Jaws Unleashed

The premise of Jaws Unleashed is just flat out awesome. I love Jaws, heck I even love the cheesy sequels, especially that one set in the water park! So, I was very excited to hear that we were getting a game based on Jaws where you actually control the shark. The NES game was not that great and you were trying to kill the shark not actually play has him.

Kill or Be Killed!

One of the more interesting things about the game is that there is actually a story to play through. Set 30 years after the first movie, Amity Island is doing just fine and one day, Jaws decides to take a swim and have a snack. This snack turns out to be the son of a major CEO of the town and he wants Jaws dead! That is the basic premise of the game and it is fine for what it is.

The presentation of the game is a very mixed bag. At the time of release, Jaws Unleashed was a budget game and the visuals have a budget look to them that is for sure. The underwater world is not bad at all with shipwrecks, reefs, and plenty of aquatic life to look at and eat. It is the human characters that look super weird and low quality. The thing is, it kind of adds to the game's charm if I am being honest.

Taming The Beast

There is a tutorial at the start of the game and that is a good thing. Many people will say that this game is unplayable, but that is not true. Does it take a while to get the hang of the controls? Yes, it does, but Jaws Unleashed is kind of fun once you get the hang of controlling a massive great white shark! The game is set with various missions. Most of these missions are about eating someone/something or destroying something. There is not much variety to the game at all, but you do have a bit of an open world where you can swim around just killing for fun. It is not the kind of game you are going to play for hours on end, but in short bursts, it can be fun.

Let There Be Gallons Of… Glitches!

You thought I was going to say blood, didn’t you? Well, this game does have a lot of blood, but it is also glitchy as hell. It has a very “budget” feel to it, like they did not have quite enough money to fully test this thing before they released it. Sometimes these glitches can be funny, like once I got Jaws stuck between a rock and he started freaking out! Other times, it can be so bad you have to restart the game!

Pros:

• You can play as Jaws!
• Eating people is fun
• The open-world aspect of the game is a neat idea
• It does at least try to have an engaging story
• Some of the glitches can be funny

Cons:

• The game is very repetitive
• Not sure it was actually ready for release due to the number of glitches

Something Lurks Under the water. And it's not a floating turd either; no, no, that would be on the surface. Instead, it's the Spielberg-created, dead-eyed, fishy-breathed monster of the 70s, the one single-handedly responsible for making me afraid of going in the swimming pool.

Developed by Appaloosa Interactive (the former developers of Sega classic Ecco The Dolphin), things follow a much darker path here than in the hippy favourite, Ecco. You play as the great white shark who's yet again returned to terrorise the inhabitants of Amity Island, thus equating to a series of stages in which you must hunt and be hunted by the residents of the island, returning back to the relative safety of the ocean between missions. Things don't seem to be looking up for our 25ft fishy friend though, as the game is plagued by a number of issues, such as a dodgy camera, unwieldy controls, a number of bugs and some poor console graphics.

However, the brilliant John Williams theme tune is present and correct, some of the underwater scenes can look quite pretty and the first 30 minutes had me in stitches after I discovered that I could jump onto land, dismember people in different ways and that the panicked swimmers sound a bit like Futurama's Dr Zoidberg. Sadly, much of the novelty wore off soon after and the rest of the game left me, just like many in the film, dead in the water.

We usually spaz out at the thought ot movie-licensed games--bit, oh, how we anticipated the idea of taking control of this killer fish and rending everything that swims into chummy bits. But things go belly-up quickly here, thanks to an awful camera, awkward storytelling, and stupid missions.

Bottom Line:

To quote the famous review of Spinal Tap album Shark Sandwich: s*** sandwich.