So Telltale Games. I’m sure you’ve seen some reviews and articles here, there and everywhere about this company and the games they’ve made. There have even been a couple right here at Gamer Laughs (go give them a read if you haven’t yet). But one thing I’ve noticed is one Telltale Game that gets swept under the rug by the other games in their line-up such as The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. And that game, dear readers, is Jurassic Park: The Game. Let’s take a look shall we?

Story

Now, dear readers, do you remember the first Jurassic Park film? Now think back to the sub-plot where Dennis Nedry tries to smuggle the dinosaur embryos from InGen in a shaving cream bottle? And he gets pretty far actually, before the general kerfuffle with his Jeep he steals and of course before he gets sprayed by the Dilophosaurus. In that scene we see him drop the bottle full of little baby dinosaur embryos, and it never gets spoken of again. The story of Jurassic Park: The Game actually follows up on that forgotten sub-plot and finally gives it an ending. Which is truly something that makes my heart happy being such a fan of the series.

The story all takes place on Isla Nublar and starts just after Dennis Nedry’s death, the setting and time zone from the first film. So you’ll get a fair amount of references to the first film. The game adds locations and dinosaurs that weren’t in the film, or any of the films really. That’s not to say there isn’t all your favourites from the first movie, you still have T-Rexs. Velociraptors, Triceratops and Dilophosaurus.

You play as a variety of different characters, unlike a lot of newer Telltale Games. The characters are likeable enough, but I only really ended up liking two of them out of the playable cast of around 6. You have Nima, the merc from Costa Rica who was brought up on the island, Gerry Harding, a veterinarian for the park and his daughter Jess, who is basically there to be a pain the arse I guess. You also have Billy Yoder and Oscar (my two favourites personally) who are two soldiers hired by Ingen and Laura Sorkin, a bio geneticist who hates how the dinosaurs are treated by InGen.

Having so many characters can get a bit irritating at times, especially when you then have to play as some that you don’t feel anything for. One plus of having a host of different characters (OK, like six, but I digress) is that the characters all have their own reasons for doing what they do.

The story did feel a little unnecessarily bloated at times with events in the game feeling like they were there to add more drama than was needed or to fill some sort of dinosaur quota.

Gameplay

The gameplay style of a Telltale game is like a souped up version of a point and click game. You wander around the landscape and click (or press a button on the controller) to interact with whatever it is when the game tells you to. Sometimes you even have to rapidly click a button. And, brace yourselves, sometimes you have to keep a dot inside of a circle.If you’ve played a Telltale game before you’ll get the controls down pretty quick. As I said above, I also had to buy a USB Xbox controller as some of the keyboard controls just didn’t work. I’d be trying to leap to the left out of the way of a rampaging dino, only to be smashed in the face by said dino resulting in a game over and dropping down a score which is ultimately useless. But I really like that approval I get for seeing a shiny gold medal saying that I did a good job. I’m a simple person really.

The game also relies a lot on quick time events. These quick time events are actually kind of bizarre. Sometimes you can miss one and nothing too bad happens, maybe you stumble a little bit. But other times missing the button press kills you instantly. There are no in-betweens. They also vary a lot in how long they give you to press the button before it gets classed as being failed.

There’s a couple of puzzles interspersed in the game to break up the quick time events and single button presses. They’re not too difficult, even for someone like me who’s terrible at puzzles in general.

So the more recent Telltale games, starting with The Walking Dead, gave the player choices that would further sculpt the world and later story around them. I know that I’ll never forget Clementine looking up at me with sad, confused eyes as the words ‘Clementine will remember this’ flash across the corner of the screen. Well, this game doesn’t have those moments of a mixture of crushing guilt for having let Clem down and utter dread as you wonder how, when and why that will come up later in the story. Whereas the newer games in Telltale’s line up make you think about what will happen further on in the game, and how your choices are going to change how the game progresses, Jurassic Park: The Game doesn’t have this. So in the end you don’t really care very much what you say to the other characters as it doesn’t end up changing anything anyway. There was also no inventory like in the newer Telltale games either, your character just uses the item automatically when it’s needed.

Sound

The game uses some of the soundtrack from the movie including the main theme. The score’s pretty good, nothing that leaps out at me but it’s in no way unbearable to listen to. The soundtrack did its job really, but it’s not like I’m going to be spending hours scouring YouTube for the OST. I did enjoy the use of the main theme from the movie being used during some of the scenes in the game.

I enjoyed the voice acting, most of the characters were on point, the delivery was good and there was only one voice that annoyed me, but maybe that was just the fact that I didn’t like the character of Jess’s anyway. The sound effects were good, and the dinosaurs made the same noises they did in the movies which was nice, I mean it’s always nice to hear that classic T-Rex roar after all.

Graphics

The graphics aren’t too bad. I mean they’re not great, but I’ve seen worse. So I was running the game in the highest the graphics settings would go and the environments were still pretty unattractive. One thing I did notice was that some foreground items were very flat looking. I couldn’t stop staring at the trees in the first section of the game. They looked like those cut-outs of trees that you see in school plays.

Now that being said, the character models are where the graphics seem to shine a lot more. The characters are far more detailed and it clearly looks like a lot of effort went into making them. Even if sometimes the characters have one eye staring deep into my soul whilst also somehow managing to make it look like they’re also watching a tiny tennis match, and then have the other eye probably looking for where the plot went.

What could be considered even more important is how the dinosaur models look. It would be a terrible Jurassic Park game if the dinosaurs looked terrible. Well, dear readers, they look fine. That’s all I can really say, they’re fine. I wasn’t blown away by them, and sometimes they didn’t look like they were actually walking on the ground, more hovering centimetres above it. Now, I’m not a dinosaur expert. Maybe they all did hover above the ground. But I do know people don’t do that as I am a people. Because all the characters have times were they do the same levitating magic trick.

Is it fun?

Jurassic Park: The Game isn’t an amazing game, it’s more like a beta version of the later way Telltale games work as a medium. It’s not terrible though, and other than the problems I had with the keyboard controls, it’s not that bad at all. It’s pretty fun, especially when you have no idea of how the story is going to progress, and it does at to the Jurassic Park mythos. The characters are fairly interesting and each have their own agendas, although you’ll probably like some more than others like I did.

Now Jurassic Park: The Game is currently on Steam for £15. Not the worst price I’ve seen for a fairly short game (can you class 8 hours as short? I do…) but it’s not got much replay ability after you’ve played it the first time. I played it again for the purpose of this review, after having played through it already and watching a Let’s Play of someone doing so too, and it lacked interest for me playing it again. Other than trying to get more achievements and seeing if I could do combos I couldn’t do before, knowing the story made it a lot less interesting to play.

Overall Rating:

7/10