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.

Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series

I’ve taken a new tact to getting my unplayed games completed. I’ve targeted completing the 30 ‘easiest’ games in my collection on both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. I wasn’t keen to do these in order, so I asked my friends again to pick numbers to go through. I think at the time this was number 2, where number 1 was the easiest. That’s to be expected from the Telltale series.

The Enemy Within continues from where the first game left off with Batman fighting crime and taking names. The Riddler is up this time and after the opening scene, it transpires that there’s more than just the Riddler terrorising Gotham. The Enemy Within sees the birth of the Joker in this universe and the conclusion seems to imply that we won’t be seeing any more Batman games from the Telltale boys.

There’s not really a lot else to say by now. The stories are multiple choice dialogue games where you can choose to say one of three things or nothing at all. This one felt a little longer than the other games though but I’m not sure if this was because I keep playing them late at night and falling asleep or they were just longer. I found myself taking between 2 and 3 hours to finish an episode rather than the usual 1 to 2.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Play through the story from start to finish and you will net all the achievements. Except one word of advice is to not skip the end credits at the end of episode 5. I did this, and the final achievement did not unlock as there is a post credit cutscene and for some bizarre reason, despite this not being the end, it doesn’t have a checkpoint and I had to play the whole of the 5^th episode again to get the last achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While I quite liked the game overall, it did drag on a bit and you spend a lot more time being Bruce Wayne than Batman. And that last achievement glitch irritated me beyond all measure. This is one for the Batman fans and not necessarily achievement hunters, although it remains a straightforward easy completion.

Game of Throne: A Telltale Games Series

If you ever want to complete a game quickly don’t play a game with your partner. In fact, if you want to complete a game quickly, don’t play a TellTale game is probably better advice!

I love A Game of Thrones so when TellTale announced they were doing a game, I was all over it. That was back in December 2014 when Episode 1 was released. I finished Episode 6 in December 2015. A year. A year to complete a game that could be completed in an afternoon if started once all episodes were released (and not played with a partner). This also shows how far behind I am with my reviews, even more so than when I initially wrote this one.

Anyway, ridiculous release timescales aside, there is a game to play here... sort of. Another point and click adventure game but a game nonetheless.

When I say ‘play’, what I mean is ‘interactively watch.’ There is nothing really that needs doing as the game is basically one long quick time event. As with most TellTale games, there are several dialogue choices you can make which can lead to several different outcomes, however these aren’t really all that different (I did have to read up on endings online to find this out though).

Game of Thrones follows the story of the Northern house of the Forresters after the red wedding and how they are trying to survive in the Game of Thrones world with Ramsey Snow trying to have them destroyed in typical Ramsey Snow fashion. The whole game is story-driven so there is not really much more I will say about it. If you want to find out about the story and moral choices, play the game.

The game itself, to be frank and honest, is an absolute joke. If you are going to spend ages releasing episodes for your episodic game, the least you can do is make them crash free, glitch free and graphically acceptable. The game is none of these of these things which is more than disappointing. It’s unacceptable. I don’t understand what makes a developer think that they can get away with some rushed bollocks after promising the public they will deliver. It’s more the fault of Microsoft and Sony for allowing it but what do they care, they keep getting our money. Maybe it’s our fault? But how are we supposed to know it’s shit without paying for it?

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to say. Play the game through making any decision you want and don’t die. There is nothing that requires you to go off the beaten track to get anything extra. I didn’t have the patience or will to play through the game again to get a different ending and I doubt many others would either.

So once again, they could have expanded the play time with a more diverse achievement list but they chose not to. It feels more like they couldn’t be bothered to do it more than they thought the story was strong though. Laziness would be in keeping with the glitchtastic gameplay, freezes and graphical defects.

Downloadable Content

You have to pay for each episode but it’s not really DLC in the true sense. People still moaned about it though. You know the score with these games by now – if you don’t like it, don’t play them.

It may seem from the above that I hated the game. This isn’t true. I thought it okay considering all of the above but only okay. It’s no Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us, and I think they realise that seeing as they have released another 2 Walking Dead games. I sincerely doubt fans of this game will see a follow up until December 2018. With the last episode released in 2020.