Now that I am back from Christmas break, it's time to start the new years off by preparing for the new year: a brand-new audio chair, a gaming mouse, a few steam sale games, a future home to look forward to, and...The Sims 4. Whelp, time to review that later. As for now, there's a review that I have been putting off for quite sometime and that's how everything telltale has ever made.
First off, the story is a mixed bag within the telltale line up. While the games the company made where good, especially The Wolf Among us, the company should at least focus on one game at a time. However, the is biggest weakness of Telltale is that they try to multi-task. While it's good for normal games, episodic games tend to be rushed since they used the same system since Tales of Monkey Island in the last generation.
Fans and critics noticed this while season two of The Walking Dead, while it wasn't awful, it suffered from bad writing as most of the team was busy with The Wolf Among Us. When they pushed the finally of The Fables game, the ending didn't really have an impact because the focus was switched to The Walking Dead season two. While the story did get better in Season two, it didn't step up as much as the first. There was a similar issue with King of Thrones and Tales of Borderlands, as production where split-up there as well.
Since the company been using the same system, that means the animations are dated and stiff. While it's not as bland as Ubi-soft's Assassin's Creed series, telltale haven't updated their system since the Devil's Playhouse, the third season of the Sam and Max telltale game series. Of late, The Odd Gentlemen has stole the spotlight with their King's Quest reboot, as their animation is much more fluid than that of telltale's past and a few of their current games. Now would be the best time to use the spare time to update their systems, but knowing that the company is now working on a Batman licensed game, they probably wont have the time as they're finishing the mine-craft story series.
The biggest problem however is that the choices in their games of late have no real bearings or changes nothing big in the end. While adventure titles often have multiple endings, or in this case, have choices that impact the rest of the game, the choices in games didn't matter. For example, in the walking dead season one, the player has a choice to save one character or the other, knowing the character will help out down the line though different outcomes. However, that part of the story can easily be forgotten and has no real impact within the story and the characters are often killed off later within the series; so no matter what one dose, both the characters are boned and can never really be saved! This hurts replay value and makes the choices lob-sided as it really doesn't matter as life goes normally as nothing changes and everything stays the same.
Now how would they fix it? Get a new system while making future games. Tempt the companies involved to update to a new system because they would make a profit. To be perfectly honest, why did they remove the original point-and-click for the PC version? It was for the counsel ports of the games, yes, but most people prefer that timeless mechanic of the classic Point-and-click controls on our PCs. Even the remaster of Grim Fandango has that benefit of the new interface that still have the point-and-click system while still having the controller support that is not too intrusive. This reboot is a good example of good mixed controls.
While telltale in the past have developed good games in their resume of games, telltale games do need to step it up in the current age of adventure games. While not all their games are terrible, past games like Jurassic Park is an examples of how telltale games could fail in today's market. Their latest game with Tales of the borderlands has to be their recent decent game, so take a look into that game. Have a Happy New Year!
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