2 Jawsome (Video Game Review)

… there are no words for this. Either this was created on a shoestring budget the likes of which have not been seen since Blake’s 7 or this game was officially created to troll people. I’ve never seen a more lazily made game. This one really proves to be bad even by the standards of Xbox Live indie titles; you know, the selection which consists of religious quiz titles and torturously amateur FMV quicktime events. So what makes 2 Jawsome so especially abhorrent to the point it stands out amongst the bottom of the barrel titles? Let’s find out.

First off, there’s no plot for this. Nothing at all, not even the “are you a bad enough dude” reasoning you usually get to handwave away stuff; though at least that can be overlooked. But the gameplay, by Poseidon’s salty balls the gamplay! Just looking at it makes you wonder why they even bothered trying to ever release it. It’s so amateurish, so terribly half baked it’s hard to decide where to start on how godaweful it is. You know those terrible games you see once in a while, the ones so bad that their problem isn’t the fact they’re too difficult or have bad graphics? The ones which are just so visibly barely completed that you feel no challenge playing them and the very experience of picking up a controller feels like a chore? That’s this title in a nutshell.

First – The level designs. There might as well not be any. What you have is a wide open area in which to sail about in a boat. This area looks like some vision of hell if it were farted out by Salvador Dali on an exceptionally lazy day.

The sky overhead is dominated by some huge bluescreen which is borderline neon and begins to hurt your eyes after a while. It’s also the only hint of colour in this world. Either side of you are grey buildings which have been badly copied and pasted from Google Maps and are so ugly they make the likes of City 17 look appealing to live in. This is the laziest part of the level but it’s not the worst. Not that’s the liquid you’re on. I say liquid because it’s sure as hell not water as it consists of a familiar dark brown colour. It’s also apparently been frozen over as there are no waves and just one solid chunk of shiny surface you slide about on. This is something which doesn’t help the very limited physics capabilities.

You skid around the surface of the water like you’re on an air hockey table without any sense of friction or even if you’re actually touching the ground. With such terrible graphics and badly marked out boundaries you’ll barely know they are there until you bounce off of a force field attached to some slightly different coloured part of the sea.  Which is apparently supposed to be a beach of some kind. When it actually works and keeps you in one area anyway. More than once I managed to somehow end up outside the “sea” and far inland, no-clipping through half textured grey blobs of buildings.

But the crowning failure of 2 Jawsome, the third strike and final nail in the coffin is the objectives of your gameplay. You rescue people from circling sharks and cylindrical speech bubbles hovering over their head by running them over and complete the level by hitting enough of them. In other words you’re collecting things. However, where as most games would make things interesting with its maps and enemies, and even Superman 64 had some variety to it, this is simply time wasting. You’re stuck in one small area, hitting these objectives with no visible impact upon the game and then you “win”. Watching this play out on screen is like watching paint dry, you’re not sure if you’re winning, losing, doing right, doing wrong and there’s no sense of any accomplishment. Any score or fast time you might complete this in is completely pointless as there’s no sense of pressure, desire to finish things or even moments to enjoy.

Perhaps the only thing which doesn’t need to be vivisected is the music. It might be below average and helps to enhance the sense of perpetual monotony within the “levels” but it’s visibly somewhat less atrocious than everything else in this.

Really, there is no reason to get this. It is an almost awe-inspiringly cheap final product and should just been avoided and forgotten. And before someone tries to get this off the hook by saying “Hey, it’s only a one dollar indie title, it can’t be held to any high standards” I said Kymera bloody Keeper was relatively fun, and that was a free online Facebook game. This though? Use it if you need to prove to someone that the likes of Big Rigs wasn’t the worst of the video games industry, otherwise find something better on the Xbox Live marketplace.

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2 Jawsome and all related characters and media are owned by Archor Games.