It is said that some things are just better left extinct. In the game of videogames, certain styles of game design can fall under that category. One in particular was born in the 1980s, with Dragon's Lair as its shining example. It showed how colorful and well animated games could look but how boring and non-interactive they could be as well. You could only guide the knight Dirk by pointing which way he should head and depending on your choice, he either lived or died. Since then, we haven't gotten hardly any games fully based on that concept. It was pretty much dead and buried after a few other disastrous attempts a few scant years later.What we now know as QTE (quick time event) can somewhat be associated with that concept, although very rarely do we get to play games that are solely reliant on it. It's usually used as just a gimmick, a break between action scenes that more often than not tends to be plain irritating, demanding precise timing and in most cases, brain dead button mashing.
So it came as a surprise when Telltale Games, the people behind episodic games like Sam & Max and most recently Back to the Future The Game, announced that they had acquired the rights to the Jurassic Park film and would be making an adventure game that would exclusively use this sort of mechanic instead of giving direct control of characters on screen. The resulting works mostly well but isn't rid of a few annoying problems.Similarly to Back to the Future The Game, Telltale's pick for a niche to place the story for Jurassic Park The Game is rather interesting. Rather than being a sequel to the somewhat lackluster Jurassic Park film franchise, Telltale's game is centered around a can of shaving cream. That can of shaving cream. Barbasol. The one Dennis Nedry, Wayne Knight's obnoxious computer hacker character from the first Jurassic Park movie tried to smuggle dinosaur embryos out of the island in but ultimately failed. His contact decides to send two agents into Isla Nublar in order to recover the prize and that's where the game begins.
Scenes play out and don't give you direct control on what's going on with the characters and the situations they are placed in. Instead, you're given the task of correctly (and timely) pressing the buttons shown, like a quick combination of controller buttons and analog stick tilts. For most of the time, the intensity and demand of what you have to press fits with the chaos that's going on, while in others, it's just frustratingly obtuse.
Telltale has managed to convey a sense of immediacy for what happens to the game's characters into the indirect controls you're given to do but sometimes the game's interface manages to do a great job getting in your way. The graphics and character animation do a great job of showing emotion (mostly of desperation, as it's to be expected when dinosaurs are trying to eat everyone) but in some instances, amidst all the action it becomes extremely difficult to see some of the prompts or get the timing wrong due to how often the indications on screen become obscured by the camera that is often shifting positions and moving along a predetermined path.
The timing in which to press the buttons was my most frustrating issue of contention with this game. I rarely reached a point where I just wanted to give up, due to how well the check-pointing works in this game, although some people might get turned off after seeing their unlucky fictitious friend get eaten due to a mistaken or missed input. Regardless of how forgiving the action is for most of the game, allowing a fair number of mistakes before slapping you with a game over screen, it's still disappointing to see it happen instantly in some of the more exciting parts of the game, in "insta-kill" mode.
If you persevere, though, you'll be rewarded with a surprisingly well developed story that is delivered in the confines of this four part episodic series. Telltale once again manages to develop an exciting plot that plucks an overlooked element off the movies, all the while creating their own original elements that perfectly fit in the mythos of Jurassic Park, something that both of the movie sequels failed to do. Two other islands? Really, Mr. Spielberg?
While it's a little annoying that you don't get to guide much of what happens in the story, it's mostly up to you to uncover additional tidbits of background information on characters and the Jurassic Park canon. They're hidden behind certain dialogue choices and button prompts that can be easily missed if you aren't looking. The overall script is set, though. Certain character deaths, for instance, are written from the beginning and happen regardless of how perfectly you execute action sequence button prompts. The way you get to certain points in the plot can somewhat differ but it's nothing dramatic or short of a few extra bumps and awkward falls on the way to an objective.It'd be easy to classify Jurassic Park The Game as passable if the scope of comparison was focused on action adventure games like Uncharted. But as an adventure game that strips the 'point' out of 'point and click' and replaces the 'click' with button prompts, analog stick movements and a few cases of insane button mashing, it works relatively well. You're still picking dialogue choices, examining items and solving a half of a handful of puzzles, even though most of what you do is firmly strapped in on a story that moves along a pre-determined track. Jurassic Park The Game might not be one of Telltale's best titles, but it's certainly the most unique of the bunch. |6
