Wallace & Gromit Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees
Framerate problems aside, this is a great first entry for the Claymation duo.
Telltale Games has excelled at making a name for themselves in the adventure game genre, taking a long thought dead style of gameplay and revitalizing it in recent years on the PC, with titles like Sam and Max, Bone, Wallace and Gromit, and Strong Bad. The Wii has already had a taste of two of those titles, and now it's time for the Xbox 360 to get some love with the first episode of Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures, this episode titled Fright of the Bumblebees.
The game does a remarkable job of staying very close to the source material, and while the adventure is all new, the characters and locale are instantly familiar to anyone that's a fan of the bumbling duo and their misadventures on West Wallaby Street. There's plenty of side characters from the W & G universe, and I'm sure that long time fans will catch on to a few other nods from their previous adventures. The humor is intact, the dialogue is witty and genuinely funny, and the overall look is as spot on to the old Claymation style as it can be, albeit with some technical issues. There are occasions where the animation will skip a bit, and the framerate has some strange hiccups, along with some texture loading problems that pop up on occasion. I was a little surprised to see the game have as many technical problems as it does, it doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to run on the system hardware, but I suppose under XBLA limitations it does the best it can.
Still, regardless of those problems, the game is pretty fun to play. The adventure game qualities are well represented, with lots of exploration around the small town near Wallace's house, the house itself, and the surrounding yard area. There are a couple sections that are cut off, obviously for the next couple expansions, but you get a decent amount of space to walk around and check things out. The controls aren't point and click like you might typically find in this style of game, instead you directly control Wallace or Gromit and move them about like any other third person video game. Interactive objects are highlight by moving the right stick around and you can mess around with things by pressing A. You'll have an inventory to manage that allows you to work out the various puzzles in the game, and you can combine certain objects according to whatever the story requires.
The single episode told here is split up into 4 sections, and they're all fairly short and not particularly difficult, but I did get stuck towards the end of the second part (stupid dog tags), so there are a few puzzles that'll make you think a bit, or at least require you to do some thorough searching. Half of the fun in these titles is interacting with everything you can just to get the dialogue or reaction from the characters, so players that are usually pretty thorough won't have a lot of trouble here. The puzzles all make sense too, there's nothing that's really out there in terms of logic, and so it won't require you to delve into a FAQ to figure out some arcane way of solving something.
All together I found the first entry to be really enjoyable, and I look forward to checking out more of the episodes as they release on XBLA. If nothing else it should give people some hope that these guys will handle the Monkey Island stuff really well, since they've obviously poured some attention and care into the majority of their titles so far. It's a shame that the game has its technical issues though, as that's the only thing that's really holding this back from being a fantastic title.
