I’ve been a fan of Telltale’s episodic adventure games on PC. They seemed to get better with each new season, from Sam & Max to Tales of Monkey Island, my favorite probably being a tie between that and their Back To The Future game. Unfortunately, now I’m in a predicament – I don’t like the new Jurassic Park game. It just feels wrong.
Jurassic Park doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It tries to be an adventure game because, hey, Telltale makes adventure games. But the puzzle sections are very short, and not very… puzzly. Several of them are basically just excuses to make you click on things. There was one part near the beginning with the mercenary girl where I’m investigating a Jeep crash, I plan to explore everything before I move on, but what’s this? Oh, one node, with little indication, forces the story to move on. There are several more where the answer isn’t to solve a clever puzzle, but simply a matter of clicking on the 5 or 6 nodes available.
Even the times where order matters can usually be solved by clicking on everything, often it won’t be a matter of clicking on a node, noticing something, and then quickly acting like in previous games, it will be a matter of clicking something which causes a state or scene transition that allows you to acquire the object.
Of course, this leads to my next complaint. Quick-Time Events. QTEs have worked maybe four times in gaming: Dragon’s Lair, Shenmue, Indigo Prophecy, and Heavy Rain. And a couple of those are probably even debatable. This game is clearly trying to be in the Indigo Prophecy/Heavy Rain category (in fact, a Telltale statement you can find online without too much trouble specifically mentions it’s like Heavy Rain), with an adventure story that transitions to QTEs for action. Unfortunately (if you haven’t guessed where this is going), this is done very poorly.
For one, the QTEs switch between incredibly merciful and merciless. Luckily the game is rather forgiving in most cases if you miss one, but will take off points towards your gold-medal. Even so, it’s rather frustrating to miss them. Probably the easiest to miss are the “stacked” QTEs. Every once in a while will decide you need to press multiple buttons in quick succession to perform an action, so it will make a circle with multiple rings around it and an arrow in it. So you press the button, a circle disappears, and another arrow appears. Of course, given the time limit you have approximately no time to process the next button to press if you want to succeed. It’s only really a problem when you get up to 3 ring QTEs, but it can occasionally be a problem for two-ring ones as well.
There’s also the "timed’ QTEs where a green ring continually shrinks around the button, and once it’s inside and the button starts pulsing you hit the correct key. These are usually easy, but it’s visually VERY difficult to tell what’s the correct time and what’s slightly too early, so you either miss it by waiting to “be sure” or miss it by being such a hair too early you couldn’t have really known.
On top of this QTEs come out of nowhere, my only advice is every time you click expect a QTE. At first they’re rather telegraphed, but I’ve found a couple of times where I’ve clicked a puzzle element while taking a drink, expecting a warning, and then had to rush to put down my drink and hit the right button (which, of course, wasn’t going to happen).
My only other real complaint is the graphics, or rather, the performance of such. The game’s graphics are fine, but I find it rather ridiculous that I can run Skyrim on max settings, and The Witcher 2 with everything on Ultra (but no Ubersampling) with barely a stutter, yet this game becomes an unplayable bucket of lag on the highest graphics settings on my computer. The graphics certainly aren’t THAT good. Mind you, this is a minor complaint since turning the graphics down a notch still looks really good (roughly on par with previous Telltale games). I don’t know, maybe it’s optimized for Nvidia or something.
I wouldn’t recommend AGAINST getting it, but I don’t think this is a game to rush into getting if you liked previous Telltale games (even if you also like Heavy Rain/Indigo Prophecy). If you want to play it, I’d personally recommend waiting a month to see if Steam puts a big discount tag on it.