Jurassic Park The Game

This game is by no stretch of the word great. It's clear it was made on a budget as the graphics and animations will point out. However, it's heart is in the right place. If you ever loved Jurassic Park as a kid and want to experience a taste of that magic this is a good buy. I went into this game knowing it was budget and an adventure game to boot and while I find the extensive use of quick time events to be a bit excessive the action scenes and story make up for it. Not to mention you get to explore new parts of the park never before seen in the movies. This game is more like an interactive movie with moments of the point and click adventure games of old. Jurassic Park is not a game for everyone and those unfamiliar with the a fore mentioned adventure games of the 1990's will probably not get into it finding it to archaic in game play terms to be satisfied. People familiar with more modern approaches to this genre such as heavy rain will be in their element as it shares the same genre with out the quality of time and a budget to make it truly great. Here's a quick list for easy dissection of this review.

Pro's:
- Great story and voice acting
- A retro style game for re-living those childhood memories
- Explore new parts of the park like the marine life facility
- Dinosaur animations and sound effects are great
- The investigative sections where you explore the environment are a lot of fun

Con's:
- Dialogue can be stereotypical at times
- Animation (Specifically the human characters) and Graphics in general are below today's standards by far
- A lot of quick time events

Overall I give it prop's for simply being done well with what budget they had and it's clear by their efforts that they loved the source material and did their best to make an adventure worthy of the fan's love. Take it for what it is and what could of never been instead of what it isn't.

STORY: 8 / 10
GAMEPLAY: 3/10
BUGGY: VERY (Especially near the end)
REPLAY VALUE: 1/10
OVERALL: 2/10

Quick Opinion: Worth it to the fans out there, but could be real boring for most gamers out there. On the flipside, a creative way to tell a story...just needed a couple more months of development time.

Full Opinion:

First off, this is a different kind of game. If you're looking for a change from the norm, this might be right up your way. It is a cool way to immerse the player into a story, but I don't think it was too well executed.

It would be good to know that I play a variety of games, thus am open-minded to new types of game play. I took this one as a challenge and stepped up to it because it was quite different from the other games I frequently play (Modern Warfare, L.A. Noire, Starcraft, etc.).

This game opens up a great deal of story that took place on the island post movie. For Jurassic Park fans this is worth sitting through. You get to see some different parts of the island, get to know the history of the island, and I mean...there hasn't been a big JP release in a while.

Action in the game comes in waves. I felt like I was doing a lot of sitting around but when the button mashing scenes came up they would prove to be a challenge here and there. One of the reviews on IGN was spot on in pointing out that the death scenes are quite hilarious (not to sound morbid or anything).

What gets this game 2 stars is the fact that it should have had a bit more work done to it.

I ran into a situation where I got to Episode 3 and wanted to go back through some scenarios in Episode 1&2 for achievements. This broke my story progression so when I tried to resume the story where I left off, it wouldn't progress. I had to repeat the entire two first episodes of the game to pick up the story again. I searched this on their site and it was apparently a feature...high-five.

The animations and character actions were also sometimes graphically awkward or just plain buggy. I played this on 360 and when I sit down to play a 360 game, I expect it to be polished. Some situations where you are required to press a button in a timely manner didn't work due to the game being 'choppy' in sections and it would throw of timing on my button mashing. This got extremely noticeable near the end of the game even to the point where character speech was stuttering and repeating.

In my personal opinion, the game is great for fans of the JP franchise, but I wouldn't recommend it for any other reason. Replay-ability is zero on this game. Whence you beat it, you've gone and done it all. It was a easy 1000 MS Gamerscore though.

I was pretty disappointed when I started playing this game. Throughout the ENTIRE game, all you did was follow what the screen told you too do (ie: push "X"so many times, twirl the joystick 3 times). Pretty lame is you ask me. I was expecting this game to be like Halo where you controlled the characters and hunted the dinosaurs. Not even close.... Don't waste your money, unless you like to watch a lot of videos instead of playing.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 35 reviews  3.1 out of 5 stars