Jaws: Unleashed
We’re gonna’ need a bigger boat… better controls, a steadier framerate…
Tags: Jaws: Unleashed Categories: Reviews, Xbox Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jun 22nd, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Jaws: Unleashed (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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The shark eyes its prey in amusement. The frantic swimmer is mere feet away, but the shark just waits there as he paddles away in terror. If one believed the creature to be capable of human emotion, they would swear it was taking perverse delight in its meal’s pathetic struggle to reach the safety of dry land. Suddenly, deciding that it wanted to see its toy try a new trick, the shark darts ahead to take hold of the terrified man in its jaws, barreling down into the depths of the ocean with the horrified screams of onlookers ringing out behind.
Jaws: Unleashed is a title that attempts to pander to our more visceral urges for bloodlust and carnage, allowing us to play the role of Stephen Spielberg’s infamous shark (or one just like it, because wasn’t the shark killed in the movie? Or… at least in the three sequels…). In this respect, it succeeds, albeit in a basic and even primitive manner. However, even the most shallow gamers out there are bound to desire a little more meat to their games from time to time (pardon the pun).
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While tooth marks ran across the victim’s body, it would still be entirely possible for him to survive, if it wasn’t for the vicious predator that had dragged him down here, and was currently watching him, expectantly. With the need for air burning his lungs, he starts to swim madly for the surface, only to find his foot is stuck. He looks down and shudders to see that the obstruction is the shark itself, its mouth wrapped around the man’s ankle. The shark gives the man a moment to fully absorb this before biting down and severing the man’s foot.
The game was developed by Appaloosa, the makers of the Ecco the Dolphin titles, and as such it controls in much the same way as the more recent Dreamcast entries in the series, and at the same time shares many of the same problems that those titles had. The fact that you’re controlling a ferocious man-eating shark instead of a wussy dolphin does help to make things a bit more interesting, but it’s still just a new spin on the old formula.
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The man is screaming uncontrollably now, which makes his need for air unbearable, and despite his new handicap, he flails madly to reach the surface, not even bothering to look back to see how far back his tormentor is. As his head finally reaches the top, he tastes the sweet air… but only for a moment, before the shark drags him back down. The shark’s mouth wraps around him again, this time coming up to his waist, and for a moment his bottom half feels the warmth inside the creature’s mouth. Then, it feels nothing at all.
Players guide Jaws on a blood-soaked eat-fest through a world that’s part free-roaming and part mission-based, with missions actually showing a little more variety than just “eat this, destroy that”. Early on, you learn to intentionally beach yourself to get at the tasty people enjoying the supposed safety of dry land, and shortly afterwards you need to drag the corpse of a scientist to a keycard reader to open a gate (or you can do it while he’s still alive, if you want to hear him screaming). Despite the apparently limited range of activities one would attribute to a shark (eat, swim… um…. and look menacing?), Appaloosa has come up with some very clever activities to keep the game infused with variety.
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Having eaten everything underneath the man’s waist, the shark now moves around to the other end and closes his mouth down around the man’s neck, biting off his head. The water is so think with blood now that it starts to attract smaller sharks, which the predator generously allows to dine on the man’s torso and lifeless arms. Besides, it has bigger plans. This one victim was just the beginning.
Unfortunately, while this may have been a fun and unique game, it is plagued by numerous technical and design flaws that drag the game down like an anchor. The first and foremost problem is that, while you have various goals, you’re still ultimately just accomplishing them with a limited range of abilities (eat, swim… um…. and look menacing?), which makes the game get repetitive quickly.
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Seeing small raft moving slowly in the water, the shark senses an opportunity, and blasts upwards at it, sending the occupants hurtling overboard. It is not long before they are ripped to shreds. The occupants of other rafts in the area see this, and quickly work into a panic and start to head for shore. However, the shark has no intention of allowing them to make it back to safety.
Perhaps more troubling are the controls, which are terrible. It’s seemingly impossible to accurately point Jaws towards a specific object with any great amount of accuracy, and turning around is an unpleasant chore. When you try to make a bite at something, you’re never completely sure if you’ll get it, and even when you do and you start tapping the trigger to eat, you can’t be sure if you’ll munch up your meal or drop it. Also, other moves, like Jaws’ dash and tail attack, make it even more difficult to control him, and these problems are amplified immensely by a horrendous camera that is ill-prepared for the complex three-dimensional movements of a shark… you know, like going forward, turning, and moving up or down.
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The shark destroys the other rafts in much the same way, and eats the people riding them. Then, he moves on to bigger prey – a small boat. Moving away to pick up speed, the shark charges the boat to bash its hull, a process that it repeats until it pounds a hole into the boat, causing it to sink. It will only be a matter of time before its occupants are also shark food.
Even more frustrating is the fact that it’s hard to gauge just what you’re looking at until you get right up close. The game does at the very least have a “shark vision” mode that highlights what is edible, but this doesn’t help when you’re trying to judge whether something is a mission objective, or how much of a threat it poses. Combined with the camera issues, this will make for many deaths where you won’t be completely sure what caused it.
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The shark eats the people that were on the boat, and heads for the docks, slamming into a few other boats on the way for good measure, ensuring that it has done enough damage to sink them. Upon reaching the docks, the shark plows right through their supports, sending the docks crashing into the water. The shark makes sure to come around for another pass to bite off body parts of the people that find themselves suddenly plunged into the water.
As if that wasn’t enough problems, the game has crippling framerate issues extremely frequently, especially when the action gears up, which means that the game becomes extremely choppy at the worst possible moments. This is particularly egregious because the graphics, while not particularly horrible, are really unspectacular, and there’s little excuse for a game with such mediocre visuals to have framerate problems as well.
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After destroying the pier, the shark spots a cruise ship, and rams into it multiple times, knocking vacationers off the side. The shark wastes no time swimming over to them and shredding each of them to piece. By now, other people have come in boats to attack and kill the shark with weapons like harpoons, but the shark merely sinks their boats and eats the people just as it has with the other boats.
And on top of all this, the game is buggy, to boot. Numerous times, I got stuck in scenery for minutes at a time, and once or twice I was just about to press reset when I was finally able to free myself. And any time you want to take a risk by beaching yourself on land, you can never be sure how the game will act. Will it refuse to let you out of the water? Will it only let you move along the edge of the surface? Or will you actually be able to work your way up as far as you want? It’s really a crapshoot.
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The shark continued on, destroying countless boats, schooners, a yacht or two, and even a submarine. He ate numerous men, a few women, as many children as he could find, and numerous small marine animals. He really wished he’d had the chance to maul some dolphins, but sadly that was not in the cards today.
Any of these problems on their own would be rather serious, but together they compound to make the game exponentially more and more unplayable. If I can’t move the way I want, can’t properly see where I’m going, can’t tell where I need to be, can’t make out what’s coming towards me, can’t attack it without the game turning into a slide show, and can’t fight it in a tight space or else I’ll glitch up the game… well, that’s a lot of problems that’s really eating away at the fun at the core of this experience. But even if that weren’t the case, there would still be the core problem…
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… The shark kept eating people. Big people, little people… some saw him coming and tried to escape, while others didn’t know they were doomed until it was too late. He ate some people on inner-tubes, and a few snorkelers. The shark bit open a few shark cages and ate what was inside. Then it went for a few scuba divers, a couple of manta rays (for variety), jumped up on shore briefly to catch a few sunbathers off-guard, ate a few of the sharks that were indulging in the carnage of its wake, snapped up some water-skiers, a few surfers, some windsurfers…
… Even the best mindless bloodthirsty carnage gets boring after a while without depth, and starts to just get repetitive. Even if the game didn’t have all these humongous problems bogging it down, the repetitive nature of the game means it wouldn’t have been very fun in the long-term anyways. One of those “maybe worth a rental” kind of things. But with the frustration this game gives you in pursuit of that simple guilty pleasure, it may not even be worth it for those just looking to wreak a little bloody carnage. After all, the best way to make even the hungriest shark lose interest in attacking is to repeatedly poke it in the eyes.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Duhhhh-nuh…. Duhhhh-nuh…. + Yum! Blood and guts and random fleshy body parts! + There’s a lot more variety to the goals than you’d expect |
4.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- But your range of actions is fairly limited and the gameplay is still repetitive - And the controls suck - And the camera is awful - And it’s hard to make out objects in the distance - And the graphics are nothing special - And the framerates are horrible - And the game is really buggy |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| It bites. | |
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Tags: Jaws: Unleashed
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jun 22nd, 2006 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
