Horror month is over and now we're on to something else for November, which is looking like Jurassic Park games mixed with other stuff. I've just been in a Jurassic Park mood lately. Today's game is Telltale's Jurassic Park: The Game, which is thoroughly "OK". It was one of the last Telltale games before they switched styles for The Walking Dead so it's ... different. I dig it, though. Click to read more and watch gameplay.
Jurassic Park: The Game uses the old Telltale formula of, rather than letting you freely walk around like in The Walking Dead and every game since, the gameplay consists of separate scenes you switch between. You then pan the camera around in each scene and interactive stuff pops up, which allows you to continue conversations with characters or check items and solve puzzles. It also means basically everything is a QTE whenever any action happens, so you have to be prepared to mash buttons and move the sticks and do anything else that pops up on screen while you're running away from a dinosaur.
The rest of the experience - puzzles and story / writing - are pretty much what we've come to expect from Telltale. Which really means that it's only "OK" and not really great. Yeah, I've soured tremendously on The Walking Dead over the years. The first season was so good and then they just went and screwed it up with everything else they did.
For Jurassic Park: The Game, however, I can put up with Telltale's mediocre writing and goofy gameplay and ugly graphics - cause, woof, this game is ugly - because it has freaking dinosaurs in it. And not just dinosaurs, but "Jurassic Park" style dinosaurs that don't have feathers and aren't realistic anymore but goddammit I don't care because this is how I WANT dinosaurs to look and sound and act.
And there are some spectacular dinosaur sequences in Jurassic Park: The Game. I just focused on a couple of T-Rex encounters for this video, because it's my favorite dinosaur, but the rest of the game has raptors and triceratops and others along with a new species invented just for the game. That new species, uh, kinda sucks, but seeing the rest of the dinos is awesome.
Overall, it's solid enough. For fans of dinosaurs and Jurassic Park in particular, I'd recommend playing through it. I'm not sure if you can still buy it digitally, but physical copies are easy to find and fairly cheap.
