Steve Purcell's Sam & Max: Freelance Police franchise has taken
many forms: first as an independent comic series, then as a LucasArts
adventure game, and then as a Saturday morning cartoon show. When
LucasArts announced the cancellation of the second Sam & Max
adventure game in 2003, the myriad fans of the series despaired,
fearing we had seen the last of Sam & Max.
Enter Telltale Games with a new creative team, a new format (episodic
content), and new depth for the series... literally, since this new
game was to be in 3-D. As a fan of the original game (Sam & Max Hit
the Road), my expectations for the game were high, perhaps higher than
was reasonable - however, I also expected somewhat to be disappointed.
I expected the game to be funny, first and foremost, with not only the
zany, implausible logic puzzles comic adventure games of the genre are
prone to (see: Monkey Island), but verbal humor ranging from the base
and tawdry to the pseudophilosophical and witty. I expected the puzzles
to be challenging, but the logic to be coherent. I expected that, at
least, the characters of Sam and Max would be interesting.
I got way more than I ever could have hoped for.
If your favorite character from Friends was Chandler, or your favorite
Python was Eric Idle, this game has got a vault filled to bursting's
worth of humor for you. The dialogue is always interesting, and you'll
never want to just look for the most efficient way through a
conversation - the game makes you want to explore every single
conversation option, every single time. Not only are Sam and Max
interesting, but the recurring characters are funny and have a certain
amount of depth... you won't grow tired of seeing them.
Many adventure games can absolutely fall apart because of their
puzzles, either by making them too easy or too hard. If you are bound
and determined to finish the game without a walkthrough, expect to have
about one point of frustration per episode (Out of the six episodes, I
completed one without help), but even in these instances, the logic is
sound and coherent, and you don't feel cheated when you figure out the
solution.
If there is one complaint about this game, it is that it is too short.
Each episode provides about 1.5-2.5 hours of gameplay, and this series
cries out for a complete 20 hour experience. The silver lining around
this cloud is that Season 2 is ready to begin this fall - still, had
there been more content, this game would easily have earned a perfect
score in my book. This genre is not for everyone, and hasn't seen a
worthy comic entry since 2000, maybe even 1997, but this game is easily
the most recommendable game the series has ever seen.
