Prepare To Be Reviewed

JAWS Unleashed
XBOX
By, Majesco Games, Appaloosa Int.

On the surface, this seems like a great concept for a game: you play a 30ft Great White Shark who gets to eat people, attack boats, and cause all sorts of freaking mayhem around Amity Island.

Go a little deeper and you find that this game suffers from a problem all too common in today’s video game titles: Inconsistency. Inconsistency in level difficulty (some are painfully easy, while others are INSANELY DIFFICULT), lame story elements, (you game designers seem to not care in the LEAST about story these days, probably because you DON”T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT STORY WRITING!), bad, oh soooooo bad voice acting*, and the one thing that pisses me off more than anything else in video games today: Not being able to SAVE whenever I want to.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point in the last few years some genius (errr, retarded moron) in the gaming industry decided it was a good idea to make the gamer jump through a million hoops in order to save his game. In the case of JAWS Unleashed, it’s impossible to save the game while playing a level. Well, not actually impossible, but if you want to save, and don't mind starting back at the beginning of your level, then I guess your a winner here.

This in itself should be reason enough for me to give this game no stars out of five if not for two saving graces. The game contains a HUGE open ocean area that you as the shark are able to explore in free play, plus dozens of “side missions” you are able to partake in.

This is not a terrible game, but it could have been soooooo much better!

Two Stars out of Five


*It’s a shame that developers cheap out so often at this very crucial component of game making. Instead of hiring people that can ACT, and have the ability to do a variety of voices, (like myself for example) they go the cheap and easy route of just getting some choad coder or artist from the office to do the voices. Oh well, I guess they’ll never learn…