Sam and Max are back! Again! Thus showing that it’s possible to churn out quality gaming on a regular basis, unlike, say, that other supposedly episodic series that recently only achieved Episode 2 in the time it’s taken for Telltale to get their seventh game out. Gamers who have played any of the first season will know exactly what they’re dealing with, apart from a few new features and changes, whilst the rest of you are lazy gits, seeing as Telltale are offering one of the best episodes of the first Season ‘Abe Lincoln must Die’ completely free at the moment. Well, why are you still reading this? Go! Download! Play! It’s funnier than the rest of this review, I thoroughly assure you!

But for the rest of you, I don’t want to spoil the game by giving you too many details, but if you’ve seen the trailer or even thought about the title for more than a couple of seconds, you can obviously see that it’s a christmas special, in which Santa, toting an uzi, has gone crazy, leading to the need for Sam & Max to save Christmas (rather than merely ruin it). As ever, the script is excellent, with quite a few more unexpected twists and turns than a Season One plot would have had. The quality of the character animation is as good as ever (if not a little better), and locations are well-realised and stocked with amusing detail. Mostly it’s exactly the same as the first season, but maybe with a little more polish in overall presentation.

However, hanges to the game’s engine have been made that improve the game rather substantially. Upon first running the game, you are met by the COPS (Computer Obsolescence Prevention Squad), who will guide you through choosing the game’s various settings. In order to help people who haven’t completed Monkey Island several times over yet, a hint system has been put in place into the game if you want it, which allows certain characters (mostly max) to drop hints as to what to do if you get stuck. Hopefully this should mean that later games in the second series will actually have puzzles you might get stuck at, but unfortanatly Ice Station Santa is still one of the easiest games I’ve played in a long time. I’d already figured out on of the puzzles for the final confrontation in the first couple of minutes of playing, for example, and the whole game doesn’t take more than about three hours total to complete. Much more usefully, the game finally supports widescreen. Apparantly there’s a tutorial too, but I’m not quite sure who’d need one for a Point & Click video game (point, click, dammit!).

In a geeky way, the COPS were by far the best original characters in the first Season, so their continued appearance is a welcome start. A less welcome start, however, is the continued appearance of the Soda Poppers and their seething screetchy voices. The less we see of them, the better, quite frankly, and thankfully, you get to almost completely ignore them throughout this game. A new character has been added to the cast of miserable nobodies who live on the street, who has taken over Stinky’s diner, Flint Paper from the comics is (barely) featured in the first game, but is a welcome re-addition to the cast, and to make things easier for everyone, a brief but sudden unexpected piece of unplanned urban planning has made the street considerably shorter and therefore easier to navigate, which should please players of the first series who had to walk past that pointless empty building just to get to bosco’s and back over and over again. Also Bosco seems to have stopped with his extremely unfunny cultural stereotype disguises, and seems to have decided never to use a disguise again, which should make us all happier.

There are more minigames than usual, but the driving minigame is back, this time with added keyboard controls. This makes it feel unresponsive and pointless, however, but luckily all the minigames are so pointlessly easy that it makes you wonder why they even needed to be in the full game (and they’re not even clever mid-game puzzles like ‘Tic-Tac-Doom’ in the first series, they’re just ‘play this game to get past this part of the game’ games), and you probably won’t go back and play them again at any rate. They’re not a chore, they’re just not even a challenge.

All things considered, however, the game still exhibits some of the funniest writing in video games, and continues to show everyone that episodic gaming can work very well in the right hands, but continues to fall into some of the faults of the first series vis-a-vis the length and difficulty of the game, but for $8.95, you can’t really get a funnier festive 3 hours.

8/10

You can get the demo of ‘Ice Station Santa’, or the currently free Season One episode ‘Abe Lincoln Must Die’ from the Telltale Store, or Gametap subscribers can download the game as part of their monthly fee.

Posted in Games, PC