Shark Simulator: Ocean Predator Survival

Genre: Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Shark Simulator, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch, is a game that does far too little to actually simulate anything to be considered a Simulator. In fact, there’s not even enough here to be truly considered a game. There’s no survival element here, either. But I suppose this game does have you controlling a shark, it does take place in what seems to be an ocean (shallow though it may be), and you do act as a predator, so I guess at least three of the five words in the title are technically accurate.

Okay, look, I’m not gonna’ beat around the bush here, Shark Simulator is a broken, incomplete mess that should have never been released. Players have two different types of “attacks”, but there’s no indication that either of these do anything other than exhausting two different stamina bars (oddly on opposite corners of the screen). You eat smaller fish just by running into them, which fills an experience bar that raises your level, with no indication that raising your level is actually doing anything. You have a health bar but nothing I encountered actually damaged me.

You can roam freely but the controls are terrible and there’s nothing interesting to see – in fact, when you go to a new area it takes a bit for fish to spawn in that area, making everywhere in the game seem empty aside from the area behind you, where you’ve already been. There are invisible walls keeping you from going too far, as well as an invisible wall keeping you from breaching the surface with anything other than the tip of your tail (you can’t even do the Jaws-style fin above the water, despite one of the game’s icons designed to look like that).

The visuals here look decent but not particularly noteworthy, with a decent lighting effect on the ocean floor but very little else of note, and the 3D animations of your shark and the various fish are stiff and unimpressive. The game’s synthesized music is decent and first the placid underwater theme of the game well, but there’s absolutely zero sound beyond this and a few random bubble noises, with none of the actual gameplay making noise.

In short, while Shark Simulator has a few decent elements of a Shark game, everything here feels incomplete and the result is that there’s no real game to speak of – no object here beyond swimming around and eating fish, and neither of those things is satisfying. If you want a shark-themed game, you have better options, skip this unfinished mess.

tl;dr – Shark Simulator is an unfinished, incomplete shambles of a game that has a few nice elements but absolutely fails to piece them together in a way that actually feels even close to a complete game. Do not waste your money on this.

Grade: D-

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