Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The Wolf Among Us Review




Reviewed on Xbox One

Getting this ball rolling with another review, how about that?

Today's game review is....

The Wolf Among Us

The Wolf Among Us was first released on the Xbox 360 on October 11, 2013 by Telltale Games, now if you don't Telltale games and the kind of games they make the quick run down is that they make; story driven, almost "choose your own adventure" type games with minimal game play.

The Wolf Among Us is based off the comic series 'Fables' by Bill Willingham and published by Vertigo,
The comic series started in 2002 and as far as I know finished in 2015, there's countless spin-offs and after playing this game I'm awfully tempted to dive into it, anyway

The game focuses on Bigby Wolf who you guide through his investigation into the murder of a person in the community known as 'Fabletown'. This is where the hook is, so to speak. Fabletown houses fables from legend and stories throughout history, including many classical ones such as the character you play as, Bigby aka, the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast. Just to spice it up though, Wolf Among Us does not limit itself to classical fables, it also includes American legends as well which I won't dive into ( little spoilery I suppose)

They all live in New York and this provides the perfect backdrop for some noir type cinematography,
Enough about the specifics lets get on to the review portion.


Presentation

The game starts off with a pink/purple filigree type background with some neonish type colours
and is pretty bare but that is completely okay, the main draw here is the TV like format that this game follows,

The games gives you a few extra things to keep you engaged like giving you the option to review your choices you've made through the game, this is heightened by telling you how you stack up against the online community by showing you the percentage of people that made the same choice of you, this makes you feel like a unique little snowflake or super basic. This sort of information it feeds you is nice reminder of the kind of person you are, A very unique part of the Telltale games experience

There's another section that describes all the characters you've met and catalogs them, yes, nice, thanks. Always good.

The menus don't perform really well though kinda slow, kinda sluggish, you do wish it was faster.

A lot of the presentation is also part of the game play so I'll end this section here

7/10


Sound

So yeah this game, sound is its thing. Its excellent story is only aided by its fantastic sound design, Every voice actor is completely on point, putting on a convincing performance, even in the case of a talking pig. 

Environmental sounds are good and supplement the scenes well, but the true combo here is the voice acting and the music, its everything you would expect out of a top notch TV show, gives me a Stranger Things feeling, I'm not sure if its supposed to be set in the 80's but everything in this game leads me to believe that its set in that time period, cool ambient synthy music introduces the game and totally sets the style 

I am a fan

10/10


Graphics

In the case of The Wolf Among Us, it's like most Telltale games, simple graphics, much like a comic (like its source material). It uses hard tone differences to set up it's distinct style, using a lot of yellows, purples, pinks, and blues, again giving it a dated feel

The character designs are very unique, you will certainly not forget these characters, supported by their voices and distinct looks, the art of this game is truly its own.

Still in this day and age its hard not to desire something more detailed, it'll be nice to see a Telltale game with some triple A visuals one day, 

Although I know this game uses its style to determine its look, and I do appreciate all styles of art I feel that in terms of graphics, this is on of The Wolf Among Us' lower points (sorry)

7/10

Game Play

Discussing game play in a Telltale game is tough thing to discuss, since it is such a different style of game I've got to be fair.

The Wolf Among Us is not so much a game but more of a graphical choose your own adventure book so game play options are kind of limited, most of your interactions are limited to selecting responses to dialog spoken by NPC's and and Quick Time Events during 'action' sequences, this is a common thing through Telltale games, so nothing is different here if you played any other title from the developer.

Though the way the story gets conveyed in a very satisfying way, after playing a few other Telltale titles the game play is starting to feel a little stale,


7/10

In Closing...

I had really good time following the story of Bigby Wolf and part of me really want's to delve into the comic book story line (be sure to let me know if you've read them). The game play is exactly what I expected out of a Telltale game so if you go in knowing their style and have liked it in the past you will be pleasantly surprised with this game. 

If this is your first time playing a Telltale title, you've picked a good one.

So the weighted score came to another 7.7 which is a good score but I liked it more than that and since its my little review I'm going to adjust that to an 8.

Thanks for reading!


FINAL SCORE: 8