Jaws Unleashed Game Review

This game is basically GTA meets Jaws. You play as the shark, Jaws, and swim around eating people while combating the naughty humans who pollute your environment. Who knew Jaws was an environmentalist? Now swimming around as an overpowered great white shark and eating people is a great premise for a game, at least in my opinion, but sadly that’s the only good thing about this game. This game just has so many problems that could have been easily fixed, but apparently they didn’t even play the game before putting it on shelves. The camera is a pain in the butt, the controls want to fight you, the targeting system will frustrate you, and some of the game mechanics are just laughable.

The camera in this game is either too close, behind a wall, or above the water level which you can’t really see through. I’m not kidding, if you get too close to the surface, the camera goes above the water and get a shimmering surface between you and everything under the water which makes you nearly blind. The only thing you can see clearly are boats above water and your dorsal fin. Now I know they did this for the whole, “shark fin” moment, but all it really does is blind you to what is happening below the surface of the water. This gets really frustrating when you are fighting something in shallow water and you can’t even see yourself. There are several levels where you have to go through tunnels and inside underwater machinery, but the camera either zooms in so close that your body is obstructing the view, or it goes behind a wall or other object and obstructs your view. And then there are parts where you have to aim at things outside of the water, and judging the distance for these moments is a real pain.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the game challenges you even further with terrible controls. As with every underwater game I’ve played, the controls are a nightmare. If your fighting something, you have to make wide turns or you’ll just keep circling your enemy which is a royal pain during boss fights. It feels like your drifting in a car because you just keep sliding sideways. It’s also frustratingly hard to get Jaws to point in the direction you want him to when your lining up a strike, and pulling off the more advanced moves is a real hit or miss situation. Add this to the camera, and it’s a wonder that you manage to get from one end of a level to the other, to say nothing of the additional headache of the targeting and combat system. Once you lock on to something, Jaws will constantly try to head in that direction, which may be the point of a lock on, but when you have a bunch of smaller enemies right next to you, it’s much easier to simply swim near whatever it is you want dead and bite it.

Speaking of biting, the attacks in this game, though satisfying when dealing with smaller enemies, are a joke when fighting the stronger enemies. Jaws has three main attacks: bite, ram, and tail whip. The bit is the one you will use when attacking people and is very enjoyable. You are a big shark who bites helpless people and rip them apart by shaking your head, and then you eat them. You can also do this with smaller sharks, dolphins, seals, and all manner of marine life which is smaller than you. Ramming is mostly for destroying boats, piers, and obstructions. You charge up and boost forward, head butting whatever is in your way. The tail whip is your most useless attack. You charge it up like the ram, but it is very hard to actually hit anything with it because you have to position yourself next to whatever you are attacking (nearly impossible in a fight) and then you have to move the analog stick in the direction of the enemy…which turns you AWAY from the enemy and thus making you miss. There are a few other attacks like the corkscrew in which you ram and spin at the same time to do extra damage, and the belly flop which is very hard to do and next to impossible to actually hit anyone with, but bite and charge are the two attacks you will be doing the most in this game. You gain more attacks as you level Jaws up.

Now if you are a hardcore gamer and want to suffer through these handicaps for the sake of the story, don’t bother. In all honesty, this game doesn’t need a story. All they had to do was let you play as Jaws, give you a beach and presto, instant classic. No matter how bad the controls and camera, so long as we can rip apart beach bums, we’d be happy. But instead they fill it with a bunch of ridiculous missions in which you have to do things that just make you shake your head in bewilderment. Like spitting barrels out of your mouth at a sewage plant to blow it up. Apparently Jaws is related to the sharks from Deep Blue Sea, because he seems to have an uncanny understanding of human technology. He enters an underwater mining facility and destroys the power generators, destroys the power cables for an electric fence, takes out gun turrets on an oil refinery. You get the idea. I’m all for destruction, but at least make it somewhat believable. The most ridiculous and frustrating part of this game is when you have to navigate an underwater minefield that is insanely compacted. Touch one wrong mine and they all go off, killing you. You have to use your magic shark vision to spot which mine won’t set the rest off, pick up a barrel from the sea floor, and spit it out to detonate that one mine. Then you travel through a tunnel of the mines until you find another weak spot and so on and so forth. Seriously, give me a break.

They also go overboard with the realism. If you don’t keep swimming, you drown because sharks need to keep swimming to pass water through their gills. If you go too long without eating anything, you start to take damage because of hunger. I mean if you make a shark that can jump out of the water with a killer whale twice its size in its mouth and snap it in half, would it kill you to let me sit still for a second while I try to figure out what the crap I am supposed to do next?

By now you must be thinking, “But surely the graphics are good?” well, yes and no. the graphics for Jaws and the underwater environments are pretty nice, but the humans look terrible. They have painted on faces, even for the cinematic cut scenes, and they just keep saying the same crap over and over again: “We’re not gonna make it! Where is it? I can’t take it!” well neither can I. But there is hope, my children. When you do sink your teeth into one of these hysterical teenagers, you can literally dismember them. You can shake your head and rip their limbs off, tear them in half, spit them out and watch them splat, or swallow them down. You can also sink ships, destroy piers by smashing the supports, drag people down to the bottom of the ocean (though they don’t drown for some reason no matter how long I keep them under) they even threw in a stealth mode in which you slowly sneak up on a swimmer, bite them, and do the famous “drag them across the surface of the water” scene. Not very practical, but fun. The game is also loaded with collectables. Most of its garbage such as license plates, body bags, tires, and cans which give you points to spend on powering up Jaws. You can increase his health, hunger, speed, power, and accuracy. Once you pump up his speed, Jaws can really move. You can also unlock clips form the movie by collecting all of the cans in a level, so you have something to work for in between slaughtering helpless swimmers.

I would have to say that if you are looking for some great adventure, keep looking. But if you want a cheap way to pass the time by ripping apart people mindlessly, then this game is right up your alley. You can probably find it in your local game store’s bargain bin or a garage sale near you. Enjoy.