At long last - it's here! How long has it been? How long have we waited? It may not have been on everybody's minds, but ever since playing Ecco the Dolphin and enjoying its calming, tranquil sensibilities, I have wondered what it would have been like had I not been a friendly, family-fun dolphin, but an angry, malevolent great white shark. Now the time has come, and not only are you a great white shark, you're thegreat white shark. You are Jaws. Unleashed.

The concept is simple - you are a shark. You swim through the water doing things that sharks no doubt do to fill their time, like eating things and… eating more things. The events that take place in the game aren't lifted straight from the movies - this isn't a chronological journey through Jaws and its sequels. Instead, the missions you must undertake are set in similar locations and situations, or at least one of them is. Most of the missions are in fact completely unrelated to the movies and take place in a fictional universe that reflects those seen in the films. The most obvious one is the water park/zoo from Jaws 3; during an early mission you are captured by pesky sea scientists (there is a better word for them but I can't remember what it is). [Marine biologists? Smart-Ass-Ed]. They take you back to their lair, where they intend to do experiments on you and show you off to a paying public. This of course goes horribly wrong when you break out of your cage and start eating people.

The journey outward is quite amusing, as you flood entire floors of aquariums and visitor centres, chomping and bashing your way through armed guards and blocked passageways. The culmination of this journey sees you outside in a huge open-air tank, filled with playful dolphins, noisy seals and a massive killer whale, which you have to eat. The battle, if you can call it that, involves chasing the helpless whale, which will only take a couple of meagre bites at you, and chomping on its tail until it cries for its mother and gets bitten in half. Jaws is a real killer - there's very little that can actually stand up to him; not even mighty sperm whales are a worthy match. Jaws is hard and hungry, and anything you come across in the oceans surrounding Amity Island can be eaten. This includes other sharks, lobsters and, of course, people.

Eating things is the fundamental basis for any enjoyment you'll get out of this game. Sure, the story shadows events of the films and you'll point and say things like "look it's that guy" and "you're going to need a bigger boat," but mostly you'll just eat things. Sharks and dolphins and the occasional whale will try to attack you, quite futilely I might add, and you can bite and chomp your way through them, but the most fun to be had is with hapless humans. They're so pathetic and small and afraid, and you are so powerful and mighty that it's actually more amusing to circle and scare people before going in for the big fat kill. When you decide you've caused them to soil themselves enough, you can target your victim using shark vision, which turns the screen into something from The Twilight Zone but does make anything edible stand out a mile. Locked on targets glow bright yellow and if you're feeling particularly fiendish you can even target individual limbs to bite.

Once you've bitten your victim, you have a number of options available to you; you can wolf them down greedily without a second thought, an act which also gives you health, or you can spit them out over long distances, most amusing if you want to launch half eaten carcasses onto a crowded beach! You can also tear the body to pieces limb by limb. If, for example, you have a puny swimmer's arm in amongst your many razor sharp teeth, you can use the left analogue stick to shake Jaws' head from side to side aggressively. This causes a lot of blood to come out of the human, along with a number of muted and panicked screams. Drag the human to the seabed, or tear him apart at the surface so his friends can watch on in terror. Once you've shaken your head enough, the limb is severed and floats slowly away. The puny human makes a futile attempt to swim away and so you target and bite his other arm and repeat steps A through C. Its twisted, sure, but it's a hell of a lot of fun!

People can be swimmers, they can be on boats waiting for you to knock them into the water, they can be ashore armed with shotguns and they can be divers armed with harpoon guns and knives (when you bite a diver they will try their very best to stab you in the eye, only to be eaten moments later). There's quite a lot of variety in this game; the sea is teaming with life, everywhere you go there are different types of fish and other creatures of varying sizes and shapes. It makes the whole thing quite involving. The graphics aren't too shoddy either; the surface of the sea ripples and glistens in the midday sun, underwater there are bubbles and plants and rocks and things, all looking nice and polished. Things move as well - gone are the days of static 2D cut-outs littering the place, instead the sea is full of motion and life. Jaws himself looks menacing, much more so than the films. The developers seem to have found the perfect teeth-to-weight ratio to really make you not want to be in the water with him. Ever. He moves well, he's animated fluidly and has a good range of movement. He can leap out of the water, he can swim along the surface at a slight angle, his mouth becoming a vigorous chomping machine to anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in it, he can bash things with his tail, he can barge headlong into things, he can even put an explosive barrel in his mouth and spit it at people/boats/floating mines.

Ah yes, the barrels. Quite why the developers decided that alongside biting things, spitting explosives at enemies would be a major form of attack for our friendly neighbourhood shark, I'm not sure. It seems odd, but actually gives the gameplay some much-needed depth (there's only so much biting a person can take). One mission has you spitting torpedoes at the legs of an oilrig to destroy it while another sees you spitting barrels at floating underwater mines so you can follow some hapless divers. The latter is actually a clever mission, because as you switch to shark vision you can see a trail of blood left by an injured diver, a trail that ultimately leads to the diver being eaten. The game has some tricks up its sleeve when it comes to tasks you must perform, so any of you thinking, "well how much can a shark really do in a game?" should think again. Okay, so he can't pick up guns, chomp a cigar, disarm nuclear weapons, hang upside down in shadows waiting for victims or lift objects with only the power of his mind, but for a shark he can do enough to keep you, the player, amused for quite some time. Besides, you can eat people - what more do you want?

There are dozens of little mini-games dotted around the free roaming environment that is Amity Island. For the most part you can go anywhere, only certain unlockable places have "the current is too strong" barrier protecting them. As you wander around you encounter pillars of white light stretching skyward. These represent the various side missions and challenges you can partake in. For the most part they are activities that test your ability to use Jaws' many functions, such as "tail-whip this!" or "bite that!" One involves dragging a fishing boat a certain distance after it sticks a harpoon in your back, while another more amusing one has you catching bungee jumpers with your mouth as they approach the surface of the water! They're quite well thought out and for the most part good fun. Some will make you curse and swear, but that's to be expected with these side quest things - it's almost compulsory. There are plenty of them to do, which will give determined players enough of a challenge to keep them playing for quite a while. That is if the story missions don't keep you baffled for too long.

One of the game's flaws is its inability to properly explain what it is you should be doing. There are subtle hints, but sometimes you just wish you were told what happens next. The balance between assuming the player has enough intelligence to solve a puzzle and being downright cryptic is slightly askew. It's not impossible to get right, in fact I battled through the story in about twelve hours (and don't forget I was distracted by the act of simply eating people for the fun of it). My housemate, however, was completely stuck on one mission for over three days because he couldn't find the stash of torpedoes on the ocean floor needed to destroy an oilrig. The fact that the location of these explosives is marked clearly on the radar with a big green dot is in no way a reflection of his character or his ability to see things…

The music in Jaws Unleashed is awesome. It is, after all, the Jaws theme tune. It is used to wonderful effect; rather than just being a continual monotonous drone, it creeps in stealthily as you approach a victim and builds to a crescendo as dramatic events unfold. The sound effects are great too; as you breach the surface, the sounds instantly become clearer and as you dive again the sounds become muted. The underwater screaming from human victims is full of terror and panic and other sounds such as boats going overhead, other animals like seals making that noise that seals make and of course the vicious roar of Jaws himself create a rich collage that makes it really easy to immerse yourself in the underwater world.

As for tying into the movies, Jaws Unleashed has mirrored certain aspects of them, but in no way copied them. Appaloosa (the company responsible for the original Ecco the Dolphin games) clearly wanted to move away from a shot for shot remake. Lets face it though, to make a game of the first film when you play the shark would be a tad boring - you'd spend most of the early levels with barrels stuck in your back, eat Robert Shaw then get blown to smithereens. The developers couldn't recreate the chemistry between the three male leads from the film, so they didn't try. What they've done instead is distilled what it would mean to be the shark and matched that with what makes a game fun to play, which in my opinion is the only way they could have pulled it off. You do get some interesting nuggets of information about the movies during the loading screens, which is quite nice. Thanks to them, I found out that the mechanical shark they used to film the movie sank the first time they put it in the water. Oops.

Jaws Unleashed is full of great moments. It's not one of those games you'll play forever, but I suspect that for many it will be one of those games that sits on the shelf so that any time you're feeling particularly evil or you've just had a bad day, you'll load it up and go eat some people. Some of the missions will frustrate you, but for the most part they're good fun and sport enough variety for it not to get old too quickly. The environments you find yourself in are full of character and life; the game has a great ability to create lots of drama out of nothing, much like the films. One minute you're just swimming along, minding your own business, the next you've targeted a boat and the music is getting louder, the tension is building and it all ends in a flurry of blood, splintering wood and burning diesel. It turns out that being a forty-foot long (estimated), angry, vicious and bloodthirsty shark with nothing to do but inflict pain and suffering upon all you encounter is quite a lot of fun. Who'd have thought?

Reviewed by Jim Powell for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).