Review of Jurassic Park: The Game by Lucien21

Was Telltale’s first foray into the action genre worth the wait?

Unfortunately it is a resounding NO. There are too many issues with this game to call it anything but a massive disappointment.

The film is set around the events of the original movie. Revolving round the canister of embryos lost by Nedry as he tried to flee the island.

You control a variety of characters from a father/daughter team (fun fact: the character has another daughter Sarah who appears in the 2nd movie) to a couple of Mercs and a female scientist. Unfortunately because you are flip flopping between all these characters you rarely get any sense of connection to any of them and as they die every other second you rarely care. In fact part way through the game it became more enjoyable to see how I could kill them in new an novel ways.

The graphics are laggy and dated on the PC highlighting that the Telltale engine is not built for this type of game and is seriously in need of an upgrade. The dinosaurs are well done, but the human characters are sloppily animated with guns and hands clipping through their bodies and the animation looking creepily off for most of the game.

The story is decent enough and moves at a reasonable pace, there are some very nice set pieces that get the blood pumping and are exciting to watch.

Ultimately though it is hampered by the “gameplay”. Although this game has been compared to Heavy Rain that comparison is deeply flawed. This game has more in common with Dragon’s Lair. You have no control over any of the characters and instead pan around a static location clicking on the couple of hotspots before flipping the camera to another location and doing the same.

The game then utilises Quick Time Events for the meat of the “game”. However they are deeply broken, unresponsive to input and the nested multiple input (double or triple ringed prompts) usual require superhuman reflexes to complete.

You will die multiple times in this game. Fortunately that is the best part of this game are there are a multitude of death scenes in this game and they are always fun to watch (at least the first time).

I was really disappointed in this game. It is a barely interactive experience that might have been fine if the quality of the story was higher or if the control system was now dreadful.