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One of the fundamental laws of nature is "Eat or be eaten," applying equally to creatures of land, air, and sea. Feeding Frenzy 2: Shipwreck Showdown takes that idea and runs with it in a simple 2D side-scrolling time-sink. Starting off each level as a small but very hungry fish, the trick is to eat the smaller fish while avoiding the bigger ones, and eventually grow large enough to chow down on almost everything on screen. FF2's simplicity and fast-paced action make it very playable, but a few errors in execution and a scoreboard oversight prevent it from becoming the addiction it might have been.
Feeding Frenzy 2's flaws end up making it a short-lived bit of fluff, but it's entertaining enough while it lasts.
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The basic concept is pretty solid. Each level starts off with a small fish that grows through three stages as it eats. At first, it can only chow on the smallest prey, and has to watch out for the medium and large fish that occasionally swim by. Once enough have been eaten, he instantly grows to the next size up, theoretically lessening the number of threats and widening his range of prey. Once he's grown to the largest size and filled the food meter all the way, the level ends and it's time to start the next one, small and nearly defenseless again. After the first few levels he gains a suck ability that helps speed up the eating process quite nicely, but it works on big fish as well as small so needs to be used carefully.
Complicating the formula somewhat are a variety of power-ups and negative status effects. Squid shoot out ink blots that, when run into, cause a shudder in the control that makes precision difficult. Jellyfish are inedible and stun everything they touch, from the largest barracuda to the smallest guppy, and pufferfish not only give out a nasty stun when expanded but also take a few points off the score. Squid and pufferfish are both rendered harmless when approached from behind, thanks to not having eyes in the back of their heads, but the little green poison fish are evil from any direction. Accidentally eating one reverses directional controls until you've hammered on the A button for a few seconds, and the only real defense is to either hold still until the effect goes away or be very good at handling unexpected reversals.
As tricky as it gets, it would be easy to sort through the good and bad fish at a leisurely pace if it wasn't for the scoring system. Every fish you eat adds a letter to the word FRENZY! at the top of the screen and when it's full the bonus multiplier goes up by one, all the way to X6 at the highest. It doesn't take long for it to start to deplete, however, so there's always pressure to keep moving, keep eating, and never let that multiplier go. A bit of caution will get anyone through the toughest levels, but clearing them with a good score takes speed, precision, and a healthy dose of risk analysis.
That's made a bit tougher thanks to the auto-scrolling, which unfortunately does a great job of not showing what's in front of you. Each level scrolls both horizontally and vertically, but our fishy hero needs to get much too close to the edge for the screen to start moving. When you're trying to keep a score multiplier alive and not die it's incredibly frustrating to slam into a larger fish popping in from the side of the screen, who's probably very happy for the free meal jumping into its mouth. This isn't helped any when traveling towards the top of the screen, which adds trying to see behind the food meter, score, and FRENZY! indicator to the already-short scrolling distance.
Once that's been taken into account, the scoring issue comes into play. You get a certain number of lives and continues at the start of a new game, and when they're gone you can start at any cleared level with a score of zero. The key to a high score should be starting from level 1 and beating the game before lives and continues run out, and it doesn't even have to be done in one sitting thanks to FF2 politely remembering which level it left off at. The problem arises when you realize that it's a simple matter of, at the game over screen, exiting all the way to the title and then re-continuing the game from the start of the level you died on, score intact. This defeats the purpose of limited continues and makes clearing a million pretty easy, unless you beat FF2 on a day the XBLA servers are down like I did.
While these issues lessen Feeding Frenzy 2's impact, it's still a fun little time waster. There are a good variety of levels, different fish to play as, frequent bonus levels with varying goals, and the challenge ramps up at a steady pace as new obstacles are introduced throughout the game. It can be highly satisfying to balance the need to score fast with being careful of every move, clearing a level with no lives lost and a healthy score bonus. The story mode has a cooperative mode allowing a second player to join, and there's even a collection of fast-paced party games that would be even more fun if there was any online aspect outside the scoreboard. Feeding Frenzy 2's flaws end up making it a short-lived bit of fluff, but it's entertaining enough while it lasts.
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