Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures: The Last Resort Review

When I first started Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures: Fright of the Bumblebees, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Though after playing through the game, I found that Telltale Games understood the license that they acquired and continued the humor and quality that the shorts and movies had. With the second episode, The Last Resort, Telltale Games improves on the quality of the first episode while changing the theme from a point-and-click adventure, to a mystery solving quest.

While Fright of the Bumblees was a bit more straightforward in the puzzle solving aspects of the title, The Last Resort makes further use of the environment to solve the puzzles in game. At the end of Fright of the Bumblebees, Wallace and Gromit plan on going on holiday to the beach, which is quickly ended due to unfavorable weather. Wallace then has the idea to open an indoor beach side resort in their basement, which has flooded because of all the rain. This begins the adventure for the pair.

One small gripe with the first episode was the amount of travel between areas. Going from Wallace and Gromit’s house to West Wallaby Street became a little repetitive and took away from the otherwise streamlined nature of the story. With The Last Resort, most of the action takes place inside Wallace and Gromit’s house, centering the story and action.

Gameplay is easier to recognize after completing the first episode, the learning curve is almost non-existent. The puzzles are more familiar to complete and finishing this episode should only take around two to three hours, depending on how the player works through all the scenarios.

The puzzles are easier to understand, but are more complex than the first episode. There aren’t any puzzles that are completely random, such as the squirrel-bee puzzle in Fright of the Bumblebees, and the multi-layered puzzles are more complete. The requirement of talking to all the secondary characters makes sense in this episode, as they all have something related to the puzzles to share.

Wallace: Idiot Savant?

As opposed to Fright of the Bumblees, I only got stuck on one last part of one puzzle, and once I solved it, I realized I didn’t explore the environments enough. As the second episode, The Last Resort has solved about 99% of the issues I had with the first episode, so I’m looking forward to the next installment.

There isn’t any change with the graphics, sound, or control scheme, obvious since The Last Resort is part of a series. I played this episode on a different computer than the first episode, but I saw that this episode ran smoother than the first, though my setup had a little problem with groups of characters in one room. Though that’s not a problem with the game, rather my faulty computing rig.

The computer I used for this review, while the processing power was stronger (Core 2 Duo), the fact I had a discrete graphics card for the first episode probably played a big part in gameplay. Either way, most players should not have an issue running the game.

Gromit: Gold Standard in Problem-Solving Techniques

The best part of the second episode is the mystery storyline. Once the player finished the setup of the indoor resort, the theme changes and the storyline, while still linear, takes a different direction than the first episode. With all the secondary characters playing a large role in the story, it creates more three-dimensionality to these characters.

Speaking to them reveals more of their personalities and how they relate to Wallace or Gromit. I especially enjoy how Gromit, while obviously smarter than Wallace, is still treated like a plain dog by everyone except Wallace, himself.

Telltale Games has created a more complex and complete story for the second episode. Taking Wallace and Gromit out of their invention-based problems created a more diverse story that included more than just the duo. If the first episode is considered the tutorial for the series, then I would wholeheartedly agree that The Last Resort is the first true episode of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures.