Review: Jurassic Park: the Game
By Miodrag Kovačević | November 19, 2011 | Reviews | No comments | Share
I haven’t had the chance to play much of Telltale’s games, save for Poker Night at the Inventory, but I appreciate their efforts in bringing the point-and-click genre back to life. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of their work, but I’ve heard good things about their games and they’re certainly part of my infamous “backlog”.
What I think surprised many people was their announcement on working on a Jurassic Park and The Walking Dead game. Very little is known about the latter, while we’ve had the opportunity to see trailers and gameplay clips of Jurassic Park for quite a while (as well as read up on some jeep drama prior to the game’s release, and the more recent Metascore ordeal). It was obvious that it was going down the Heavy Rain route, which made somewhat sense as a transition from point-and-click adventure games if you wanted to make things a bit more intense. How did Telltale pull it off? Let’s take it one step at a time.
Welcome to Jurassic Park
We’ve seen that Telltale can handle other game licenses, but do they do justice to a film IP? Well, if Jurassic Park is any indicator, I’m now looking forward to what they do with The Walking Dead’s writing. To put it simply, it’s quite good. A 
storm breaks out on the island of Jurassic Park, which in turn causes various security measures to fail and many dinosaurs to get free. During this whole chaos, we participate in the events as Gerry, the park veterinarian, as well as his daughter who is visiting the island, as a corporate spy with a heart of gold, mercenaries and a geneticist. The game consists of four episodes, each containing at least eleven scenes. Sometimes you jump between characters during the same scene, sometimes the transition is between them. In general, the whole composition is very film-like and, dare I say, cinematic. As much as I hate that descriptor applied to video games, yes, I would use it for Telltale’s Jurassic Park.
The characters themselves are quite well executed and interaction is interesting. The archetypes are obvious: doctor too attached to her work, father who is losing touch with his daughter, a cold-hearted mercenary who is a good person on the inside, the jokester. These are your run of the mill character tropes, but the game makes good use of them and it’s interesting enough to keep your attention until the end of the game.
Press X Not to Die
So, the developers compared the game to Heavy Rain, gamers compared it and now that I’ve played it, I can actually say to what extent it’s Heavy Rainish. It’s the diet version, for better or worse.
The gameplay comes in four flavors: intense action scene where you have to succeed in a number of quick time events or die; puzzle sections where you can take your time in the vein of typical point-and-click adventure games; under-pressure puzzle sections where you have to think fast or die; conversation sections where you just talk to someone and advance the plot.
I found the sequences the game demanded I execute quite harder than anything in Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain. I don’t think I died once on my playthrough with Heavy Rain, but it happened far more often in Jurassic Park. The thing is, Telltale was obviously inspired by Heavy Rain, but it’s a really basic version of the original gameplay. Now, if you’ve played Heavy Rain, you are probably scratching your head now, asking how something can be more basic than that? While I wasn’t amazed by Cage’s attempt at making a mature, cinematic game, his work had one thing going for it: it branched out. You fail somewhere? It could lead the story in quite the interesting direction, sometimes even more interesting than had you perfectly executed previous challenges. Failing a sequence rarely meant instant death, but it could lead to a dramatic setback which would invigorate you to try harder next time. It felt like it mattered what you did.
Jurassic Park, while indeed performing on a vastly tighter budget than Quantic Dream’s title, doesn’t really seem like it took the best parts of its inspiration. The story has a specific direction it wishes to follow and it will stick with it. There was this one scene where my mercenary was attacked by a dino. He dropped his rifle due to me missing a button press, but since everything else went smoothly, he survived long enough for his buddy to save him. This might have had an impact on me, as a player, to give me a glimpse into the mercs’ friendship I would have otherwise missed, but as far as having an impact on the story? No. The only thing that was relevant was that you lived long enough.
Actually, that’s not completely true. There was this one scene that would be easier, depending on whether all three of your characters managed to grab a certain object in the previous scene. But that’s about it.
As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of moments that are “do or die”. The problem is that death is highly trivial. I’m not sure whether Telltale themselves made a big deal out of it, or it was just the media, or maybe even me somewhere in the back of my 
mind, but this is the first Telltale game where your character can die. And I do not believe it is handled well. It’s highly trivialized, as if you die, you get a “you died” splash screen that prompts you to click to retry from the last save point (usually a few button sequences away), as well as holding a death count in the corner for some reason. Perhaps the only motivation not to die is if you want a shiny medal, as death lowers your rank (as does missing some highly trivial button presses). If you’ve read my Vintage Gaming article on Heart of Darkness, you’d know your game doesn’t need to contain blood and gore to be brutal. Jurassic Park tries this to an extent. I don’t think there’s any doubt that getting eaten by a T-Rex is brutal, but there are enough discretion shots to make the thus far unimpactful deaths become even more meaningless.
But wait! There are puzzles as well! Well, they’re not particularly challenging. Considering how godawful I am at adventure game puzzles, anything that doesn’t make me overthink my next move, I consider easy. And really, for most part, the puzzle animations take longer than actually getting to a solution. Often, it just relies on searching every screen for a clue and then your character will come to a proper deduction: “Oh, this object will probably help me solve my current predicament.” I’m not sure whether the game actually solves most things for you, or it just doesn’t want to trouble you with highly trivial details. For example, when I had to open a certain feeding tank and found out which one was full, my character automatically selected it via the terminal, instead of me having to browse and remember or write down various numbers and labels. In some ways I appreciate that, but on the other hand, it does lessen the interaction between me and the game.
To Rend, or to Render?
This is the part where we rant on indie games for having sub-par graphics. Jurassic Park is not a pretty game by a long 
shot. It looks like a Playstation 2 game, and while I don’t want to be as shallow as to complain about visuals, more and more indies are coming out with either splendid graphics or amazing use of aesthetics. So yes, Jurassic Park is quite ugly to see whenever a human or flora is in the scene, which is almost always. However, most of the dinosaurs look quite decent, so it’s an odd mix, really.
The animation work is quite rough. It shined at rare moments, but for most part, it felt quite unnatural. There was this one scene where three characters are walking through a very long corridor and the shot is from their front. I swear, whenever they made a turn, it felt like the whole room was spinning. It could get that bad.
Conclusion
You know how many people said that if Heavy Rain were a movie, it would be an abysmal one? Well, at least Jurassic Park: the Game would be an alright one.
And this is probably where we come to the key argument of how games shouldn’t be like movies, how quick time events are evil, how such gameplay is bad, how casuals are messing up our vibes and so on and so forth. To be perfectly honest, I don’t mind this sequence-based gameplay. I don’t find it particularly special, but I’ve played JRPGs with less interaction and I’ve had fun with them. I didn’t find Jurassic Park particularly engaging gameplay-wise though, and I think that it kind of missed the point of why Heavy Rain worked as being “Quick Time Event: the Game”. Playing Jurassic Park felt like casually driving a bicycle with the odd spark here and there. For most part, you’d have this indifferent attitude, but then a spark would jump from your bike and you’d be all “Oh my God! Did you see that!?” for a moment until your giddiness would leave you. There were a few moments like this for me, but for most part, I felt like I was playing just to see the conclusion, not because I cared. Like watching a mediocre movie half-way through and then just sitting there since you want to see the ending at least.
It’s not a game for everyone. The gameplay is definitely not for everyone. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not a good game either. It’s just an “interactive experience”. You know how many people said that if Heavy Rain was a movie, it would be an abysmal one? Well, at least Jurassic Park: the Game would be an alright one. That’s gotta count for something?
Score: 5.5/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
