Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures: Fright of the Bumblebees Review

Telltale Games is releasing their newest episodic game series in the form of Wallace and Gromit. Most people have seen the shorts and possibly the movie, but how does Wallace and Gromit transfer to the gaming universe? Decently well, though small issues here and there can become frustrating.

Fright of the Bumblebees is the first of four episodic games. Wallace is moving into the honey business, and with the help of Gromit works to correct a slight that the inventor performs against grocery store owner, Mr. Paneer, before the beginning of the game. From there, the player follows a fairly linear storyline playing both as Wallace, who creates problems and Gromit, who spends his time correcting them.

Playing through the game is like watching the series in motion, only the player controls the speed of the action. The animations and voices appear like they were pulled directly from the series itself, but new lines were recorded for this game. Trademark animations, like Wallace’s shaking his hands, and Gromit’s eyebrow raise are in the game and it makes the reality more believable.

The system requirements for the game are:

Operating system: Windows XP / Vista
Processor: 2.0 GHz or better (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended)
Memory: 512MB (1GB recommended)
Hard disk space: 310MB
Video: 64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB recommended)
Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound device
DirectX: Version 9.0c or better

While a 2.0 GHz processor isn’t uncommon at all, my personal setup is a few years old.

Operating system: Windows XP Service Pack 2
Processor: Pentium M 1.73 GHz
Memory: 1.5 GB RAM
Video: 256 MB GeForce Go 6800

Even with these specs, the game ran fairly smooth. The graphics options are based on a number slider, turning down the graphics down to 6 proved the most stable. It’s not hard to imagine the game playing smooth on just the recommended system requirements. There were small pop-ins of the background, but the framerates remained solid. Loading from area to area only took about three seconds on first load, and became seamless as I reentered areas of the game.

There are only two real environments that the player will experience, Wallace’s house and West Wallaby St. But there is a lot of real estate in these environments. Wallace’s house is a spot on recreation shown in the shorts.

Players will finish this first episode in the three to four hour range on the first playthrough. While the story runs briskly, there are a lot of puzzles to solve and numerous character interactions. The player can talk to the same NPC about three times before they start repeating lines.

The main issue with the game is that the puzzles, while related to the story, are uneven. Some of the puzzles make perfect sense at that specific time in the story while others are unexplained of how they should matter; rather they are only necessary because they trigger a storyline point. Another problem is that there are no hints about what players should always be doing. Some puzzles are a matter of trial and error, but there was a large majority of error before success.

Fright of the Bumblebees is a point and click game, and almost everything in scenes can be clicked on and have some interaction, but during a couple puzzles, I didn’t know I should click on certain things. It was through mindless clicking that an object triggered a reaction. This broke the immersion of the game, spending twenty minutes looking for an item that was only mentioned, but never given a location became frustrating.

If this first Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures episode is any indication of what the rest of the series will contain, then I highly recommend it. There is a bit of a stiff learning curve, but after playing through Fright of the Bumblebees, I’m looking forward to the next three episodes. I just hope that the later episodes will be a little more explanatory than just a surface illustration. Also look for Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures to be released on Xbox 360.