Xbox Live Arcade Review: Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Episode 1

Telltale Games is venturing deeper into the world of console game publishing with their latest release of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees. Once again Telltale has brought home a humorously playful gaming experience, as they did with their Strong Bad and Sam & Max series. Fright of the Bumblebees takes advantage of the original Claymation style of Wallace & Gromit, while not leaving out any of the inappropriately fun British humor. However, the game suffers from frequent frame rate issues and clunky animation that unavoidably takes away from your gaming experience.

Fright of the Bumblebees is Telltale’s first release on the Xbox Live Arcade. Much like Sam & Max or Strong Bad, the gameplay involves several puzzles where you acquire objects from your environment and piece them together with other objects or characters in the world. The point and click style of gameplay, adapted from its PC predecessor, uses the right and left thumbsticks on the Xbox for movement as well as object selection. You’ll quickly notice that the object selection with the right thumbstick is often buggy and will never quite land on the object you’re aiming for. However, you can use the right and left bumpers, which will quickly give you more precision in gaming. I actually found the Wii translation of Strong Bad and Sam & Max to be much more fluid, simply because the Wii interface is more inline with the PC mouse interaction.

Episode 1 begins with a quick tutorial puzzle you’ll have to work through. Gromit has to wake his master Wallace up and make him breakfast. If you’re unfamiliar with the relationship between the two, this initial puzzle will also introduce you to the characters of Wallace & Gromit. Wallace is the bumbling inventor, who has great ideas that tend to work in theory, but the ideas fail to execute the way he planned. Gromit, the dog, is Wallace’s faithful companion, who always seems to get the short end of the stick when it comes to helping his master. As the game’s title infers, this adventure is all about bees. When Wallace gets a call for a large order of honey, he will have to find away to accommodate an almost impossible order. Unfortunately, each time he figures out a way to solve one problem, he only gets himself into a larger problem. Before you know it, the Bees have taken over and it’s up to you to find a way to stop them.

The game is about five hours worth of gameplay, and involves only a few locations. There are only a few locations you’ll have to deal with so solving the puzzles won’t be too difficult. However, if you do get stumped, there is a Hints section that allows you to work your way through them. I decided to not use the Hints section while gaming, which may have been to my disadvantage. Although the jokes are plentiful, the style of gameplay can get tedious. For instance, there is a puzzle where you will have to try and free your cheese smelling machine, the Sniffer 3000, from prison. Each time you engage the puzzle you will have to enter into a long dialogue sequence with a police office. The problem is you can never skip through this sequence in case you made a wrong decision.

The VO (voice over) in Wallace & Gromit is excellent, and really brings the subtle British humor alive. I could have done with one less cheese joke, but it was all in good fun. Sam & Max on the Wii seemed to have a larger repository of verbal snaps between characters. You could go up to the same Slushy store owner and get about ten different responses on the same interaction. Wallace & Gromit will only give you about three different responses at the most. This would have at least made the puzzles more entertaining.

Visually, Wallace & Gromit is a pleasure to play through. The only problem is the frequent frame rate issues that cause characters and background objects to jump around. The fun story and humorous antics still make Wallace & Gromit a fun game to play. Hopefully, the controls will be updated with the next episode release on Xbox Live Arcade.