Review: Wallace & Gromit’s Episode 1

Who doesn’t love Wallace & Gromit? Nobody worth knowing, thats who. Their claymation adventures are charming fun and they are back with more, this time as episodic games in the spirit of the classic point-and-click adventure games equally beloved by all. It seems like a winning combination and now they’re inaugural escapade, Fright of the Bumblebees, has landed on Xbox Live Arcade by Telltale games.

Playing this, it makes you wonder why it took till now for someone to see this combination’s potential. The Wallace & Gromit franchise lends itself wonerfully to point and click adventure style games. All the right elements are here; fun story, creative gameplay, charming characters, and the right balance between difficulty and fun.

The game is not perfect. There are some unfortunate problems that can’t be ignored here. The graphics could use a little more polish, mainly smoothing out the rough edges. It’s just somewhat choppy and unrefined. The modeling could use a few more polygons and the texturing could use a little more variation but mainly the animation itself is inconscistent and crude at times.

Its not so bad as to make it unplayable but its a little distracting and the rest is done so well that when looking for criticisms, its the elephant in the room. One can’t help but think that with a larger budget, these issues would be easy to iron out. Hopefully the success of episode one will allow this for future episodes. With the low pricetag one shouldn’t expect all the visual flare of a full retail release, but it would be a great investment for the publishers, especially considering it could all be reused for subsequent episodes.

I’d love the game to visually match the original claymation films in all respects but it’s not quite there yet. Otherwise the rest is up to par though. The orchestral music is a suitable addition, the voice acting is what you’d expect and the gameplay is solid with point and click adventuring working well with a console control-pad.

Its not a terribly challenging game but thats probably for the best as its a casual sitcom, fun to even watch someone play. You don’t want to get too stumped here and a little creative thinking will ensure you don’t. Its not about the accomplishment of beating the challenges but the experience of participating in the story and watching events unfold.

This game is great when you’re in the mood for some casual entertainment, especially with others. Adventure games like this make a great social group activity for all ages. Its not perfect but the problems are minor and potentially easy for the developers to resolve for future epsiodes, making this a great start to what could be a really fun series. We look forward to seeing what they have in mind for the future of Wallace & Gromit. Point and click adventure games are officially back. Hooray!

The best part about this, is that Telltale Games will be releasing new Sam & Max adventures on the Xbox Live Arcade soon, and they will even be revisiting Monkey Island soon, as recently announced at E3. It seems like Telltale is becoming the darling of the Point and click adventure genre’s comeback and landing such great franchises shows that there is a lot of potential here.