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Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movie franchises, even with the third movie being of a lesser quality than the first two.  The first movie was one of the most breathtaking experiences of my childhood; being someone who was obsessed with special effects from a young age, Jurassic Park was seriously awesome. I was especially excited for it since a neighbor of mine had introduced me to the book a little bit before the movie was announced, so the experience of seeing it was a big moment for me.
 
Playing Jurassic Park: The Game brought back no such memories or good feelings for me. The game has it’s good points, but by and large it just isn’t fun. There’s too much focus on things that are not fun, and too little focus on the actual exciting moments. And the repetition…GOD, the repetition.
 
I can see what Telltale tried to do; they tried to offer an alternate experience to the Jurassic Park mystique. In that, they succeeded…to a degree. I feel that storywise, there’s a relatively fun experience to be had. But what about the whole package?
 
Overall, the game looks pretty good. Environments look great and there’s a good sense of atmosphere. The island feels wet, dark, and dank when it needs to, and during sequences when the sun is out, there’s a lovely glow of sunlight that bathes everything in a nice orange glow. It looks like you’re on an actual island.
 
However, upon closer inspection, not everything looks that great. Water looks like a flat texture plane, and the overall look of the vegetation just isn’t as…LUSH as it could be. During fast-paced sequences, there’s not much time to stare at or time to notice anything. But once the action dies down a bit and you have some time to look around, you’ll notice that lots of things look like Xbox 1 quality. I understand that this game isn’t meant to resemble Skyrim quality graphics, but i still found the overall effect to be somewhat distracting.
 
The character models are pretty decent. They look a little cartoony, but not as intentionally so as in Back to the Future (which is a far superior game, IMHO). The lip synching can be a little off at times, which is pretty distracting when you consider that the game employs many close-up shots of the faces while characters are talking. The best way I can describe the characters is between what we saw in BTTF, and something like Alan Wake. They look pretty realistic, but there are some exaggerations here and there that leans into the cartoonish.
 
Gameplay is initially fun, but it outstays its welcome very quickly. It’s basically a game packed to the brim with quick timed events. On more than one occasion I would be asked to do something, think to myself “huh, that’s clever,” but then it asks me to repeat that some thing over and over…often in the same scene. The events usually pop up pretty quickly as well, and often it is hard to discern when a cutscene ends and a QTE begins. I found myself in more than one situation where a QTE suddenly popped up while I was enjoying a cinematic, and I immediately died. To be fair, however, that’s not really a big problem as once you know to expect it, you’ll know what to do.

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