Developed/Published by Telltale Games
Released for XBLA (11/2014)
Also On Android/Mac/PC/PS3/PS4/Vita
The Wolf Among Us is another interactive story from Telltale Games, following up their first two highly successful Walking Dead games. The game is based off the Fables comics, which I had absolutely no knowledge of coming into this game, but I will say that I am definitely interested in checking them out after playing through this title. I've played through at least four other Telltale Games titles prior to this game and never really ran into any serious issues. I say with no exaggeration that I've never had as much trouble trying to play through an Xbox 360 game as I've had with the Wolf Among Us.
I'll start with the glitches I experienced during gameplay. There was a point where everything just kind of stopped in the middle of a fight, the game wasn't frozen but it was as if all the characters just forgot what they were supposed to do next forcing me to restart. I had another instance where the game failed to load the dialogue options, every choice stating "This option is blank," no longer allowing me to proceed. Late in the game the dialogue choices mysteriously were displayed in Spanish while the spoken dialogue was still in English. There is no option to select the language and it did revert back when I got to the next scene but still, very weird. The frame-rate does take some dips pretty much constantly and you'll frequently wonder if the game is frozen while it stops to load, but even worse than all of these issues is the massive annoyance I ran into while trying to start up the second episode.
Every time I'd load it up, it would start to act like it was loading and would then lock my 360 up with a black screen. This was always a hard freeze, meaning you can't access the Xbox guide to properly exit out of the game and are forced to do a system reset. After several attempts and lots of time wasted researching the issue, I found that this among other problems plaguing the game have been complained about on Telltales' support forums pretty much since the game was released. They have no explanation for why these things are happening and only suggest the generic tech support stuff like "clear your system cache" and "delete and re-download the game". I like Telltale Games and all, but man that is some messy programming and just absolutely abysmal after-launch support! Check out the company's terrible BBB rating if you need evidence of this! I wouldn't blame most people for just giving up on it at this point; I really felt as if the game didn't want me to play it!
I eventually found a resolution to the problem which was to re-download the game on my old original 360 as I was playing it on my 360 E (which has never had any issues playing any other games). After booting it up on my old system I was finally able to proceed forth with the game, so beware if you only have a 360 E model stay far away from this title. I'm unable to test it on the S model as I do not own one, but if you've played it on that model let me know if you ran into any problems.
All complaining about technical issues aside, there's a cool story to be enjoyed within Wolf Among Us if you can manage to get past the bugs. The voice-work is superb, the characters and setting are all very interesting. The gameplay offers the player enough choices that they never feel left out of the story as well. Telltale Games have definitely become masters in these interactive-movie style of games, let's just hope that these programming issues involved with this title are not something I come across in their future games. I can't imagine all of the ports have the issues I've experienced in this version. The Wolf Among Us is also available in physical media form with a disc featuring all episodes on it, though I've heard bad things about the disc version as well so I don't think it remedies the game's many issues unfortunately.
Final Verdict: The Wolf Among Us is a cool interactive-movie game with some glaring technical issues. I'd recommend playing it on the Xbox One, though if you must play it on the 360 make certain it's not on a Xbox 360 E console.
Related Links:
Buy The Wolf Among Us (Xbox 360) - Xbox Marketplace
Buy The Wolf Among Us (Xbox One) - Microsoft Store
Telltale Games - Xbox Overview
The Wolf Among Us - GameFAQs
Fables by Vertigo Comics - Official Site
Fables - Wikipedia
Telltale Games - Official Site
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