Jaws Unleashed
May 31, 2006
In the film Jaws, the horrific hook was uncertainty. We didn't know where the shark was or what it was thinking. Humans on the surface trying to fight the shark underwater were like Karate Champ characters trying to compete in Tekken; 2D entities out of their depth in a boundless 3D space.
So, ignoring even the most basic analysis of what made the film work, here's Jaws Unleashed, the game in which You Are The SHARK, as the trailer proclaims. A description like "Grand Theft Auto with sharks" is fairly apt, as the game features missions in which the shark (is it really named Jaws? We're going with "the shark") swims about chomping swimmers, the coast guard, and other sea creatures. It even uses keycards to open doors! Sadly, we haven't yet found the bit where the player is shark-jacked by a gang of remoras.
When controlling a giant shark, you don't expect precision. While Jaws dispenses with most of the laws of nature, it does stick to basic physics. So momentum and mass conspire against the shark whenever it's time to attack. Granted, since the water is a 3D space, every victim is potentially a straight line away. But deviate only slightly and you'll overshoot every target, then have to slowly maneuver the shark's cumbersome form back into striking position.
A basic adherence to shark biology might also have made the game more interesting. Specifically, the shark in the game can sit still indefinitely and suffer no ill effect (boredom aside), while in reality, sharks must constantly move to draw oxygen from the water. The game sidesteps this with a hunger meter that steadily drains, eventually draining health when the hunger pangs get too severe. That provides a bare measure of tension, but since even small fish can provide sustenance, the game is lacking a real propulsive force.
In fact, there's nothing here that resembles nature. The shark can hover in water, leap onto land for brief moments, and tear apart piers and boats like they were made of people. New attacks can be purchased to make the beast even more supernatural. Sadly there's so similar upgrade for the human AI, which is set to have most humans be either unwitting cattle or screaming fools.
Instead of coming up with ways to make the shark's lack of grace work with the controls, Jaws Unleashed pretends that you're controlling an entirely different, more nimble character. So missions require the sort of precision that just isn't possible when guiding a two-ton missile through water. It's bad enough that we have to continually fight the controls to advance; even worse when there's a life meter constantly ticking away.
Not to mention that most of the missions and objectives are just silly. We had a hard time getting past the first, where the shark has to grab a doctor in his teeth, then swipe his body across a key card reader to open a gate. This sort of silliness permeates the game -- there's a goofy anti-corporate plot -- and totally undermines the admittedly cool premise of controlling the world's most dangerous predator in a vast, watery sandbox.
This could have worked with a more cartoonish or fantastic license. Games should bend and break the rules of reality. But by tying Jaws to the film concept -- a story that almost every player is guaranteed to know -- the game also ties itself to a very specific and relatively realistic world. In that world, a massive shark beaching itself to eat a human is criminally dumb. No doubt Appaloosa would insist the game is supposed to be tongue in cheek, but there's nothing in the content to indicate that.
Given how long the game has been in production, we'd hoped for a better sense of production design. But the graphics are middling, with only the shark and a few sea creatures standing out. The humans are poorly animated and even more poorly voiced; in fact, the cutscenes and dialogue are amateurish. So too are the menus, which look as if they were thrown together in a weekend.
In the spirit of generosity, we'll offer that there's about 30 minutes of entertainment to be had. Any fan of Grand Theft Auto's goofy violence will grin as the shark tears people limb from limb. Hours of doing that and little else for hours, however, will dull the enthusiasm of even the most bloodthirsty gamer.