Sam & Max: Beyond Time And Space (Xbox 360) Review
Sam and Max are back for more adventures.
Telltale are pretty much the heroes of anyone who played LucasArts adventure games back in the early PC days, with the revival of Monkey Island and Sam & Max. Now Telltale have brought the second season of the episodic PC Sam & Max games to the Xbox 360, under the title of ‘Sam & Max Beyond Time And Space’ which, as you might guess, sees everyone’s favourite suit wearing dog and crazy rabbit thing venturing through time and space.
As you would expect, Beyond Time & Space is another point and click adventure, with the graphics pretty much the same as they were for the first season. The controls are simple. Move your cursor around and press A to either move or to have a look at an item, or to interact with people.
‘Beyond Time And Space’ contains 5 brand new episodes for you to spend your time on, which supposedly will last you 20 hours, although if you are a veteran point and clicker, you’ll likely beat this in half the time.
‘Ice Station Santa’
Santa sends a Maimtron 9000 robot to destroy Sam & Max’s neighbourhood. They must stop the destruction and figure out what has come over Santa.
‘Moai Better Blues’
After a Bermuda Triangle vortex appears, Sam & Max travel through the vortex to Easter Island and are tasked with preventing a volcanic eruption from destroying the island.
‘Night of the Raving Dead’
Sam & Max are trapped in a Soul Stealer by Geman emo vampire Jurgen, and think back to how they ended up in their current predicament, before trying to defeat Jurgen and stop the zombie invasion.
‘Chariots of the Dogs’
After Bosco vanishes off the face of the Earth, Sam & Max discover he has been abducted by T-H-E-M, and they must figure out what their master plan is and put a stop to it.
‘What’s New, Beelzebub?’
Carrying on from the previous episode, Sam & Max go all the way to Hell to try and get Bosco’s soul back from Satan.
Of course, there are a couple of mini-games to change things up a bit, such as Sam trying to balance a baby bottle tray on his head while riding a surfing machine, or boxing Jimmy Two-Teeth with a Boxing Betty remote control doll.
The blurb states that there is 20 hours of gameplay, but really that’s an absolute maximum if you have never played a Sam & Max game before. Anyone who knows what they are doing will get the whole game wrapped up in around half that time. The puzzles range from highly logical to ridiculously absurd, but can mostly be figured out if you pay attention to what certain characters say to you. However, there is a problem with some speech not actually playing, so you will need to turn the subtitles on.
As ever, the main pull of Sam & Max is the scripting and the humour, which are as sharp and witty as ever. Most things can be interacted with and people can be bantered with. There aren’t a lot of laugh out loud lines, they’re mostly things that will make you chuckle a little. Such as clicking on a fire hydrant causing Sam to say “All you can drink water buffet.” or clicking the filing cabinet in Sam & Max’s office, where Sam asks where Max filed their most recent case, to which Max responds “I filed it under ‘W’ for ‘Waste of our lives, comma, a freakin’ huge’”.
Whereas ‘Sam & Max Save The World’ felt like 6 very separate small stories with a subtle theme running between them, the episodes in ‘Beyond Time and Space’ seem to follow on from each other more, but the plot of the season as a whole isn’t actually tied up until the end. Also, it seems like an obvious thing to say, but playing the episodes in order helps with puzzles in later episodes. For example, in one episode a not too distant future version of Sam swaps items with your Sam, and in a future episode, you need to perform the trade from the other end.
Final Thoughts
The simple fact is, if you’re a Sam & Max fan, or a fan of point and click games in general, this is a must buy, no question. The Xbox 360 version is cheaper than the PC version, but is exactly the same. There are minor niggles, such as the occasional loss of speech and your cursor disappearing off screen, but they are minor, and this is a fine addition to the Sam & Max series. Telltale’s storytelling is really improving. But it is what it is – more Sam & Max. If it didn’t float your boat before, you won’t like this either. But at the end of the day, as the saying goes, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
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24 Oct 2009, 1:35 am
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