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Wednesday 25 Nov 2009
Not quite abuzz with excitement
Aaah, episodic content! An enticing way for software publishers to score plenty of quick bucks, and for consumers to never quite get the value-for-money they expect or deserve! You can probably tell I’m more than a tad skeptical of the whole concept of episodic content, since it seems like a convenient excuse for developers to stretch out a title for as long as possible, and squeeze out every drop of profit in the process. With this in mind, I approached Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures: Episode 1 - Fright of the Bumblebees with a great degree of trepidation, and more than a mild dash of cynicism.
The return of the Bee Bee C duo
For many of us, Wallace and Gromit will probably be a household name, and the industrious duo goes together just like cheese and crackers, spit and shine, sardines and condensed milk, or Sam and Max. The Wallace and Gromit Grand Adventures series comprises of four witty adventure puzzle games (called episodes) that each play out over a couple of hours. In Fright of the Bumblebees, Wallace has entered the honey-making business, and scores a major financial breakthrough when he has to deliver a boat-load of honey later that evening. Through a series of haywire events, the typical (and equally hilarious) “from-bad-to-worse” scenarios unfold right before Wallace and Gromit’s eyes, and it is left up to the intrepid partnership to gradually rectify the ensuing chaos that has bee-fallen an unsuspecting West Wallaby Street. As the title suggests, this episode will involve Wallace and Gromit dealing with some rather misbehiving bees.
Grand Adventures is a strange mix between an adventure game and a television episode of Wallace and Gromit. To Telltale Games’ credit it does feel like you’re spending more time watching a show rather than playing a game, and for this sort of product, the experience works very well. The control system is simple, and it won’t take long to get the hang of things. If you’re a shy person, you may want to get to know Wallace and Gromit a bit better before you join them on one of their grand adventures, and this is achieved through Wallace’s Interact-o-vision (aka tutorial mode).
Wallace is very helpful in politely explaining to you what’s going on, however - although every instruction is done audibly - at rare times a mumble-bee may disrupt your ability to follow the conversations carefully, and you may end up missing an instruction. If you like, subtitles can be enabled under the options menu to just make things that little bit easier to follow. The interface is very straightforward and it won’t take long to get to grips with navigating and interacting in the game. To cater for the console’s game controller, the game follows a “cycle-and-click” system where you can cycle through the objects on screen that Wallace or Gromit can interact with, and then activate them with A. To assist with navigating through the objects, Y can be pressed to highlight any objects of interest (Hint: Remember to use Wallace’s map for quick travel between locations).
It could have bee-n better value for money
The first episode retails for 800MSP (that’s about R90.00), and is 284MB (an average bandwidth plan will bring this up another R20.00 or so, making the total R110.00). You don’t get more than the first episode in this download, and the entire “series” of episodes will set you back 1.5GB (that’s approximately R100) and 3200MSP (that’s about R380.00, which makes the total for downloading the series around R500).
For the points-mongers out there, this game offers 200 achievement points, and they’re generally not hard to obtain, so there will be some additional reward for having a good time. The entire episode plays out in a couple of hours, but I found the experience was more enjoyable in shorter stints, rather than all-at-once (I recommend playing one Act at a sitting). This game is certainly not a kids’ game - not because of any objectionable content (there’s nothing objectionable at all) - but because some of the puzzles generally require some insight that I don’t expect most younger kids to be able to decipher on their own.
The game itself is fairly well put together, with a handy hints system to get you through the tight spots. The hints system can be adjusted in the setup menu to change their frequency and hints are presented to you through comments made by characters in-game. One criticism is that some of the hints are barely audible over the background music, and aren’t always as helpful as they should be (although when you get the hint, it is invariably only a matter of time from there before you figure out what you need to do).
At the current price, this game is definitely a may-bee…
Overall, Episode 1 is definitely worth the play, but I am still dubious about the value-for-money, since you only get one episode for 800MSP and in my opinion, that’s a lot of loot for one episode. If I am going to fork out 800MSP for a game, I expect the game to be ironed out, and sadly this is not the case with Episode 1 - there are some ghastly graphics at times, as well as some fairly obvious continuity errors. However, apart from that, this episode is certainly still worth the few hours of time it will take to play through if for no other reason than to have a good chuckle and enjoy something different to the usual stable of shooters and platformers.
Most adventure gamers or fans of Wallace and Gromit won’t be disappointed with the simple elegance of a game that never tries to take itself, or its audience, too seriously. If you can afford this game, you won’t be disappointed, but without droning on, I still think it’s a bit overpriced at the current 800MSP, and would probably say it’s a better deal at 560MSP.
The Good: Clean and well-bee-haved; puzzles aren’t impossibly complex, but they can still be a little challenging; feels like a traditional Wallace & Gromit adventure
The Bad: Minor glitches and continuity errors makes it feel unfinished
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Bryan |
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