Yep, it’s a British invasion, only this time the Beatles aren’t involved. Instead, the claymation icons Wallace and Gromit have inserted themselves in our computers. Telltale Games’ newest adventure series is based on the beloved British cartoon franchise.

Does Telltale’s third episodic offering live up to their past efforts? Do the man-and-dog duo’s antics translate well to the computer screen? Read past the cut to find out.

For many gamers, Wallace and Gromit will be slightly more obscure than the residents of Strongbadia. Fortunately, there isn’t a ton of backstory that you need to know. Wallace is an Englishman with a few mild peculiarities. For one, he is constantly tinkering with inventions that are dangerous at best and criminally stupid at worst. Gromit is his ever-loyal canine companion. Note that I didn’t say servant. Gromit is definitely the master in their relationship, despite what Wallace may think. Together, they live their lives on pleasant old West Wallaby Street, unintentionally terrorizing their neighbors. Want to know more? I highly recommend checking out the various short films and the longer Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

As this episode opens, Wallace seems to be in a spot of trouble. His cheese-detecting robot malfunctioned and devastated a few of the local shops. It was locked in the town’s only jail cell, and Wallace is up to his neck in hot water. He learns that all will be forgiven if his newly founded honey delivery service can produce fifty gallons of honey in time for the crumpet festival. Naturally, he agrees without considering how, exactly, his bees can produce fifty gallons in less than a day. That is for you, the lovely player, to puzzle out.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, Wallace & Gromit (the game) isn’t quite the same kind of experience as Sam & Max. Namely, the humor is extremely British. Like, “oh-god-we’ve-dived-off-of-the-deep-end” British. A few of the jokes are pretty subtle, the only clue being the fact that the on-screen characters are giggling awkwardly. It’s the kind of humor that, when the meaning hits you, you’ll be grinning for a while. A few of the other jokes are so intentionally dumb that you can’t help but chuckle. Admittedly, it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea (that was intentional), but you’ll be pretty pleased if you enjoy that kind of dry humor. I didn’t laugh out loud as often as I did during Strong Bad or Sam & Max, but I never got bored either.

Just to assuage the fears of the anxious fans, Fright of the Bumblebees looks exactly like the claymation shorts that it builds on. Telltale has a knack for capturing the look of the properties that they license. For Strong Bad, they modified their engine to produce a cel-shaded cartoon style. Perfect for a 2D Flash cartoon. Creating a convincing replica of the clay-molded world of Wallace & Gromit seems like a slightly harder task, but they pulled it off remarkably well. This game looks fantastic in motion, especially if you crank the resolution up really high. What is even cooler is that they even took care of little details, like having the characters’ lips vaguely move along with the dialogue. Gromit even gives his characteristic little shrug when you talk to him. The sound is also pretty faithful to the source material. The background music is filled with the exact kind of tunes you’d expect to hear in “jolly old England,” and the voice actors come from the actual films. One sore topic is that Peter Sallis couldn’t fill in for his usual role of Wallace. A few fans will undoubtedly be up in arms, but I honestly thought that his replacement, the official understudy, did a decent job.

As the Wallace & Gromit series is Telltale’s first game for the Xbox 360, a few notable changes have been made to the gameplay. Don’t panic, the game is still fundamentally an adventure game. You are still clicking on objects to inspect them and digging through your inventory for that final puzzle piece. The core difference is that you occasionally have to press buttons that aren’t on your mouse. Moving the analog sticks to carefully position a cursor before pressing a button to move to that cursor would be mind-numbing. Instead, you now move with the arrow keys (or the “wasd” buttons) and click with the mouse. Rather than clicking an on-screen icon to open your inventory, you now press the shift key.

While I’m sure that these control changes make the game far more playable on the Xbox, it actually is fairly clunky on the PC. Character movement is pretty clumsy. I ended up caught in corners far more often than I would have with standard mouse controls. The extra button press for accessing your inventory also felt a little less natural. Fortunately, you can also play the PC version with an Xbox controller if you have one lying around. I didn’t personally try this (the keyboard controls were clunky, but not that clunky), but it is pretty cool that this option exists.

Like all of Telltale’s past games, the first episode of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventure is $8.95 for about four hours of gameplay, with extra discounts if you order the whole season. The price of a movie ticket gets you an evening of hilarious humor and clever puzzles to solve. Unlike a lot of movie-based games (including past Wallace & Gromit games), Fright of the Bumblebees is literally a W&G short that you get to interact with. There isn’t any awkward action gameplay shoved in, and the narration flows in such a way that it isn’t completely obvious that you aren’t watching a movie. I think that I mention this every time that I review a Telltale game, but it remains true. Grab this episode if you’re even remotely into Adventure games or a fan of the original movies. It isn’t a perfect game, but it is probably better than the movie you were going to go see.

Positives: Smart puzzles, true to the source material, beautiful claymation-based graphics.
Negatives: Clunky controls, some may not “get” the humor.

Score: