Jurassic Park: The Game Review (X360)

• Publisher: Telltale Games
• Developer: Telltale Games
• ESRB Rating: “T" for Teen
• Genre: Action
• Pros: Great music and sound; dinosaurs; punch a raptor in the face; some really awesome scenes; a couple great puzzles
• Cons: So-so graphics; little replay value; janky sound glitches

Jurassic Park: The Game takes place briefly during, but mostly immediately following, the first Jurassic Park film. It features veterinarian Gerry Harding (you might recognize him easier when he's standing next to a sick triceratops) and his daughter who was visiting the island, a corporate spy sent to retrieve the Barbasol canister fully of dinosaur embryos Nedry was carrying (and dropped), an inGen scientist, and a couple of mercenaries sent to rescue the survivors after Dennis Nedry screwed everything up.

The story is actually pretty good, if not a bit clichéd and predictable. In a strange move, it hits most of the same high points as the movie (like, identical scenarios, just in different locations) and spouts many of the same one-liners and key lines that the characters in the movie do. For all of the eye rolling you'll do at some of the dialogue, however, the story is still worth the trouble and the delivery from the voice actors is fine at least. Some characters are awesome (Oscar) while some are obnoxious (Jess), but overall it is a fun ride you'll want to see through to the end.

The game isn't difficult at all. The QTEs usually pop up with plenty of time for you to recognize them, and even if you do screw up and die (and your characters usually say "Damn" or something when you mess up, which made me laugh), the scenes are short and there are frequent checkpoints, so you usually restart on the same QTE you failed at. I have heard that the PS3 version of the game is a bit hard to play since the button commands are hard to recognize due to the way the buttons are presented onscreen, but since the Xbox 360 uses color coded buttons, it is easy to scan the screen, identify the color of button, and press it.

The action sequences where you're being chased by dinosaurs are pretty straightforward - you push the buttons as they pop up and your character narrowly escapes the snapping jaws of a predator. Or maybe you'll knife fight one-on-one against a raptor with the biggest bad ass in the history of badasses (Oscar). The dinosaur scenes are definitely the high point of the whole experience. There are velociraptors, t-rex, triceratops, dilophosaurus, and more including one super creepy new species that plays a big role in the story. As a dinosaur game, JP:TG is pretty solid.

There are some puzzles and exposition scenes scattered around as well, which do take some actual critical thinking occasionally. Many scenes are just talking to characters, or moving the camera around to identify interactive bits of the scene, and generally require you to just click on everything in order to move the scene forward. Some puzzles require you to perform actions in the correct order, however, or make you read and understand schematics, and if you pick the wrong options, the characters die. There are a couple of really memorable, really fun puzzles here that are satisfying to solve. Not quite as fun is the fact you often end up controlling multiple characters in each scene, so sometimes you have to play through both sides of an argument which is absolutely ridiculous.

One final mostly minor complaint is that in a lot of the exciting action sequences you're so focused on the QTEs popping up that you don't notice all of the cool stuff going on in the background. Why make a game with so many cool set pieces and then cover them up and distract attention away from them by making it a QTE game? It makes the game more enjoyable to watch someone else play than to play yourself.

The sound fares quite a bit better, but that is mostly because it uses all of the awesome music and sound effects from the movie. The T-rex and raptors all have their distinctive sound effects, which is pretty awesome. The dialogue is mostly well delivered, but the sound mixing for the dialogue is kind of terrible. Dialogue volume changes constantly and (especially in the later parts of the game) pops all the time where one word or line will be super loud compared to everything else.