Telltale Games was kind enough to provide Big Shiny Robot! a review copy of their new game “Sam and Max: Season One” for the Wii.  (If you’re interested in picking it up from Amazon, click here.)  I spent quite a bit of time noodling around with the game and I was quite excited to play. Sam and Max Hit the Road was a game I had a lot of fun with in my teenage years and so I’ve always harbored a fondness for these characters.

My inherent fondness for these characters might have been the only reason I was able to enjoy this game at all.

The game is very simple in it’s design.  You use your Wii-mote to point at various things on the screen and watch Sam and Max pontificate in a generally humorous fashion. And there is plenty to click on, so there’s never any shortage of stuff to do.

The problem is that the only thing there is to do is click on stuff.  There are puzzles to solve by clicking on stuff, but they aren’t terribly intuitive…  I played through three (of six) episodes and it did get easier as I went on and I think the reason was because I started to get acclimated to the mechanics of the game and the inherent…lameness (?) of how the puzzles work. Maybe lameness is the wrong word.  It’s just cheesy.  And for the first episode, the dynamics of how they work didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so it was really frustrating.  Like, so frustrating that I went to GameFAQs.com and looked up a walkthrough.

All in all, I think if you’re a fan of Sam and Max, you’ll enjoy the game if you can get around the awkward writing, they are fun characters.  If not, it might be worth a shot to Tell Tales’ Strong Bad Games instead.