The concept was good. Create a video game where instead of the player trying to kill the deadly shark from the “Jaws” movies the player is actually the shark from the movies. This of course would allow the player to wreak havoc all over the Amity Island Community. How hard could this possibly be to screw up? You know what; on second thought don’t answer that.Jaws Unleashed merges a good idea with bad follow through. Don’t get me wrong, the game isn’t awful by any means but it could be so much better. Of course in this game you play as the monster shark known only as Jaws. The game takes place 30 years after the original Jaws caused untold amounts of mayhem in and around Amity Island and in the time since then the community has become nothing short a booming success.
The storyline goes something like this. The wonderful Mayor of this town, Larry Vaughn Jr., thought it would be a good idea to team up with the owner of Environplus, Steven Shaw, to create additional jobs in the area and triple the islands income. However, marine biologist Michael Brody has issues with the idea of bringing in more people to the area especially considering the area’s history of shark problems. But what does Brody know? He’s just some dumb scientist, who listens to scientists anyway?
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This is where you (Jaws) join the party. Your goal is to cause as much mayhem around the island as possible without getting killed or captured. Sounds simple, right? WRONG.
The biggest issue with this game is that the controls and the camera angles suck. The controls are bulky and hard to get a feel for. How hard? It took me over an hour to finally beat the tutorial. No tutorial should be so difficult that it takes an hour to beat; I don’t care what kind of game you are playing.
The camera angles in this game just flat out SUCK. In small corridors are where the camera angles are at their worst. You are trying to figure out what to do or where to go and you can’t see anything but the shark’s backside. Big fat lot of good that does you. In open water the camera angles aren’t so bad, maybe because it’s really hard to screw that up. Biggest problem is most of the game is spent maneuvering through tight areas trying to accomplish missions so the camera angle can (and will) take its toll on the player.
Where this game does succeed in gaining brownie points with me is the free roam (or Open Ocean) mode. Here you can simply run around in open water and cause as much mayhem and disaster as you see fit. Wanna eat some unsuspecting bystander or sink that big sail boat in the middle of the bay? Well in this mode you can. There are also smaller sharks roaming the sea floor that you can take a bite out of. Don’t tick these guys off though, if you eat one there are usually more in the area and they don’t like it when you eat one of their friends.
Outside of Open Ocean mode there are two other modes of play. First off is, of course, Story Mission mode where you play through the storyline portion of the game. This includes lots of tasks like eating people and smashing under water windows among other things. You even get to eat a Killer Whale! Wait, didn’t Disney make a movie with a killer whale in it? Aw who cares about Disney anyway?
There is also a mode for side challenges. In Open Ocean mode you have to swim around the island and when you see a glowing buoy you’ve found a side challenge. These all have three difficulty levels: easy, medium or hard. These can be somewhat fun but they also get boring after awhile.
As you swim around Amity you’ll also notice other little bonuses. License plates and tin cans (why they chose those I’ll never know) are scattered around the island and as you collect those you unlock bonus content including movie clips and animal bios. Nothing particularly exciting, especially if you’ve seen the movie like I have.
The HUD is pretty simple to understand, a big plus in my opinion. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen you’ll find two bars and a circle. The bar on the right is your health meter and the bar on the left is your hunger meter. The hungrier you are the lower the hunger bar gets until it becomes empty and you start to starve. Eventually this will kill you if you don’t eat however you shouldn’t have a problem with that considering the huge amounts of animals running around in the ocean.
That big circle in your HUD has to do with three things: your charge meter, your tail whip gauge and your radar. Your charge meter tells you how strong of a forward charge Jaws has when he attacks a ship. The stronger the charge the more damage dealt. The tail whip gauge is essentially the same thing, just for your tail whip. Amazing ain’t it?
The radar is, of course, your most important tool in this game. This tells you everything you need to know. Red dots are story objectives, yellow dots are large enemies (sharks, boats, etc.) white triangles are side objectives, green squares are points of interest and anchors are save points.
Graphically the game looks great. The underwater world is outstanding with lots of ocean life and it seems vast. A player can kill an hour just swimming around the ocean floor eating fish and smaller sharks and having a good ole’ time while doing it.
Everything put together though this game is a good concept with a bad follow through. The concept, while good, was not used to its potential in this one. At best this is a rental, nothing more. That is, unless you’re a fan of the entire Jaws series. In that case you should buy this game and continue to not have a life because I sure felt like I didn’t have one while I was playing Jaws Unleashed.
My real name is Adam, my friends
call me NASCAR. I'm a pro wrestling and NASCAR geek and I have two websites dedicated to professional wrestling. I'm a fan of shooting games such as Halo or Doom and I also enjoy racing games such as the NASCAR series produced by EA Sports. I collect NASCAR Die-Cast cars (Hot Wheels cars for example) as a hobby.
