Jurassic Park: The Game

Guest review by: Jack "HarlockJC" Campbell

In 1993 Steven Spielberg brought life to the legendary book by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park. Due to the success of the movie, there have been many sequels to the movie as well as a number of video games. Jurassic Park the game takes place during the first movie. The game adds more details to the story behind Dennis Nedry. For those who don't remember, Dennis Nedry was the fat nerdy guy played by Wayne Knight. Nedry's goal during the movie was to steal the dinosaur embryos and sell them for $1.5 million. As it turns out, Nedry's plan A was to get the embryos and when you start the game you're playing as plan B.

The story line for Jurassic Park: The Game was a full cinematic game with solid cut-scenes that makes the player immersed throughout the game. If you loved the first movie and would like to revisit it, then Jurassic Park is the game for you. The story line draws you in and leaves you wanting more. Telltale does a great job explaining some of the holes in the original movie.  Each character provides a deep background and develops as the story goes on. As a player it's hard not to let your emotions get draw in as each character in the game goes though their ups and downs. This is where the game really succeeds.  

The gameplay, on the other hand was a letdown. The puzzles in the game were simple due to the lack of an inventory system.  I did not quite understand Telltale's reasoning for this. The game felt like it was made as an entry level point and click game. However most the fans of Jurassic Park are going to be in at least their 20's by now. So, as a gamer you find yourself longing for more complex puzzles. Most the puzzles were going though many different screens trying to find the right item to compete the puzzle.   Most of the time once you found the right item the puzzle completed itself. As you get to the end of the game the puzzles become even less of a challenge when the answer to the puzzle becomes more of percentage based rather than require much thought. An example of this can be seen when the player is trying to find his way to the Marine Center at the end of the game rather than being a challenge it came down more to picking right or left. If you pick the wrong choice then the player just tries again. This is an example of many puzzles to follow. While watching the credits for the game I did notice that another person wrote the fourth episode than the other three. I am not sure if this had anything to do with the lack of a real challenge or not.

There were times in the game where I was playing Dragon Lair; the screen would prompt you to press arrows at certain times. If you missed too many arrows or missed an arrow at the wrong time then you got eaten by a dinosaur.  With the cut scenes of a player getting eating by the dinosaur were entertaining at first.  After dying five times in a row due to missing the same dang arrow, I found myself longing for a way to shorten the cut scenes. The arrow system becomes a pain when a player has to click on an arrow for every step he makes. It does work for the game at times drawing you into climatic moments of the game.

There were some bugs in the game. Twice during the game I could not see my mouse cursor in the game. I found myself having to guess where to click on the screen. There was another point where I was talking to another person in the game and the chat would not close. I ended up having to press each key until the screen closed. With the cheap price of $29.99, with the exception of the errors with the game and the lacking gameplay, if you love Jurassic Park like I do then the game is still worth playing. If you don't really care for Jurassic Park and want to play a challenging point and click then I would recommend passing on this game.