Jurassic Park: The Game (2011)

Easy award for "most underrated Telltale game". I had an absolute blast with this game, and I genuinely do not understand why it has a reputation for being mediocre.

What I got was an interactive action movie with a great story, interesting characters, great action set pieces, and a game that respects the source material while doing its own thing.

I mentioned in the "What We Playin'?" thread that I believe this to be the best Jurassic Park movie after the original, and that absolutely holds true. It takes place both during and after the original movie - it starts immediately after the demise of Denis Nedry, and finishes a day or two after the film, chronicling the events of a few stragglers left on the island for one reason or another. It does sag a bit in the middle at times, but episodes 2 and 3 appear to have had different writers. Episode 4, however, does a great job of cleaning up some of the missteps with satisfying resolutions to cap it all off.

To be clear though: This is absolutely an interactive movie. Action scenes are resolved with QTEs, and dialogue, puzzles and searching for clues comprise the rest. The puzzles ranged from passable to excellent, and the ways they both involved dinosaurs and quirks of the park was great fun. The QTE segments were hit and miss - they did a great job of keeping me on my toes, but they were marred by a handful of technical hiccups. If you've played Telltale games before, you will know how these games sometimes drop inputs when the game is lagging, and this was no exception. I suffered a handful of cheap deaths because the game did not register my inputs. Annoying, but not enough to marr the experience overall for me. However, there IS an achievement for a deathless run, and I can imagine those technical issues driving an achievement hunter up the freaking wall. There was also one QTE where no symbol displayed at all, and while that was not a death check, it was odd.

I can recommend this to a lot of people, but not everyone. If you're a John Carmack and mechanics are everything for you, you might want to watch an LP of this one instead. But if you're a fan of games with great stories and you can overlook other blemishes, or if you're a big fan of Jurassic Park or dinosaurs, I give this one a hearty recommendation.

This is also a game I've noticed start to creep up in price in the last few years, so if you're wanting it physical, I would pick up a 360 copy before the used games market goes bananas again.

This game feels very lazy, and it was pretty boring to play. It is not a 1 star because it had several good qualities, but it was indeed very boring

The few goods

• The voice acting is pretty decent, all voice actors do their jobs well enough. They vocalize worry and fear correctly
• It has many good shots and cool scenes. There is a scene where a character fights a raptor with a knife, all set to cool music, a fight between a T. rex and a Triceratops, and there is the scene where the Trodoons are introduced and the animators did a good job at making such a small dinosaur feel like an actual danger

The many bads

• There is a severe lack of consequences. If you mess up a quick time, you either just die or you get another chance to save yourself on the next one, if you anger a character the story doesn't change; unlike The Walking Dead, where if you said something it would affect the plot, if you got wounded that wound would stay or if you got someone killed then that character no longer shows up, etc

• The story is not interesting. It is just about some employees left behind, a bounty hunter trying to find the can with embryos that Nedry dropped, and some mercenaries trying to find people who were left behind; this was a good setup but the game doesn't give everyone enough time to do things before they are forced together, also most of the time is spent talking and it drags for a long time. Also the story gets contradicted by the movies later on, since this game implies that Isla Nublar got firebombed into oblivion

• The situations get very repetitive. Most quick times are just "avoiding dinosaur" or "fight off this character", almost no puzzles and they are solved super easily

• There is barely any music that is memorable, they didn't even use the music from the movies. The only song I can remember is the the one that plays dyring the knife fight with the raptor