Look at the pedigree: Appaloosa previously developed the much-lauded Ecco games, so it’s hard to see where they could go wrong, other than the immediate grisly appeal of masticating people to bits waning quite quickly. Even the affixation late in the day of the Jaws licence shouldn’t have harmed the game too much, seeming to be mostly a Jaws-themed front end and John Williams’ iconic der-dum accompanying you as you stalk the surf. Oh, and some rubbish relation of Chief Brody stalking about the game with a beard, much like Lance Guest in Jaws 4: The REVENGE! We forgive you, Lance. You defended the Frontier against the forces of Xur and the Kodan Armada, after all.

Why, then, is it such a misconceived, poorly executed bunch of shark plop?

The tutorial bodes (reasonably) well: the engine seems half-decent, despite looking a fair bit raggedier than Ecco did on the DC five years ago. There’s a palpable thrill to being a shark and a huge barstool of a shark you are, too. Much like Ecco, Jaws (although why he’s called “Jaws” in the game is a bit of a mystery: as the game explains in one of its Jaws Facts and any fan worth his salt water knows, the shark was nicknamed “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer) has a dash attack and a tailflick. Fair enough. Jaws can also jump out of the water, just like Ecco (except not as dramatically). Reality-stretching as this is for a Great White, fair enough (hey, he sort of does it in the movie). It’s all starting to seem a bit lazy, mind. When the realisation sets in that utilising such moves is ten times more awkward than in Ecco, there’s really no excuse, especially considering how long this has been in development.

Then the horrifically disobedient camera starts to wee on your shoes and the realisation that this is just going to be a miserable slog, with the occasional chomp and gobble, sets in. As pleasant as an occasional chomp and gobble sounds (it’s the most the majority of us can hope for, after all), it just isn’t enough. It’s never enough.

There’s no denying, for the first half an hour or so, Jaws is fun. It’s sloppy and three-quarters finished, yes, but the first few times you spy a swimmer ignorantly splashing their way across the bay, speed toward them with your dorsal fin cutting through the waves like a brutal black knife and set about them with your great big nasty teeth as they scream quite horrifically and then try to ineffectually splash away minus an arm or leg, blood streaming in great gouts from the gory stump… hey, who wouldn’t enjoy it? Especially when you can keep chomping at them until there’s only a blobby bag of entrails bobbing in the surf, or time the first hit so that they’re knocked out of the water, flying in a delightful bloodstained rainbow 50 feet or so away, screaming the whole time.

Once the visceral, bloodthirsty thrill dulls, though, there’s little else on offer: smash stuff up (ensuring you get stuck on as much scenery as possible whilst the camera strains to give you the least viable angle on the action) – check; grab unwary bystander in mouth to use passcard to open underwater door – check; jump out of water and grab oblivious seal/sunbather and then flail like a stranded sumo wrestler to get back into the sea – check; smash the town up for no real reason – check; wander about aimlessly because you can’t figure out what the game wants you to do because the signposting’s so broken – check.

Unlike the streamlined Ecco, Jaws controls like a bag of spanners and has the turning circle of an oil tanker, which makes retaliating against noisome divers and their spear guns, and the extremely irritating attacks of other (diminutive) sharks, quite frustratingly difficult: wrestling with the camera whilst trying to line up an attack (which is almost impossible in first-person mode) is a savage exercise in masochism, not helped by the crippling slowdown which occurs whenever you thrash up so much as an air bubble. Much like A Dog’s Life’s Smellovision, Jaws has a Sharkovision mode, which helpfully embosses potential targets with a luminous green tinge to help you pick them out in the murk. It’s also possibly to perform stealth kills (well, as stealthy as a 30-foot shark can be) by sneaking up on swimmers and using the B button to quickly perform a light chomp and then carrying them down to their doom in the briny depths, thereby not alerting the other bathers and spoiling your seconds (and thirds, and fourths…).

Since we’re in a comparing mood, whilst Ecco: Defender of the Future could be an intensely annoying game and on many occasions it was eminently possible to be wandering around for what seemed like days before the game beneficently revealed what it wanted the player to do next, there was always a serene, otherworldly grace to it. It was relaxing to merely glide about as a dolphin and harass big fat whales with your sonar. Jaws Unleashed, whilst it has to be admitted that grinding up bathers in the surf never really gets boring, is such a chore in every other respect, not least that this truly has the worst camera since, oooh we dunno, some really bad N64 game, that whatever gory goodwill you initially offer up gets drowned in a sea of cack-flavoured loathing. Much like going swimming off Southend beach.

Could’ve been fun, but ends up being more annoying than Mario Van Peebles. At least in the original version of that particularly sad little movie, he gave us the pleasure of having the good grace to die. Things have gone very wrong at Appaloosa.