I’ve been a big fan of Telltale Games for a while, having enjoyed their early Sam n Max games, and delighted as that series improved and others spawned as well. Wallace & Gromit, Back to the Future, in particular enjoyed Strong Bad and Monkey Island. 

So without really thinking twice about it, I pre-ordered their Jurassic Park game, expecting the same level of quality. Having played through the game in the past few days, it sadly failed to live up to expectations.

Its not all bad. Some decent graphics and voice-acting, and at times I was genuinely surprised and thrilled by being chased by dinosaurs or discovering new set pieces. Some of the character interaction was ok.

But mostly it was kinda bad. The characters were generally uninspiring and cliched. 

And then there is the gameplay. Fail. Its more an “interactive movie” than a game, you spend most of the time watching things happen and then pressing a few buttons to get to the next bit. Think the “action” sequences from Heavy Rain but completely linear, with no consequence to any of your actions. You live or you die. The plot is always the same. At times the key combinations are impossible to get on your first runthrough a sequence, and you have to replay it, and if you keep failing it dumbs it down for you to stop the game being endlessly repetitive. The interface for the non-action bits is annoying, you can manipulate a very slow moving camera and select highlighted bits on screen. But it felt so clumsy playing on my computer. Perhaps its better suited to console play. There were some fun puzzles (the roller coaster cars) but mostly they were dull too.

Interestingly, the game is divided into 4 episodes like many of Telltale’s other games, however was all packaged together. Perhaps they realised people who bought episode 1 wouldn’t buy the rest.

Anyway. It was mildly enjoyable but ultimately annoying, and I was glad to finish it. It played perfectly on the Mac unless you paused the game for more than a minute, then it crashed. 

Going to check out Hector next, hoping it fares better.

It DID get me in the mood to re-watch the first Jurassic Park film…. if I hadn’t been a closet Jurassic Park fan I probably wouldn’t have bothered playing the game through. But I enjoyed inhabiting that world, the music….

I’ve written more than the 5 lines I thought I would. ah well. if anyone bothers reading this i’ll be surprised. cheers.