Wallace & Gromit - The Last Resort

The second Wallace & Gromit adventure flopped onto the tubes a couple of weeks ago and I finally gathered the wherewithal to play it. I wasn't exactly enthralled by episode 1. Episode 2 is... better. It's still not really that good though.

This time around, things proceed in a much more game friendly format for the plasticine canine and buffoon. There are three separate acts and a coda, all with separate objectives and tones to them. Episode 1 did have this but the acts were all fairly tenuously linked - I got the impression that I was playing a day in the life of Wallace & Gromit which made the plot fairly hard to swallow.

Here, you have an act where you set up a hotel, an act where you run it and an act where you deal with a situation that has arisen due to the antagonists.

That's right, there are actual antagonists this time around. This is extremely fecking welcome as, bar a squirrel and a giant bee at the end, there were no malicious forces in episode 1, which made the whole thing seem a little too twee.

So. Episode 2 is better. Did I like it?

Well. Sort of.

I don't resent the time I spent playing it but I never really laughed out loud or found myself making real leaps of intuitive logic. The puzzles & game mechanics are a little too simple - meaning that the puzzles are either easy or obscure. Neither of those make for very interesting puzzles. And, unlike Sam & Max, the game doesn't really have humour to fall back on when the puzzles fail.

So, all in all, not as funny as Sam & Max, not as clever as Sam & Max, not as good as Sam & Max.

I am being a little harsh, perhaps. With the exception of the Ace Attorney games, the Sam & Max episodes are the only decent adventure games to appear on our screens for some considerable time. The Wallace & Gromit adventures are certainly far superior to the Strong Bad ones and A Vampire Story.