Xbox 360 Review: Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures - Episode 4: The Bogey Man

Part of: Xbox Live Arcade Games

Telltale Games typically does something big for their final entry into each of their episodic games series. In Sam & Max Save the World, they reunited all the characters from the previous episodes on the moon. In Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, they sent the Freelance Police to Hell to overcome Satan. In Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, they trotted out fan favorite Trogdor for a showdown that spanned several retro video game genres.

Then along comes the final episode of Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures, wherein Telltale really drops the (golf) ball. That's right, Episode 4: The Bogey Man all about about golfing and features the most obtuse and frustrating puzzles yet found in the series, a story that barely makes any sense, frequently lengthy non-interactive portions and a plethora of bad golf jokes that even the Sunday Funnies would be embarrassed to showcase.

I don't know of too many gamers that are also into golf, which makes the choice of theme for this season closer all the more strange. That being said, sometimes a game's theme doesn't matter if the gameplay is fun enough to make it interesting, which, sadly, The Bogey Man's does not.

The story opens with Ms. Flitt, Wallace and Gromit's next door neighbor, thinking that Wallace has proposed marriage to her at the end of Episode 3: Muzzled! It's all a misunderstanding that Gromit must now fix. Controlling Gromit, the player learns that the only "deal-breaker" for Ms. Flitt is if it turns out that Wallace is a member of the Prickly Thicket country club, for some reason. So, it becomes Gromit's mission to get his master accepted into the club to breakup the accidentally engaged couple.

Once a member, Wallace finds that Prickly Thicket is in danger of being shut down because it hasn't actually got a golf course. Police Constable Dibbins, angry about his being passed over for membership when Wallace was accepted, threatens to close the club unless they can prove they actually have a golf course, the Deed to which was long ago lost somewhere in the walls of the clubhouse.

It turns out that a duo very much like Wallace and Gromit had long ago built the country club and its ultra-complicated security system, which Wallace must now figure out to save. I had hopes that the episode would find Wallace and Gromit heading back in time to actually BE the ones who set up the club, but, sadly, it was not to be. Still, that would have been a great climax to the series, but instead we get a much more mundane storyline.

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Article Author: Sombrero Grande

This writer is a member of The Masked Movie Snobs, a collective that fights a never-ending battle against bad entertainment.

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