G4TV

Just on principle alone, any free-roaming game where you play a massive killer shark, sinking boats and chomping on unsuspecting surfers should be at least somewhat fun. But no. Jaws Unleashed fails on every single level on which it is possible for a game to fail. Between fighting with the camera, fiddling with the controls, gaping at the awful graphics, and struggling with senseless level objectives, you'll wish you could throw Jaws back.

White Sharks Can't Swim

Yes, you're the great white shark himself. Yes, you can swim around and eat people. Yes, you will probably die in the tutorial because the controls are so ridiculous. Jaws' main form of attack is biting, which is assigned to the R button. But you'll never quite understand how to use it: sometimes you have to chew things by pumping the button, but sometimes that just causes Jaws to drop whatever he's holding.

You should, in theory, be able to jump out of the water and snatch people right off the deck of a passing ship, but you'll never get it to work properly. The controls are as far from intuitive as possible, and this goes double for the new moves you learn by upgrading Jaws throughout the adventure. The terrible camera contributes greatly to this mess, mostly because it keeps snapping above the water when you want it under the surface and vice versa.

And a variety of bugs and glitches plague Jaws. Objects disappear right in front of your eyes. Checkpoints fail to activate, necessitating replays of segments that were painful enough the first time. And Jaws will get stuck in the scenery quite a bit. Sometimes you'll be able to extricate him by thrashing around. Often you'll just be harpooned to death before that happens.

Confusion Under the Sea

What is an ocean, if not a sandbox filled with water? In true sandbox-game style, you have free run of the waters around Amity Island. Story missions are represented by areas cordoned off with red buoys, and a whole seaful of side missions are marked with giant glowing shafts of light. You'll probably have to attempt the side missions once or twice before you even understand what you're supposed to be doing. One tells you to pick up a swimmer and slap her into a buoy, but there's no swimmer to be seen when you start -- you've got to really look hard to find her.

The story missions are even less clear. At any given time, there will be something happening that you don't understand. The game will give you all sorts of text messages to let you know what is going on, but you won't know what it's talking about: I tripped an alarm? How did I do that? What does the alarm look like? Where was it placed? I have to catch some swimmers before they go back to shore? Where are they? I'm losing health? Why? What's attacking me? I can't see it. I'm dead? What killed me?

Even when you know exactly what to do, it's rarely clear as to why it works. Here's a typical scenario. The radar screen shows a little green blip (point of interest) and a little red blip (mission objective). So you go to the green blip, and find some nondescript objects on the sea floor. You carry one over to the red blip, where there is a nondescript large object. You spit at the little one at the big one. There's a big explosion. You beat the level! What the hell was all that, anyway? Who knows.

Fish Out of Water

But where Jaws really jumps the -- uh, shark -- is in the presentation. Man, is this game ever ugly. The sea floor isn't too terrible, with a variety of different specimens of marine life scattered about in a colorful array. But that's mostly because designers can fudge the draw distance underwater -- "murky depths" and all that. Topside, things fall apart. Jaws features some of the ugliest human models this side of the PSone. Their mouths don’t move. Their hands resemble nothing so much as cheese wedges. And the voiceovers sound like they were recorded in somebody's bathroom.

You can't even swim all over the entire ocean unimpeded -- the main map is split up into three chunks, with massive loading screens in between. In fact, the loading screens actually have their own loading screens. Knowing you'd spend a lot of time there, the designers inserted little nuggets of trivia from the Jaws movie, just to remind you that this franchise used to be a well-respected and successful cultural phenomenon, not an awful budget video game.

More Like Chum

Perhaps we're not giving Jaws Unleashed enough credit. Maybe it is an intricate metaphor for the harsh reality of life on a fragile planet. Maybe it is a simulation of the pain and confusion of living as a member of an endangered species. Maybe Appaloosa Interactive cannot design their way out of a wet paper bag. Either way, Jaws Unleashed is best thrown to the sharks. Having your actual torso bitten off by an actual great white might actually be preferable to this.

Review By: Chris Kohler

Video Produced By: Paul Bonanno