Despite the lack of a mouse, this Xbox 360 port of what was originally a PC game works quite well. You use your left analog stick to move your character, and the right stick cycles through nearby objects. It’s clearly not what you were originally intended to play the game on, but it plays just fine and I hope they’ll continue with these kind of controls in other games. You’ll occasionally need to let go of your left stick for a moment when the camera angle changes, and there are some minor framerate dips, but overall Wallace & Gromit plays very well on this system.

This is a mental game rather than one of twitch reflexes, so it has to get by on the strength of its writing, presentation, and puzzles. Fortunately, it does just fine at all of these. A few puzzles were hard enough that I had to seek help, but most of them were able to be figured out with either careful thought or random experimentation, so this was all fine and well. A ’blind’ run through the game should last you about three to four hours, which is decent for the genre and 800 Microsoft Point price tag.

But for all the excellent controls, clever story, and interesting characters... this game has lots of bugs. Some of them are minor and easily able to be overlooked; the occasional framerate dip and jittery controls during a camera angle shift are not a big deal. What is a problem is that a lot of bugs in Wallace & Gromit Episode 1 are show-stoppers or close to it. While an average play-through might take three to four hours, I really spent about double that total due to having to replay sections due to bugs, and in one case I managed to glitch a puzzle so badly it was literally unable to be completed until I reloaded a previous save. The problem was it took a lot of research to verify that, by which time I had wasted close to two hours trying other solutions in the hopes I had just missed something. All told, I hit three show-stoppers during my play-through; two required loading earlier saves and one required quitting back to the Xbox Dashboard because the game was completely ignoring my controller input.

The glitches are very disappointing, because this is otherwise a great game. I went in not even knowing who the titular characters were, but by the end I was pretty amused. But the bugs are so numerous, and some are so severe, that whether you’ll want to play this game really depends on how willing you are to deal with them. If you don’t object to doing a little research online and saving regularly, you’ll find this is a great adventure game. On the other hand, you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to enjoy a game like this. Whether you want to buy it or not depends on just how tolerant you are of significant bugs, but I personally can’t really give this a passing score despite the many things it does well.