Maneater, the Shark RPG from Tripwire Interactive, is due out sometime this year. But if you just can't wait another minute to swim around and chomp on innocent people, there's another option! Modder JulioNIB is developing a Maneater script for GTA 5, and while it's still a work in progress (and only currently available to subscribers of his Patreon), it's already some good, gory, silly fun. I took it for a swim this week and discovered what life is like for a very hungry shark in Los Santos.
Above (and here on YouTube) you can see a sample of some of my adventures, which include the stealthy (sorta) murder of a fisherman, a fight with an extremely confident citizen who runs into the water just to call my shark a 'fat-ass', my repeated attempts to take down a police helicopter, a quick snack in a fancy swimming pool, and the time I tried to lure a cab driver close enough to the water to eat him. Yes, my shark has a smartphone. He's a smart shark.
In a way, being a shark in Los Santos isn't all that different than being a gangster! People die, cars explode, and a flurry of cops are dispatched, only this time I'm a damn shark instead of Michael De Santa, and the solution to my problems involves eating people instead of blowing them up.
Once you activate the mod and transform into a shark, you're bestowed shark powers, the primary one being the power of not being able to breathe air—so don't do what I did and transform into a shark while you're standing in Michael's foyer. You'll die after about a minute if you're not in the water. The same is true of swimming pools—you can swim in them but can't breathe—and, as I discovered, you can't swim up the Los Santos Canal either. It simply isn't deep enough for a chonky sharkboi like myself. RIP.
In addition to swimming you have a few different attacks: you can bite people and drag them along in your mouth, chew on them by clicking the attack button repeatedly, or let them go (I don't know why you'd let someone go, but you can) by pressing Q. You can also perform a spinning tail whip, good for knocking boats through the air or sending jerks flying.
The mod also includes (with permission) the script functions from the Dismemberment Mod, which means after you've chewed on a citizen for a few seconds you'll actually bite them in half, and then be able to snack on their top and lower halves separately. It's gross! It's also funny. And delicious.
You can launch yourself through the air by swimming fast and then aiming yourself up, though it's difficult to aim since you can't see all that well underwater, hence my difficulty with taking down the police chopper. You can also move around awkwardly on land by spamming the attack button, which lets you wriggle forward. This is definitely useful, because while there are plenty of victims to be found swimming at the beach by the pier, you might have to get creative in other coastal areas.
That's why I use Michael's smartphone to call a cab while prowling around Sandy Shores. We're dealing with a very clever shark, one who can operate a phone and mimic a human voice. The cabbie arrives but naturally won't drive into the water to make things easy for me, so I have to waddle out onto land and headbutt his car to death. The cabbie, when faced with the option of running directly at the landshark or in literally any other direction, chooses poorly.
Mmm, that's good cabbie.
The mod lets you pick between a number of different sharks, like a great white, hammerhead, tiger shark, killer whale, a mighy megalodon, and others. You can even be a dolphin! A cute, murderous dolphin. Also you don't have to eat people, there are plenty of fish in the water to eat. Though, where's the fun in that?
Like I said, the mod is a work-in-progress, which is why it sometimes appears that a pistol silencer is sticking out of my shark's mouth, but even if the mod isn't complete it's still a ton of fun. If you're not a subscriber JulioNIB's Patreon, you'll still be able to use the mod for free when it's officially released. More details and installation instructions here.
Ready for a joyride? Here's our guide on how to install GTA 5 mods on PC.
