Jurassic Park: The Game

The next game on the hit list is another American only game and one of the early TellTale games and I have to say, they’ve made vast improvements since this outing.

It’s a story-based game where you follow Gerry, Jess, Nima and some dickhead marines around Jurassic Park in the aftermath of the first film. The marine come to rescue the likes of Jess and Gerry but this soon turns in to a quest for survival and trying to make money out of dino embryos.

In terms of the characters, Tell Tale haven’t changed much in terms of their design. All of the characters move between being endearing and irritating at a whim and their moral compasses appear to be attached to ridiculously strong magnets. In addition to this, the dialogue options don’t seem to tie up with what they actually say. A lot of the time, it appears to be inconsequential what option you pick because they will say whatever they want.

In terms of the gameplay, it’s basically an 8 hour long quick time event. These are the only real interactions you have other than clicking on objects in the environment to generate further bits of meaningless dialogue. There are also a few puzzle bits but not a lot, so I would it’s limited in terms of gameplay.

The quick time events are ridiculously unforgiving too. You have to know what’s coming before it comes to get through most of them. The button prompts change speed and flick all over the place. Thankfully though there are loads of checkpoints throughout these segments.

In terms of looks, it’s now very dated and the frame rates are poor when loading into a scene for the first time. It feels a little bit like it’s been glued together and quite badly. Sound wise, it’s typically good as it’s stuck to the original soundtrack for the movie and therefore, sounds epic.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Playing through the game without worrying about the achievements will net half of them. The other half mainly require completing all of the quick time events in one go without making any mistakes. As mentioned earlier there are checkpoints during the scenes but this also becomes a problem later on.

There are a few scenes where the checkpoints occur directly after a point that’s easy to fail. This happened to me during one of the last scenes in the final chapter of the game. The problem with this was that once you activate the checkpoint, you then need to replay the scene without any checkpoints at all or start the episode again from the beginning. However, this particular section was even more problematic.

There is an achievement for using three flares to look down some corridors after this scene. You get the flares by picking them up during the QTR action sequence, however the action I missed was for picking up one of the flares. Even replaying and completing the scene didn’t work as when I came to use the flares in the next section, I only had two of them as replaying the scene does not overwrite your last save. This meant restarting the episode again and making sure that I didn’t miss the flares during the cut scene.

Aside from this, another one that often goes missing is for completing the first episode without dying. I didn’t take any chances with this and made sure I immediately reloaded whenever I made a mistake on the first playthrough to ensure I got it.

At the end of the game, there is a multiple-choice achievement where the story line splits. This appears to be Tell Tale’s first foray into multiple endings, and this is the only decision that impacts the storyline as far as I’m aware. It’s not very far after a reloadable checkpoint though so it’s not too painful to replay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Jurassic Park: The Game was an interesting journey into the earlier TellTale franchise, if not a bit messy and rough in places. It’s a solid and enjoyable story experience but the over-the-top quick time events get old fast. It takes anywhere between 8 to 10 hours to complete so is fairly decent value for money.