Farewell and Adieu to You, Old PS2…
Makes as much sense as a roaring shark
Alright, let’s dive in! Get it?……. *Pause for laughter.
Have you ever wanted to be an unstoppable, 25-foot killing machine with zero chill and a vendetta against literally everything that floats? No morality meter – just Jaws, fury, and a never-ending buffet of limbs and propellers. Jaws Unleashed doesn’t ask you to save the world. It asks, “How many jet skiers can you turn into confetti before lunch?” It’s loud, dumb, chaotic as hell – and I loved every bite of it.
You play as the big guy himself – Jaws – as you swim, smash, and chomp your way through an open-world version of Amity Island. The gameplay is a mix of free-roaming and loosely structured missions, where objectives range from sinking boats and disabling oil rigs to terrorizing beach parties like it’s your full-time job. There’s even a mission pretty early on where you have to escape captivity. You’ve got a health bar, a hunger meter, and a growing arsenal of shark abilities that somehow get more preposterous as you go:
Tail Whip
- A powerful flick of the tail that can knock enemies back, destroy boats, and stun prey.
Lung Capacity Upgrade
- Increases the amount of time you can stay out of water (on land or leaping through air) without dying.
Sonar Ping (sort of like shark “vision”)
- Helps you detect targets and hidden objects more easily, kind of like a predator mode.
Explosive Barrel Launch (yes, really)
- You can grab explosive barrels and toss them at enemies, it’s pretty awesome.
Boat Destruction Abilities
- As you grow stronger, you can destroy bigger and faster boats – starting with jet skis, then moving on to Coast Guard patrols, and eventually body-slamming luxury cruise liners (I’m kidding… but imagine?)
There is nothing funnier in this game – maybe in gaming history – than watching a massive apex predator full-body yeet itself out of the water, belly-flop onto the sand, and start wiggling after tourists, terrorizing them like a giant, angry fish out of hell. You can wreak havoc on sunbathers and watch as the beachgoers lose their minds, tripping over coolers and each other while you, a literal sea monster, inch-worm across the shore biting everything within flopping distance. There’s zero grace. You’re just a wet, angry torpedo of teeth and spite, bulldozing through beach towels, lifeguard stands, umbrellas, and probably someone’s unfortunate grandma. And the best part? The game lets you do it. Not once, not as a joke – but constantly. It’s comedy gold, wrapped in a layer of unintentional horror, and it never stops being hilarious. It’s like the developers knew they had a guaranteed sell just from the title alone – so they leaned all the way into the stupidity, cranked it to 11, and made the dumbest game they possibly could. And honestly? It’s fantastic.
I’ll take off my rose-tinted diving goggles from the PS2 era for a moment and admit that this is not a very good game. That being said – it is a deeply entertaining, gloriously broken, borderline-unhinged mess of a game that lets you live out your fantasies of being a giant shark. The controls are clunky, the camera fights you at every turn, and the story is the kind of nonsense you’d expect from a late-night straight-to-DVD sequel – but none of that matters when you’re flinging dolphins like frisbees or biting through a yacht like it’s a rice crispy treat. This game doesn’t work in the traditional sense… …but it absolutely delivers if you were 12-years-old in the mid-2000s, when your peak idea of radical was launching yourself into the air, as a great white bloodthirsty shark, and smashing straight into a helicopter mid-flight just as it explodes in a glorious fireball and you drag the wreckage down into the ocean – You do not get more owned than this!
With Sony slowly releasing their old titles on PS5 at the same speed that a sloth fills out a tax return, hopefully we can see a little more of these buried-at-sea treasures rise back to the surface. This game was actually rated as Gamespot’s “Worst Game Everyone Played of 2006” award. And honestly? I concur. It’s probably aged about as well as an old pirate boot fished out of the Mariana Trench. It’s janky as hell, clunky, and borderline unplayable at times – but that’s also what makes it such a fun disaster. That being said, if you’re browsing the retro gaming stores (soon to be GameStop itself) and you’ve ever wanted to play as nature’s most chaotic middle finger, Jaws Unleashed still delivers a bite worth savoring.
Smile, you son of a glitch!
Mikhail
Verdict: 5.5/10