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PS2 | Action | Jaws Unleashed

Boxart for Jaws Unleashed
Jaws Unleashed 45 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 2.50
  • SOUND: 3.00
  • CONTROL: 2.75
  • FUN FACTOR 2.75
  • AVG USER SCORE 3.4
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 2.5

Review: Jaws: Unleashed

Review by Rice Burner | 06/01/2006 | 11:48:01 AM PST

Who wouldn't want to play as a Great White Shark and roam around capsizing boats, fighting giant squids, and mauling random ocean lovers? However, Jaws: Unleashed is a perfect example on how a great concept can go horribly wrong.

The concept of a sand box non-linear game, based on the classic Jaws films, where the player assumes control of the most deadly predator on the face of our planet seems like it would be a no-brainer. Who wouldn't want to play as a Great White Shark and roam around capsizing boats, fighting giant squid, and mauling random ocean lovers? However, Jaws: Unleashed is a perfect example on how a great concept can go horribly wrong.

In Jaws: Unleashed, you're given the task of stopping the human encroachment into your natural habitat by killing and destroying as many things as possible to scare the bejesus out of everybody. So, you go along your merry way, gnawing, dismembering, and facing off against armadas of shark hunters and giant killer whales and octopi, in a vain attempt to stop industry on Amity Island.

PETA Would Be Proud

The problem is you're a shark. How does a shark take down big business? Well, by capturing depth charges, transporting them to the oil refinery and tossing them onto the surface to detonate --which is a little lame. The entire premise of this title is a vain and pathetic attempt to engineer a GTA-styled clone, complete with nonsensical side-missions and a really horrible in-game engine.

As Jaws, you'll have to take care of your basic needs, just like a real shark. You must eat to regain health, eat to stave off hunger, and eat license plates and tin cans to collect ability points to unlock abilities --also lame.

At Least Jabber Jaw Isn't a Playable Character

Putting the entire flawed premise of Jaws aside, Jaws: Unleashed would be a decent title to play if the camera system, collision detection, and graphics were up to par. But unfortunately, Jaws garners lackluster scores in every one of those categories. The camera has a bad habit of rising above you anytime you're in a confined space. That really isn't so bad when you're deep in the ocean, however when you're in shallow waters the camera actually goes above the surface and you cannot see through the surface textures, rendering you blind to what is going on below you. This forces you to toggle to first-person view, where the collision detection is horrible and you'll be lucky if you can bite anything at all -- really lame.

Additionally, the physics system is tuned pretty horribly. There are moments where you'll stop dead in your tracks because of a small object that you should be able to swim past. Other moments yield awkward results, which jarringly pull the player out of the gameplay, such as getting stuck behind the gameplay area effectively ending your game session, and dying in an explosion which doesn't even appear on the screen.

Shark Fin Soup Anyone?

You would think the one draw that had everybody talking about this game early on in its development cycle would at least be instituted decently. However, eating humans isn't as fun as it could be either. Dismembering unsuspecting humans is a chore. You have to maw them into bite size pieces before you can ingest them. This takes a lot of time and effort and you can forget about trying to do all this when multiple smaller sharks and boats with harpoon men are attacking you. It's easier to just go after seals, and other marine life, than to eat humans.

In the end, the final version of Jaws: Unleashed is less fun than the previewable version we got in several months ago. It's an enjoyable experience for a few minutes, but the game loses its merits when you finally get the hang of the controls because of all the inadequacies of the game. Still, the game is worth a try; just don't plan on this title keeping your attention for more than a weekend's worth of gameplay.


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