While its emotionally charged storyline carries the potential of allowing Episode 3 to be the best of Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures, Muzzled! is muzzled by several setbacks that leave it just average.
In the Wallace and Gromit short A Close Shave, the duo save a flock of sheep from certain doom, and along the way grow so attached to one of the wooly fellows that they end up naming him "Shaun" (Shaun has since gone on to become popular in his own right as a result of the short, leading to his own series of cartoons).
In Muzzled! the same sort of thing happens. When an unscrupulous shyster named Monty Muzzle arrives in town, claiming to be virtuously doing charity work to aid homeless dogs while really imprisoning them to work in his fair, Wallace and Gromit grow attached to the pups Monty muzzles and one in particular, a timid runt, they name "Twitch."
For the first time in the Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures series, I didn't just want to finish the game for the sake of completing it; I wanted to give Monty his just desserts and save the pooches! It made me realize that what's been missing from the other episodes of Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures is the emotional resonance that can be found in cartoons like A Close Shave.
Unfortunately, several flaws in the game prevent the story from achieving all it could have been.
First off, there's the same issue I had in Episodes 1 and 2 of controlling Wallace and Gromit with an Xbox 360 controller. The controls in this series are a strange departure from Telltale Games' other Xbox Live Arcade offerings like Sam & Max Save the World and Beyond Time and Space. Instead of moving a cursor around like a mouse on a PC (the platform on which these episodes were originally released), players move the characters around with the left thumbstick and select items with the right.
Holding down the Y button darkens all areas of the screen except the things that are selectable, which makes it easier to spot important items, but moving the little white brackets that select an item with the right thumbstick while still holding down Y is incredibly awkward. Pressing A to bring up your inventory of items being carried while holding Y and moving the right thumbstick is even a contortionist's nightmare.
There were several points in the game where the controls were particularly frustrating when they had no foreseeable reason to be. One was at the fairgrounds, a donut-shaped environment where I sometimes had a remarkably difficult time getting Gromit to walk in a manner that didn't appear drunkenly. Rounding several corners, even though I had the left thumbstick pointed in the exact direction I wanted Gromit to move, he would inexplicably get stuck walking into a booth or wall or heading in the opposite direction I wanted.
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