Wallace and Gromit: Fright of the Bumblebees

Anyone paying attention will notice I'm playing absolutely every game I can get my hands on at the moment in order to stave off depression. It hasn't been a roaring success- until now.

WaG: FOTB is an adventure game from Telltale, the geniuses who gave us the new Sam & Max Games. In it, Wallace and Gromit have built a new thing and it's causing problems.

I'd describe the plot further but every time I've tried, I've either spoiled things or i've inadvertently spoiled things so I'm not going to. Just trust me that it's a very good W&G plot that could fit nicely into the canon if Nick Park deems it to be so.

The graphics are also very nice - it looks and feels very similar to Sam & Max but they've made the surroundings, characters etc. LOOK like clay, which is pretty remarkable for a computer game. Characters have authentic hand moulded scratches and fingerprints on them, everything has that stylised look caused by being fashioned out of putty...

I wouldn't say that you feel like you're actually moving little clay people around your screen but it comes nicely close.


So what else? There is quite a nice level of humour - it's not as funny as Sam & Max but it's not trying to be. The puzzles are very much in the telltale mould - IE intuitive and well thought out. You're never trying to work out what you should be doing, just how to do it.

This is partly down to Telltale's excellent hint system which makes a welcome return and partly because you are given a little plot summary and objectives list in the menu screen. That's a nice touch and I'm quite surprised no-one's tried it before.

It's also quite a long game, by episodic adventure standards. It also doesn't fall into the:

Single Objective,
Three pronged Objective,
Single Objective,
Coda,
END

Structure that many Sam & Max games used to. It comes perilously close at one point but then swerves and goes off at a new tangent.

So what's wrong with it?

Not much, to be honest. The voice acting is... okay. They got the stand ins for guys who voiced the cartoons, so at first the voice acting will feel very slightly wrong. As is the way with these things, though, this feeling vanishes as you go through the game.

That's the only criticism I've got, thinking about it...

So yes, it's very good value (£20 gets you all four episodes in the series) and it's all we're likely to get as far as decent adventure games go for a while...

Get it.