The main reason to purchase Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space on Xbox Live Arcade is that you've already played through Sam and Max Save the World (also known as Season One) and you want more. If you have not played Save the World yet, I urge you to. Not only is it a hilarious compilation of six episodes of adventure and puzzle-solving fun, but also, Beyond Time and Space is pretty much dependent on having the player be familiar with everything that happens in Save the World for a significant portion of its stories and gags.
I raved about Save the World in my review of it, so if you're reading this you'll be wanting to know how Beyond Time and Space stacks up as a follow up. Well, it's more of the same: more hilarious writing, more outlandish cases to solve, more obtuse puzzles, more wacky characters and more souvenirs to clog the Freelance Police office.
Beyond Time and Space comprises five episodes this time around (compared with Save the World's six), encapsulating "Ice Station Santa," "Moai Better Blues," "Night of the Raving Dead," "Chariots of the Dogs," and "What's New, Beezlebub?" Sam and Max are thrown into even stranger cases than in Save the World (where everything ended up revolving around hypnotism), traveling from the North Pole to Easter Island, from a zombie rave in a German castle to a flying saucer in outer space, and throughout time only to end up in Hell. The Freelance Police must face off against zombies, babies, mariachis, Santa, Satan, boxing rats, piranhas in the Fountain of Youth, a demonic "Shambling Corporate Presence," and a giant, killer robot who quotes '80s pop music lyrics.
Telltale Games continues to create entertaining adventures to play through, and in Beyond Time and Space they've added some fun new twists. In "Ice Station Santa," Sam and Max must travel backwards and forwards in time, revisiting a case from Save the World and jumping ahead to help themselves out of a jam in a later episode. In "Chariots of the Dogs," the duo must again gallop through time, this time attempting to fix paradoxes, Back to the Future-style. There are other fun game play surprises that pop up, but I don't want to spoil them.
Beyond Time and Space sports a few improvements over Save the World, such as a now shortened main street that makes Sam's slow saunter from one location to the next not as time-consuming, thankfully, but there are also areas where Beyond Time and Space seems like a step down from what came before.
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