Have you seen Jaws? Of course you have. It’s only the biggest movie ever made about man-eating sharks, and it helped popularize the horror sub-genre of animal attacks – I think only Cujo and Arachnophobia were able to match Jaws in terms of their unprecedented animal horror, but there have been plenty others people were willing enough to watch in theaters: Anaconda, Rats, Lake Placid, and most recently, the hokey-looking Pirahna. Only Jaws, though, is the surefire winner if we’re discussing quality films.

When I saw iShark by Ahmet T.S. Dundar, creator of Sheeps Gone Crazy, I admit my imagination instantly drifted to that infamous great white shark with his deadened black stare, and his massive, barrel-sized teeth gnashing down on a lone, unsuspecting person, blood spewing as his body was torn in half, and the remainder of his jerks and spasms going silent. Not a pretty sight in a movie – or, god forbid, in life – but I’ll overextend myself here: it would make for a great action game premise. We already have so many ridiculously violent games – some even sexually promiscuous, and this harks back to the days of Duke Nukem 3D- so it doesn’t surprise me that people would want some violence stemming from animal attacks. Chomping down on humans with a shark as your weapon? Yes, please.

At first, iShark disappoints. The graphics are pretty hokey, like one of those cheap games you find for free online just to pass the time, and it has the distinct feeling of being drawn by the wild hand of a six year old. Loud, scary music appropriate for a shark flick is heard the entire game – it’s fitting, I suppose, but it’s pretty grating, so I would recommend turning it off. But, some of the illustrations and effects aren’t so bad. The shark, for one, is equally menacing and appealing, zipping around underwater, only to take flying leaps out of water to chomp down on an unsuspecting seagull. The underwater scene, with its shells, slowly undulating seaweed and shells, makes for a more convincing environment than the flattened people characters that swim just above you, at water’s break.

As for the game, itself, it turned out to be pretty fun, if tedious, once I got past a few quirks (a vast improvement compared to the developer’s freshman effort, Sheeps Gone Crazy, an app of which I had more than a few reservations). I was immediately thrown off by the mechanism to move the shark, which involves you tracing a line and the shark following this line exactly. The result was all at once disorienting, jarring, vertigo-inducing, and annoying. If you have even one small crook in your traced line, the shark will rotate his body at blindingly fast speeds, because he’s a two-dimensional character, on a rigidly set path, and to conform to that path, his body must match it in a parallel fashion. You can now understand how a jerky line with tons of twists and turns will lead to the shark’s body contorting in all sorts of disorienting ways. As if this weren’t discombobulating enough, the shark moves with deft speed, making his jerky motions all the more irritating. However, after playing the game for a bit, I practiced diligently to make my line as straight as possible, really planning my routes, and this made for a more enjoyable game. At least my shark wasn’t jerking around anymore, or at least, not to the same migraine-triggering degree.

The best part of the game is simply eating. You’re a killer shark, so take delight in eating rows of humans, floating on their inner tubes or body boards, and take relish in jumping free from the water, your mouth snapping shut around a pelican or seagull. When the shark jumps out of the water, the animation is actually pretty fluid, so I put in the extra effort to have my shark jump out of the water as much as possible, catching birds on the way up, and then

Blood and guts, oh my!

ensnaring a human in his mouth on the way down, taking his food on an icy plunge below. Tiny, pixelated plumes of blood, like puffs of red, burst into the area whenever you chomp on a creature, followed by a very satisfying crunch. Once you get past the dizzying movements and develop fluid lines, it becomes entertaining, just swimming back and forth, making fluid leaps, and crunching you way to a higher score with these puffs of blood the whole way.

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback of the game isn’t the poor graphics, or the mediocre controls – it’s one of longevity. Sure, eating people and birds is good fun… for about 3 minutes. After that it just becomes one familiar scene after the other, a duplicate of every semi-fun experience you had in this game for the past few minutes. As your score increases, you’ll have enemies that shoot at you, or new food lots in the form of water gliders, but it’s not enough to add dimension to the game. A simple game doesn’t require that much depth to be entertaining, but iShark manages to skim on shallow waters the entire time, despite the depth of its ocean (which, frankly, isn’t even that deep. Where are all the sea creatures to eat?). Hopefully, in future updates, iShark will include bonus rounds, or combo scores, underwater enemies, or different sea environments… just something. For now, iShark remains a pretty fun, if quirky game, that flirts with, but doesn’t quite make that oh-so-important entertainment factor.

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