Reviewed: June 18, 2006
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Majesco Games

Developer
Appaloosa Interactive

Released: May 23, 2006
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature

8
8
7
8
7.9

Supported Features:

I’m not sure why it took them this long to get a game out of the franchise. After all, Appaloosa has been making “fish games” for nearly 20 years now with their famed Ecco the Dolphin franchise leading the way, but the wait is over (assuming anyone was really waiting for this) and now, for the first time you can take to the open sea as one of the deadliest creatures on the planet, at least in the water.

Jaws Unleashed is a mighty big fish in a small sea of competing titles. Let’s face it; when was the last time you got to play a game where the primary character was a fish? "Finding Nemo" and "Shark’s Tale" come to mind, but before that you’d probably have to go back to Ecco on the Dreamcast. So Majesco had a really great opportunity here to explore…ahem…relatively uncharted waters, and for the most part Jaws Unleashed is exactly what I expected and what most gamers are probably going to enjoy.

Trying to pigeonhole Jaws is as challenging as playing it. It’s primarily an action game along the lines of Grand Theft Auto, but only in that you have this huge open area to explore freely at your leisure. There are primary missions that propel the story, 32 side challenges, each with three levels of difficulty, and more hidden collectibles and bonus items than your two favorite platform games. They even throw in an RPG-lite skill set and new moves and abilities that are unlocked as the game progresses.

Just like in real life, Jaws must keep moving so the water can pass over his gills and he can breathe. If you stop moving you only have a few seconds to start back up again, so make sure you pause the game before visiting the fridge or the can. The same goes for cruising on land. There is nothing more wickedly delightful than skimming up onto the beach and munching on some moron who has wandered too close to the water. Just make sure you can flop yourself back into the ocean before you suffocate.

So with the basic rules in place the game kicks off with an engaging interactive tutorial that teaches you how to bite, chew, tail whip, target lock, use your shark vision, and perform stealth and shake and tear moves, and that’s just for starters. Later on you will earn new moves and you can then leap into the air and body slam boats, or perform corkscrew torpedo runs into the sides of boats. Of course the most useful and the most difficult ability to master is picking up and throwing objects using nothing but your mouth.

Amity Island is huge, at least by video games standards. The map is divided into numerous sections, each with its own collection of story missions and side challenges. There is a modest load time as you swim between these sections, and considering your shark swims fast enough that you could water-ski behind him, it still takes you a good 2-3 minutes to swim across any given section and a good 10-12 minutes to circle the island.

Story spots are noted with a red dot until you complete that mission at which point the dot moves to the next story mission. Side challenges are labeled by number (SC4, SC5, etc) and noted in the 3D world by a buoy that goes from white to yellow to red and finally green when you have passed all three challenge difficulties. My only gripe here is that you have no way of telling which challenges you have completed from the map view.

While I’m complaining I may as well unload my biggest beef with the game – the save system. Jaws offers you three (and only three) save spots on what I’ve already indicated as a massive map. If you want to save your game you will need to swim to one of these anchors to do it. The only other time you can save is immediately after completing a story mission. The problem is obvious. You either get caught up in the game and forget to save or you have to spend several minutes swimming to an anchor to do it. The anchors are never really "on your way" to anything.

On one occasion I had more than two hours of solid non-story gameplay behind me including at least 6-8 completed side challenges – some that were freaking hard. Then the game locks up and guess what…I get to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. Saving doesn’t take that long so I’m not entirely sure why the game just can’t auto-save after each significant milestone. On another occasion I wanted to stop trying a particularly hard challenge and hit the wrong menu entry and instead of exiting the challenge I quit the game. Without warning of loosing all my progress I was taken back to the main menu.

There are also random scripting bugs that will keep mission-specific requirements (targets) from appearing, and physical collision detection bugs that will get Jaws hung up on the environment and quite possibly stuck so bad you have to reload. One time I got stuck between some wood beams with at least 90-minutes of unsaved progress I was going to lose if I restarted. I twisted those analog sticks in every angle imaginable and kept hitting the charge attack until I finally broke free – about 15-minutes of effort.

The worst bug I encountered was early on in the story. I had just torpedoed three oil platforms and was trying to take out a refinery. As the refinery exploded a cutscene kicked in just as Jaws died leaving me trapped in a loophole within the script. The next event (battle with a fishing boat) didn’t trigger and the refinery was already blown up so there was nothing I could do but restart the mission, which also including the lengthy process of taking down those oil platforms again.

Complaints aside, the game is still a great deal of wicked fun and the bugs are few and far between, but when they do rear their ugly head they are as vicious and deadly as our hero. There are 15 QA Testers listed in the credits, so you have to wonder how this many crippling bugs managed to sneak (or were allowed) through.

The tutorial does a great job of teaching you how to eat, destroy boats, and pry divers from their cage like an oyster, but the fun really starts when you hit the beach and start terrorizing the locals. Now you get to learn the fine art of snatching swimmers from the surface without giving yourself away. This is followed by the massive destruction of property where, by ramming support beams, you can bring down docks and an entire marina. There is even some strategy like the people who “think” they are safe on the concrete slab until you ram the marina gas pumps causing them to explode and catch the people on fire. Their only option is to jump into the water to put themselves out and then its feeding time.

After the tutorial you are then captured and taken to Amity’s version of Sea World, which is actually about twenty times more impressive than the real Sea World. There are several features that are ripped straight from “Jaws 3” including the underwater control rooms, pedestrian walkway tubes, and observation bubbles. Even fish aren’t immune to the "locked doors and key-finding" gameplay popular in the action genre, only here you must find the scientist with the keycard and grab him (don’t swallow) and swipe him through the card reader to open your escape route.

What follows is an epic thrill ride with more innocent bystander deaths than I care to count, although most die from drowning. You’ll explore much of the theme park including newly flooded areas until you are dumped into the performing pools complete with grandstands and cheering (or are they screaming) spectators. Want to have some fun? Grab somebody near the edge and spit them into the crowd. It’s this demented thinking that makes Jaws Unleashed such a guilty pleasure.

You become the star of your own water show as you engage in your first boss fight with a baby-version of Shamu complete with a most grisly ending. Truth be told, I actually had more guilt killing dolphins, killer whales, and seals than I did eating any of the humans, and the designers don’t try and hide one ounce of blood or gore. You can rip your targets to shreds, especially humans whose limbs and heads will detach and float away. You can rip them in half and see their intestines spill out like a sack of sausage.

Once you escape the Sea World level the game opens up and gives you an all-access map and the ultimate freedom to explore the waters surrounding Amity Island at your leisure. You can race through the story levels or tackle all the challenges or mix and match. Admittedly, some missions and challenges are better left until you have built up your stats and abilities.

There are dozens of collectibles in this game starting with license plates then moving on to smaller more obscure objects like film canisters (to unlock movies) and random items like mermaid statues that just give you points you can use to spend on stat boosts.

As previously mentioned, the game is big on gore so don’t be shocked to see body parts floating around and large stains of red expanding on the surface. The almost vaporous blood effect is outstanding and provided a visible envelope of danger since other predators will be attracted to the stain. You need to dine and dash or you might just become dinner for some other sharks or even piranha.

Animation is amusing and horrific, usually at the same time. Grabbing onto a victim and swimming around at 20-30mph with your head above the surface shaking them about as they scream and spurt blood, only to dash them into a buoy or the side of a sailboat with a bloody splat is as therapeutic as it is disturbing. You can really get twisted if you bite off a leg or arm and watch them still try to swim away. Toy with them before biting them in half or spit them onto the deck of a nearby yacht. Mom's not around, so play with your food.

I have two complaints with the graphics. The first is that when you choose widescreen mode the game merely extends the view several inches on each side of the screen leaving my HUD right in the freaking middle of the picture. No…no…no people. The HUD moves to the edge. Bad designers.

The second complaint is much more severe and even game crippling in some instances. The camera system needs to be flushed and replaced with something that works 100% of the time and not 70% of the time. You have three views that you can cycle through at will. The first-person (or first-fish) view is great for surveillance work, especially when you need to pick out the dog or fat lady from a group of human legs. The chase camera is good when you need to keep the camera behind your shark (for spitting barrels) and the smart-cam gives you the most cinematic angles on the action while being anything but “smart”, unless smart means finding the nearest piece of environment it can get hung up on.

It gets even worse on missions and challenges where you cannot break the surface. Try swimming underwater while the camera is above water. It’s harder than it sounds. To its credit, the camera system does interject with some stunning cinematic views when you leap and body slam ships or perform a perfect stealth snatch. The cutscenes are all created with game-engine graphics and look fantastic. You are given long cinematic fly-throughs of the areas for each story mission that show your objectives.

Whenever you are underwater you get the obligatory muffled effect so when people are yelling SHARK SHARK SHARK, you can still make it out – it just sounds like you are listening through water. The rest of the audio package is engine noises for motorized watercraft and jet skis, and of course the powerful engines of fishing boats and Coast Guard cutters. Sailboats are quiet until they are splintering apart in your jaws.

As mentioned, there are numerous cutscenes that tell an interesting story from the human perspective. The actors turn in decent performances considering they are usually being upstaged and outwitted by a giant shark. The canned one-liners for the vacationers get a bit repetitive – just that much more incentive to eat them quickly.

There is no multiplayer component and no real reason to replay Jaws Unleashed once you have completed it the first time, other than the guilty pleasure of eating screaming people who are too stupid to get out or off the water after the first few thousand corpses have washed ashore.

Apparently there is no expiration date when it comes to turning a movie into a game. What next – Gone With the Wind? Then again, Jaws is a timeless classic that is still as intimidating today as it was in 1975, and the concepts in that movie are perfect fodder for Jaws Unleashed. If you are looking to kill a few thousand tourists this summer this is probably your safest alternative, and it’s a bloody good time.