I went into this game with tainted expectations, had to force myself to play it most of the time, and am not a fan of the aesthetic in general.  I completely judged the book by its cover, in other words.  I had seen Wallace and Gromit on DVD covers, always kind of raising an eyebrow at the crude claymation efforts of its creators.  Don’t get me wrong, I love just about everything to do with England.  Something about this dog and man couple irked me though.  I’ll probably never quite put my finger on what.  Perhaps they remind me of a long lost tormentor somewhere in the mists of time.

To get back on topic, I did play Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Ep 2: The Last Resort, and despite not having played Episode 1, I jumped right in without being lost or confused.  Let’s just say the narrative isn’t cohesive enough between episodes that entering midway is a problem.  I am familiar with point and click  adventure games, though this was the first I had played on a console.  My experience generally includes Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton, and one could argue that those particular adventures are quite different from your classic PC point and click.

And that brings me to my first issue with the game.  Point and click adventures are aptly named.  They originate on a computer and involve pointing and clicking.  This Xbox adaptation takes the pointing away and leaves players with a scroll through option or a proximity option I guess one could call it.  When controlling either Wallace or Gromit, moving around with the joystick works well enough, and even finding the objects to select is fine, but it does not work as well as a Wiimote, stylus, or mouse would.  In fact, it adds much time to the experience and takes away from it for that.  There is a handy highlight feature that will show players what can be interacted with, but I generally forgot about it because usually it was obvious.  It just wasn’t always easy to click what I wanted to click.

Controls aside, the story of The Last Resort is fairly humorous.  Wallace decides to build a beach in his basement because it’s rainy out (it’s England), and he needs a vacation.  The game is divided up into 4 chapters, each with its own mini story.  The final chapter is about five minutes long, but the previous three border on one to two hours each, depending on how fast you can figure out what to do.  For those uninitiated in the adventure game genre, this game follows a classic formula.  Players have an overarching objective to fulfill.  They fulfill this objective by interacting with objects, people, and combining objects and people.  In a way it’s just a graphical math formula.  The story is vaguely funny, as is most of the dialogue.  I did have a few laugh out loud moments.  The characters, for the most part, are very one dimensional.  Gromit, who is a dog and never speaks a work, is oddly enough the character with the most depth.  He is ever suffering his master’s idiocy, but also seems to care about him in a sarcastic, suffering way.

The puzzles, if one could call them that, are usually not too difficult.  The ones that do provide a challenge do so because they are unintuitively stupid.  These are few, however, and actually paying attention to what people say and to one’s surroundings will heed answers probably 90% of the time.  For instance, it’s no leap of logic to assume the guy driving around with 40 bags of sand in his truck is the one players need to talk to for a basement beach.  Thus the overall difficulty of the game doesn’t approach something as convoluted as Layton.  It also makes it less enjoyable.

The Last Resort is not a bad game.  I did have to force myself to play it for the first half, but I warmed up to it and genuinely enjoyed the latter part of it.  It’s not something I would ever replay, and I’m not terribly excited to start up episodes 3 and 4, but neither do I dread those eventualities.  The story is quirky, the characters humorous if not laugh out loud hilarious, and while the genre does not work near as well without a mouse or at least a pointer, it was not overly frustrating to navigate.  At the very least, I know now that my initial judgment of the cover was not entirely fair to the pages within.

Title: Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Ep2: The Last Resort Publisher: TellTale Developer: TellTale Platform(s): Xbox Live Arcade Release Date: 11/04/2009

Doin It RIGHT: -Humorous at times. - Puzzles are not frustrating. -Good voice acting.	Doin It RONG: -Starts out very slow. - Puzzles are often too easy. - Some of the characters are nothing short of annoying.
FINAL SCORE: 5 / 10

Tags: adventure games, claymation, episode 2, last resort, Wallace & Gromit

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Reviews, XBLA, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.