Jurassic Park Review

If you're like me, you want the Jurassic Park game to be great. Just about everyone describes the original film as a classic, so developer Telltale Games picking up the franchise and creating a four-episode adventure game -- the genre Telltale specializes in -- sounds like a recipe for success. In the end, however, it isn't. Jurassic Park is a meandering tale of forgettable characters getting lost in a park that is far less wondrous than the one we saw on the silver screen.

The events here bookend the original movie. When Nedry -- Newman from Seinfeld -- doesn't show up with the Barbasol can packed with dino-embryos, his employers send in a female mercenary to retrieve the package. Along the way, she runs into a dino-doctor and his daughter, and when they don't make it out, a rescue team moves in. All the while, a T-rex, some raptors and a number of mysterious nocturnal dinosaurs are out to make life on Isla Nublar a living hell for humans.

Navigating through this madness breaks away from Telltale's traditional adventure mechanics. Whereas you moved one character and tried to use objects to solve puzzles in Back to the Future, Jurassic Park has you in control of every character I just mentioned while not using an inventory at all. Who you control depends on what needs to happen in the game. Likewise, moving the plot forward depends on moving the camera to examine areas of the environment. It might sound intriguing, but it's really disorienting and not that much fun to play.

Besides the times when I didn't notice I had switched perspectives and was now controlling someone else in the room, I didn't like not knowing these characters on a deeper level. Telltale games -- and adventure games in general -- are about getting wrapped up in a story and making choices as that person. Jumping between characters means motivations get cloudy and no one is fleshed out beyond a standard stereotype. There's a bad girl, a badass mercenary, a wise-cracking soldier and so on. In the end, I didn't care who I was in control of because it didn't matter. The plot was going to move in the same direction regardless of who uttered what.

Coupled with the flat story is the ho-hum gameplay. When you're just standing in an environment, you'll see magnifying glasses on the screen and need to press the corresponding button to check out the clue. Investigate until you find the right one, and the tale moves on. Quick time events make up the other part of your time in Jurassic Park. A dinosaur will pop out, and you'll have to hit a series of buttons in order to get to safety. Miss one, and you're usually attacked and killed in a death animation that's stiff and unsatisfying. Then, the onscreen medal drops from gold to silver and you try again.

This whole setup feels like a really poorly placed movie rather than a video game. As players, our inputs just move us to the next scene. No puzzle pushed me to scratch my head and really think. Without objects to find and interact with, I just kept clicking, and the game kept going.


Without a compelling story or interesting gameplay, the little things that usually make Telltale titles rough around the edges stick out even more. Stiff animations for characters kept me from feeling immersed, basic graphics don't dazzle, and a bunch of tech problems -- choppy framerate, the sound dropping out, etc. -- hold the PS3 back.

On top of that, this just doesn't feel like Jurassic Park. Remember the T-rex a Jeep could barely outrun? A little girl can outrun it. Remember the Raptors that could slice your belly open with one claw? They can be engaged in one-on-one knife combat and lose. The threat and immediacy of the dinosaurs is severely neutered by the pacing of this adventure game.

• More PlayStation 3 Reviews
• Latest PlayStation 3 News, Reviews, and Videos