Jaws Unleashed review (Xbox)

The in-game camera makes matters even worse. Enemies come from all directions in Jaws Unleashed, and trying to position the camera in such a way as to make it so you're not constantly getting nailed from behind is a near impossibility. It's even worse because the game constantly forces you to feed on enemies to maintain your hunger level (if it drops too low, you die), but when you're getting constantly sideswiped by enemies you can't see, and you can't properly steer yourself into an opportune position to snag a meal fast enough, you're going to find yourself extremely flustered. It's even worse when you're swimming near surface level. The camera snaps beneath and above the water depending on where you're at, and if you get too close to the surface while trying to snag something or perform an attack, the camera will snap to the surface view, which totally obscures your ability to see if you hit what you were after, and to even get the camera back to a normal position, you have to swim down a ways.

You might be willing to struggle with the controls if the game provided missions that were entertaining in the slightest. Jaws Unleashed does nothing of the sort. For what it's worth, there is a measure of entertainment to be found in Jaws' missions, but it's purely unintentional hilarity. Take, for example, the very first mission objective you're handed. You're trapped in a science lab, and in order to escape, a door must be opened. Normal Jaws logic would dictate that simple brute force would get you out, but no, not in Jaws Unleashed. Here, you have to grab a nearby scientist, drag him into the water, swim over to a nearby key card reader, swipe his body past it, and thus, open the door.

And this is hardly the only example--the game is littered with scenarios in which you're picking up exploding barrels with your mouth to toss at enemies (inexplicably, the barrels catch on fire the moment they leave your jaws), and murdering orca whales inside theme parks so that a magic door will open instantly the second that orca dies. Maybe it's asking for too much to expect a total reenvisioning of the action game paradigm in a budget, movie-licensed game, but Appaloosa failed to think anywhere even resembling outside the box on this one, instead slavishly dedicating itself to recycling the same trite, boilerplate action-game mission designs that have been done to death in other games and furthermore, seem ludicrously out of place in a game starring a wild shark. It's not even done with a hint of irony or humor.

Jaws Unleashed's presentational aspects are better produced than anything the gameplay has to offer, but that isn't to suggest they're any good. Expectedly, the most graphical detail is shown in the Jaws model, and it is a pretty good-looking shark by any standard. It animates well, looks natural swimming, and basically does what it needs to in order to look like a big, mean shark. The underwater environments have their charm, too. You'll see lots of little schools of fish, groupings of dolphins, and other assorted undersea bric-a-brac swimming about--although you won't see any of it until it's practically right in front of you, as the game has a terrible draw distance. Once you get out of the water, things fall apart. The people in the game just look bad, and the environmental designs above water just look cheap. The frame rate also completely tanks in certain underwater situations, especially when lots of air bubbles start appearing during a thrash-heavy battle. It seriously goes into single-digit territory on both platforms. The frame rate actually seems a little worse on the Xbox version, though the Xbox version also has slightly cleaner overall visuals compared with the PS2 version, so there is a tradeoff. There are also plenty of random animation glitches and random bugs to give the game something of an unfinished feel--it even crashed on us a couple of times while we tried to exit missions. On the audio front, there's some decent orchestral music going on in the background, but beyond that, it's just cheesy voice acting and some underwhelming sound effects and screams. And even the musical score isn't that great, especially considering the theme music the game uses isn't the original track from the movie, but rather a new orchestration of it that sounds a little cheesier.

There's certainly a measure of morbid thrill that can be derived from some of the more open-ended components of Jaws Unleashed. A novel level of enjoyment exists in the notion of swimming up to an unsuspecting oceangoer and sinking your teeth into them, dragging them screaming beneath the waves and turning them into a midday snack. However, the novelty of said action wears off about 15 minutes into Jaws Unleashed, and without it, all you're left with is a really lousy action game that's cumbersome to play, contains not a single interesting mission over the course of its roughly 10-hour structure, and looks and sounds terribly mediocre. The $30 price tag might seem enticing, but $30 for a bad game is no deal at all.