If you’ve never heard of Sam & Max, you’ve missed out on one of the craziest dynamic duos there is. Working as “freelance police”, cartoon dog Sam and his decidedly weird bunny sidekick Max live in a world devoid of logic, plausibility and responsibility, yet it all comes together in razor-sharp satire that works beautifully once you’ve let go of all common sense.
The game is structured like an old-school adventure along the lines of Space Quest, Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion and others, where you point-and-click your character around to interact with objects, talk to people and so on. It should take a complete novice about 20 seconds to get the hang of the controls, less for someone who has actually played a game since the Atari 2600 days.
What do you mean, episode 3?
After several failed attempts to create a sequel to the famous Sam & Max Hit the Road from 1993, fans finally got their wish in 2006. However, rather than work for years and release a big game for $40-50, the game is released in shorter episodes every couple months for $8.95 each (free for GameTap subscribers). While this is the third episode, you don’t have to have completed the previous episodes for the game to be fun and fully playable.
The mission in this episode is to crack the infamous Toy Mafia and rescue an undercover mole before he’s discovered and executed. Naturally, the path to achieving this goal involves recovering a stolen meatball sandwich from 1957, shooting rats (as in, the snitching kind) with a handgun large enough to qualify as a cannon, acquire a talking cockroach and many other quests that makes perfect sense in Sam & Max’s world.
There is a ton of laugh-out-loud material compressed into the 1-2 hours this game lasts. That is, assuming you appreciate this kind of humor. The jokes keep veering between edgy and goofball, dark satire and slapstick. Sam and especially Max are clinically psychotic and are not above extreme violence, so if that offends you this is probably not the game for you. If you see the joke, however, you’re in for a knee-slapping good time.
What make the game really work are the one-liners, quirky characters and the unreal conversations. Bosco, the inconvenience store owner (not a typo,) has adopted a French identity for the episode to avoid mob hit men. Job-hopping neighbor Sybil has taken up a career as a professional trial witness. The Toy Mafia all wear gigantic bear masks, yet try oh so hard to conjure up the imposing image of 1930s gangsters. Naturally, this sets the stage for some great dialogue, and the game delivers on every count.
Every scene is littered with clickable objects, all of which prompts additional hilarious comments by the main characters. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all there is to the game, which brings us to the other side of the coin…
The bad
This episode is extremely short and extremely easy. I could write a complete walkthrough of the game in a single paragraph, but who’d need a walkthrough for something this unchallenging? Even if you make it a point to click EVERY object and explore EVERY conversation in full, you will still complete this game in less than two hours.
Furthermore, the difficulty is stuck somewhere between “super easy” and “no brain required” so the puzzles are merely there as segues for the storyline to move along. The biggest problem is that while there are tons of objects to look at and joke about, there are very few objects that have anything to do with the actual gameplay. It doesn’t help that the entire game is essentially confined to a grand total of six rooms.
It’s like a machine with only a handful moving parts – it doesn’t take much effort to figure out that the one round peg goes into the one round hole, and the one square goes into the one square hole.
The graphics are cartoonish but highly detailed and nicely rendered. The rooms are fully three-dimensional rather than static pictures with animated characters moving on top of them. While the camera moves as you move Max around, you have neither direct control of it nor any option to zoom in. It’s too bad, since it’d be nice to get a closer look at some of the details.
The voice acting is great, although a tad repetitive at times such as when playing poker with Leonard Steakcharmer or getting information out the Mafia goons. Sam’s enormous revolver makes a lot less noise than you’d expect, but sound effects really play a minor role in a game like this – it’s all about the voice acting, and they got that one down pat.
As mentioned earlier, the user interface is so simple you could teach a hamster to use it. The only button there is brings up the inventory, and it’s of the “pile o’stuff in a sack” variety. You don’t even have a limited amount of ammunition for Sam’s gun. Just click on everything you see and you’re golden.
For a game you can easily complete in less than an hour and probably won’t play again for a long time, should you really spend almost ten bucks on it? It depends on what you’re looking for. If you like the comic and view these episodes as more of interactive extensions of the original comic, I’d say go for it. You’ll get enough laughs and guffaws here to justify the price tag and then some.
Personally, I liked the comic and I liked the game, but I couldn’t help feel a bit disappointed about the lack of beef. I don’t expect Myst, but couldn’t they throw in at least a couple puzzles that take more than 30 seconds to figure out? Or at least expand on the in-game options, so you can interact more with the environment and perhaps try a few different approaches to the quests?
Hopefully TellTale will kick it up a notch with episode four, but this one gets “recommended, but with reservations” as the final verdict.
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