Jaws Unleashed...and Unfinished, Too.
The game has an unusual and inherent difficulty; how do you get a person to play a shark? After all, he's got no hands, no weapons other than his own body, and no way to get about on land...which is where the antagonists just happen to live. Majesco did a good job solving this problem overall. First, the shark moves like a shark; whoever set up the movement engine on this puppy did a great job and did their homework. Jaws looks and moves like a shark should...hell, he looks better than most of your big-budget movie sharks do. They also added a unique way of letting the player enjoy the preternatural sensory apparatus the shark has by giving you "shark vision". It's sort of a combination radar screen/targeting system/enhanced optics that allows you to find prey from far away, zero in on them with ease, and target them for attack. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well it is, but it happens to be necessary. Majesco's camera is the most awful thing I've seen since...well, heck, I don't remember EVER seeing one that bad. For a "smart" camera, it does a remarkebly bad job of giving you the view you want. My advice? Turn it off. It's more trouble than it's worth, and if it weren't for the shark vision targeting system, you'd never hit anything and scream in frustration. Examples, you ask? In the first boss match against a killer whale in Amity Islands version of Sea World, half of the time I was fighting the camera would be OUT OF THE WATER, where I couldn't see what was going on. Turning it off solved the problem, but the point of a smart camera is not to have to worry about that sort of stuff.
Controlling Jaws takes some getting used to. He has some nifty attacks (including what is surely the coolest of all cool special moves...tossing a victim into the air, then leaping up in an "Air Jaws" move and snapping them in half), but some are hard to do consistently...and it seems like just when you need them, they don't work out right. Nothing a good gamer can't overcome, but given his limited arsenal, I'd want the attacks to be easier to use.
The graphics for Jaws are top notch, at least for the environments and various sea critters you run into. Jaws himself is, as I mentioned, truly specatular to see, and a joy to watch just swim around. The game boundaries are cleverly done with a "current is too strong" message that keeps you from swimming out of bounds. This is a bit frustrating at times, because out of bounds is where you see some stuff you really want to sink your teeth into; whales. Sperm whales and blue whales abound, and you can't reach a one of them.
The people are somewhat poorly rendered, particularly for a game made in 2006; they have the classic "lobster hand" polygon problem. But they scream and thrash about most satisfactorily, and since that's what they are there for, you really can't gripe too much. But if you are expecting long and lavish cutscenes, forget it; there are few cutscenes, and they aren't anything to write home about. They get the job done, filling in the storyline, but look about 10 years out of date.
Sound is okay. The above and below water sounds are good, if a bit repetetive. I found myself thinking "if that guy says 'I don't want to die' one more time, I'm going to make sure he does". It's particularly silly to hear that scream over and over when no one is actually in the water. But it adds flavor, and works for what it is. Some variety would be nice, but the other sounds (particularly the rather gruesome sound Jaws makes when he chomps on someone) make up for it.
My one serious gripe with the game is the tutorial and sad lack of mission briefings. The tutorial starts with you swimming along toward various "side challenge" bouys; little side games or ways to earn points spread out in the game. You don't have to play 'em, but the points you earn let you upgrade Jaws' abilities, so it's worth your time. But in the tutorial, one of the first things you do is to attack a diver in a cage, with your nifty nose-ram attack. Yeah...right. The dummy target (who one would think would be a harmless diver at this stage, as it's still practice) starts filling you full of spears from his AK-47 super-automatic speargun; within seconds of approaching his cage, you die. And to make matters worse, other little sharks come up and start biting you while he's shooting you. You finally get the guy, but geeze...couldn't it have been a bit easier, being a tutorial?
Next, you end up lost if you don't destroy a seemingly innocent sea-floor robot. By killing it, it explodes and opens up the way into the next level. There is no hint to do this, just as later there are no hints at how to do some missions you'd think you couldn't. One mission says you must destroy a refinery. A shark, destroying a refinery up on a cliff. Right. How do you do this? Why, it's obvious! You just have to pick up a burning, exploding barrel tossed into the flaming oil slick near by, carry it in your mouth like the worlds biggest and meanest Golden Retriever, and (get this) spit it out onto a refinery pipe to blow it up. Now, who WOULDN'T think to do that, right? Again, don't you think that if biting and carrying crap is an important part of the game (and sadly, stupidly, it is) that the tutorial would address it? Nope. Not at all. Fortunately for Jaws, eating virtually any live prey will restore him to glorious full health, so biting exploding burning barrels isn't as bad as it may seem. But not telling us to expect to do that or illustrating how, even with a quick note during the mission? Pretty bad preperation.
And that is the big frustration here. The game has a potential for true greatness. It's fun to swim around eating stuff. It's fun to play the biggest shark in the ocean and rule without fear all you see. But it ISN'T fun to try to figure out stuff you have no logical reason to think you should do, nor is it fun to wrestle that awful and poorly named "smart camera". A little more polish, a little more fine tuning, and this would have been the game to beat this summer. Sadly, it isn't. I still give it a 7.2, and enjoy the heck out of play ing it, but the difficulty of the controls, the stupid camera, and the counter-intuitive mission goals really hurt the game. Reports of massive bugginess have cropped up, too, though I didn't experience a single lock up or bug yet.
My verdict? Give it a try. It isn't perfect, it could use some more polish, but Jaws Unleashed is a good time if you are armed with a little foreknowledge and some patience...and isn't that what we all want?