Hungry Shark World

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Hungry Shark World is an Arcade-style game where you play one of the titular ocean predators looking to eat anything and everything they can munch on while exploring the game’s oceanic environments.

While some may compare this game to the likes of Ecco the Dolphin, there’s not much the games share in common beyond the superficial – you’re an aquatic animal swimming through a 2D environment. However, where Ecco focused more on exploration and puzzle-solving, Hungry Shark World is more interested in continually feeding your shark – your health meter is constantly ticking down, and while we’re told that real-life sharks die if they stop moving (as I understand it, this is an urban myth), in Hungry Shark World, your shark will die if he’s not constantly feeding.

This ends up making the game somewhat monotonous, simply a matter of seeking out food your shark can munch on, and then chomping it down. And while it is fun at first to nibble helpless fish and to massacre swimming humans (or leap up out of the water to wriggle to them on land), the novelty of this dies off, and you’re stuck looking for something a bit… er, deeper.

It’s here that the game’s single-mindedness works against it, as the game does provide areas to explore, but the need to constantly be feeding discourages you from straying too far from plentiful sources of food. Plus, many parts of these levels are simply inaccessible unless you have the right shark, meaning that your attempts to explore will only result in the frustration of realizing you’re gated off from seeing the rest of the map, and ignoring your shrinking health meter was done in vain.

It would have been a simple matter to solve this issue – either focus entirely on the more arcadey elements of the game by giving players more things to do when it comes to hunting down and munching food, or ensure that the player isn’t punished for exploring. Sadly, this game settles for more of a middle ground that ends up doing both the arcade and exploration elements of the game a disservice.

The presentation here is at least pretty good, with a good amount of personality, fairly detailed environments, and a game that all-around looks and sounds pretty good, though not anywhere near as nice as even the underwater environments in games like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Still, the presentation here is decent, even if the gameplay isn’t quite what it could’ve been.

Don’t get me wrong, for short bursts, Hungry Shark World is amusing. Who wouldn’t enjoy stalking the seas as a merciless predator? Unfortunately, the arcadey action isn’t deep enough to have much staying power, and the exploration elements are hindered by the arcadey elements. It’s still a fun game, but it definitely feels like there’s a lot of room for improvement.

tl;dr – Hungry Shark World is an Arcade-style game where you’re stalking underwater environments as a shark who must constantly be looking for more food. It’s a game that’s fun on the surface, but doesn’t have enough depth to keep it going, in part thanks to its arcadey bits hindering the exploration bits.

Grade: C+

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