Feels buggier than it is.
After writing to PopBrain twice I finally got the hang of it. At first I thought you needed to be moving at a certain speed in order to bite somebody, but it turns out it's a little more nuanced than that. In order to bite someone, all of the following must be true:
- The piranha must be in motion.
- The piranha must be facing the direction it is moving.
- The piranha's mouth must be overlapping a part of the swimmer.
It's that second one that's the problem. You see, when you change direction, your piranha does a little "turn around" animation. While this animation is playing, the piranha's mouth is theoretically facing towards the camera, not towards the front of the fish. (The fact that the turn animation is just a "squash & stretch" further confuses the issue.)
Buying seeds helps a lot more than almost any other powerup. Boats always go left, so even though it may seem unfair at first, almost all of your problems can be solved by waiting patiently near the start of the stage. Gameplay quickly becomes about identifying the objectives, then picking the right moment to attack.
Killing Alligators is laughably easy-- you just need to be patient. These will be your primary source of blood. I never once saw a shark, even though there are pictures of it in the tips at the start of the level.
Quality should be manually set to low in the Options menu on the title screen. Even if you have a great computer, it'll start to chug once you get enough seeds.
The diversity of objectives is just enough for the length of the game, which feels shorter than it is thanks to the unusual pace of progress. Each stage has a time limit, and succeed or fail, that stage will ALWAYS take you that long to play. This means you'll only spend 40 seconds in some levels, and hours in others, as you try in vain to locate an objective you've never seen before. (Did I collect 10 fish or just 9? Did I miss one of the boats? What the hell is a Sea Doo anyway? (Google it!) )
You only get one shot at some objectives-- when boats are gone, they're gone. If swimmers or especially fish go behind an island, sometimes you're fucked even though you didn't do anything wrong. Once you accept these parameters, the game is neither difficult nor bad.
There's a lot of room for improvement here. The powerups are pretty much bland numerical increases, except for seeds. The controls could be a lot tighter and the reactions more predictable (boo physics engine!) Correctly biting a swimmer is a much more involved process than it needs to be. Objectives frequently become unobtainable, often for reasons completely beyond the player's direct control.
But the package is stylish, the theme is well-explored, and at the end of the day, it's addictive, fun, and not too frustrating, once you get past the hump of that initial learning curve.