In the early months of each year, I like to comb around for anything we might have missed in the rush leading up to the holidays. This extremely intensive effort typically involves heading to the TouchArcade forums and looking for big threads on games we haven’t reviewed. Every time I’ve visited recently, one game keeps surfacing to slap me with its fins: Shark Eaters: Rise Of The Dolphins ($4.99). While I had originally passed over the game due to its frankly aggravating controls, I saw it received an update that was supposed to address the problem, so I’ve given it another solid try. While I have to admit it’s better than it was, it’s still not doing much for me.

In Shark Eaters, you play as a dolphin with an odd penchant for eating sharks. While you might be imagining something like SEGA’s Ecco The Dolphin ($0.99), the game is more like a dogfighting sim held underwater. In each stage, you have to maneuver your agile dolphin around in 3D space and eat all the opposing sea life before they take you down themselves. To eat them, you just need to collide with them face-first. This will reduce their health by a portion, and if they’re on their last bit of health, you’ll happily gulp them down. Once the last bit of food is down the hatch, the stage is over and you can collect your rewards. As you progress through the stages, the enemies get stronger and more aggressive, forcing you to step up your skills if you want to come out on top.

There are a lot of things I think are very well done in Shark Eaters. The animation is top-notch, part of an overall impressive presentation. The water looks nice, and while the sea isn’t very detailed, it’s still quite beautiful in its own way. I also enjoy how well the music can shift from tranquil to tense and back again. The enemy AI is also very nicely done. You really need to play cautiously and make the most of your opportunities unless you want to end up on the wrong end of the food chain. The game also provides a clever way of helping you overcome challenges you get stuck on in the form of more powerful dolphins you can use once every day or so. There are consequences for losing a stage once you reach a certain point, which adds to the excitement. Winning a stage will earn you pearls while failing will lose you some. Since you can always go back to earlier stages to farm more pearls, it’s not overly punishing. I also give the game full points for innovation, since I can honestly say I’ve never played a dolphin fighting game before.

There are two issues I have with Shark Eaters, however. One is a small one, but the other is pretty big, and they kind of clump together into a really big problem. The first is that I feel the camera is zoomed in a little too closely on your dolphin. You can’t see much around you, and while that’s realistic in a sense, it can be very frustrating if you lose track of an errant fish. That tends to happen a lot, because the controls are an absolute disaster. I’m an advocate for touch controls more strongly than most, but I’m not sure if there’s any way to properly control a speedy, highly-maneuverable avatar in a fully 3D environment with just a single virtual stick and a couple of virtual buttons. Your dolphin is highly prone to getting turned around and blasting off in the wrong direction, and given the fast pace of the game, you don’t have time to fiddle around trying to make fine movements. On top of that, it’s really hard to gauge exactly where an enemy is in relation to your character. The vertical and horizontal are easy enough to eyeball, but how far or near they are relative to the camera is a whole other ball of wax.

The result is that you’ll often ending up scooting behind or in front of a target you thought you had a bead on, leaving your tail exposed. You’ll want to get turned around in a hurry, but half the time it feels like your dolphin has other ideas. The developer compensated for this in an update by adding a special tail bolt move that fires a little shock out from your rear. It has a limited number of uses but you can refill it by buying more with pearls or by playing a mini-game stage, so you can make extensive use of it if you’re willing to grind occasionally. It’s an interesting bandage for the problem. The tail bolt is very effective, especially against early enemies, but it’s not very fun to win the battle that way. It’s an empty victory at best. So you’re left with the choice of wrestling with awkward controls for the sake of the good times when things are working, or grinding to abuse a technique that isn’t fun at all but will get you through. Well, it’s a bandage, not a cure.

If you really like dolphins, then you might have enough love in your heart to fumble around with the controls enough to enjoy the spectacle and oddity of Shark Eaters. It’s an interesting idea, lovingly crafted, and there are certainly quite a few members in our forums who have enjoyed it. Ultimately, I think the controls aren’t even close to properly supporting the concept, making this a hard recommendation for all but the biggest fans of Flipper and company, but I encourage you to read the thread in our forums if you’d like some counterpoints.