at numbers like some kind of hopeless gambler. Oh boy, I hope this pack contains a card over the $4 I can sell the unopened pack for!

I imagine for some, this game will release the happy chemicals, but no happy chemicals for me. It was okay enough to waste a few hours while I waited to do something else.

I don't think the story is perfect but I enjoyed it. I liked the playthrough and ending I got. I doubt I'd like other endings as much, but I'll probably open the game back up every now and again to see what other outcomes there are.

I really dislike the depth of field outside of cutscenes. Low, high, it doesn't matter. In a third person game, the focus should not be on the player's own character. I want to see the world. If I wanted everything to be blurry, I'd take out my contacts. Really frustrating that there is no "off" option or that they don't do a good job of focusing on what I actually want to see.

Also... no ultrawide support. Pretty disappointing.

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I have a lot of questions about why any scientist would design androids to so closely match humans and their flaws. I get why people could feel more comfortable looking at a human rather than the stereotypical robot, but androids are kind of... eh. They think faster (barely), but they don't really have any advanced strength or speed. They don't really see the world in any way that's different than a human unless you count the mind palace (which I do not). They are largely incapacitated in the same way as humans. They are just incredibly underwhelming as a tool in this world. I don't think the game or story would change that much if you just switched out androids for like a whole race of basically normal humans but in a trance-like state.

One example of an android being stupidly designed to have human flaws is in one scene where an android gets punched in the gut. What did I expect to happen? Nothing. It's an android. Take the hit and show virtually no reaction. Instead, the android keels over. You can blame bio-components physically affecting them just as much as real organs in a real human, but again, I just wonder why they are designed to have virtually an exact replica of the human organ system. There's a lot of little things like that, that make me wonder what the scientist in this world were thinking when they designed androids. It feels like the story wanted humans but without calling them humans, so this is the outcome. "Androids" in name only.

I just feel like a lot more thought could have gone into making androids distinct from humans. At the very least, physically. Ideally the way they think, process, or value things would also be distinct, but I get why this would be hard to pull off. Androids just feel like humans that are brainwashed to follow orders and are slowly waking up and realizing they don't need to.

I think how much you enjoy this game will depend on the value you see in reflecting on your life. I am younger and not at the end of my life (hopefully), so this reflection is more of a time to think about where I am now and where I would like to be in the future.

It's given me something to think about. This is not the first time I've thought about how I will look back on my life 10+ years down the line, but this game is the cause of the most recent reflection. One day this kind of lifelong reflection will be very real. It's always something to think about. It's good to be reminded of that now to hopefully avoid long stretches of unfulfilling or unhappy living. I've already made some improvements to my life that have made me think, "if only I had started this sooner. Maybe I wouldn't have spent those years in a cycle of self-destructive behavior." Although, maybe this is a dangerous way of thinking. Always reminiscing that if you had just done this one thing, your life would be completely different and you would be happy now. It's hard to say.

You'll never be certain about what kind of thoughts will come up while reflecting on a life lived until you are actually having them. What will you think of this part of your life when you look back in 10 years? 20 years? Are the things you're stressed about really that important? Are you maintaining friendships and seeking out new relationships? Are you investing in yourself and your own well-being?

There are some rough edges to the gameplay. Here's a few "bugs" I can call out specifically. The scores sometimes increase by two and the side serving won't switch when it should. The ball won't go out of bounds on the side with the ref... ever, even though it definitely should. The ref just calls whatever he wants with no regard for what actually happened. It's hard to figure out if these "bugs" where intentional or not. I'd lean towards intentional or at least explained well enough.

Also, the theme song is great.

I quit basically immediately. The combat felt disgusting.

It's a great, cute game.

It was fun. They removed bank it and killed the sniper. It's like they're intentionally ruining the aspects of this game that I liked.

If you guys hate hitscan snipers, make all weapons have travel time. This 40m hitscan, then travel time feels like the laggiest garbage ever. Other weapons can out snipe the sniper now.

Team deathmatch is not a replacement for bank it. It's too chaotic and there's no team strategy.

They've ruined this game for me. I won't be playing it again.

Why did this leave early access?

It's Stardew Valley with a fresh set of 3D animated paint. I don't mean that it is similar. I mean it is a rip off. It's like someone was trying to copy you during a test then they got to an essay question and had to make something up themselves.

The thing they made up was diving. Diving sucks. It's a chore in a game of chores. It's just scything trash over and over and over again. So far, the only mechanic I've seen is clearing trash out of the way of a random line of light that takes the most obtuse route through all the trash possible. It's boring. Dive, clear trash, eat so you have more energy, clear more trash. I've done 20+ objectives with no variation other than the amount of trash you clear.

For the combat section it's like the developers purposefully chose the wrong answers since on average guessing would've gotten a better score. Combat in Stardew was fun. It had it's quirks but it was a mix of challenging and rewarding encounters where going to the cave required some preparation if you wanted to last a while. In this game, the only preparation is stocking up on something to get your energy back. The cave is purely an exhaustion and time gate. The actual combat is offensively lackluster. The enemies barely detect you. Often times you can just ignore them completely. If they do notice you, they just walk at you then do a simple attack. Some have telegraphed attacks, like the turtle monster, though I swear they hit you before it turns red. There was one cool enemy that threw out slimes, though these thrown enemies just become the basic enemy slime that is uninteresting, so eh. There is no challenge and I often forget I have health at all. I've made it 120+ levels with the basic starter sword. Just charge in and mash click. No need to dodge or think at all.

Bug catching is just some doodle they drew in the side of the test. It's neat I guess. Though it definitely needs tweaking. Once the bugs are aware of you, they will never forget your face. They keep a picture of you on their nightstand next to their mother. So if you raise their awareness, you can forget trying again. Why is it like this? Who play-tested this game? A freak, that's who. Using the intended sneak mechanic is impossible on some bugs. You may get lucky with a dash and grab technique, though this is pretty challenging to pull off. You'll probably need upgrades or traps to catch the hardest bugs which means finishing the offerings will take at least 1+ in game years.

Overall, I don't hate it. I would be more forgiving if it didn't just leave early access. This is not full release quality. It needs more QoL and content. I was hoping to be able to mod the game, but it also appears that the tools are not available yet.

C+