Jerry McPartlin: Rebel with a Cause Review

Since childhood I’ve always loved Grease. John Travolta as Danny was one of my idols growing up and I still secretly yearn to be a greasy quiffed, misogynistic mechanic with the singing voice of an angel. As I get older, it’s looking less likely that I’ll live out that fantasy in real life, so when the chance to play as ‘50s greaser Jerry McPartlin came about, I was more than happy to give it a go.

Sadly that happiness didn’t last too long. It lasted until the third playthrough of the same damn song on the jukebox in the diner. This illustrates the main issue with the game right away: there’s just not enough going on. It’s an experience as shallow as Warrick Davis’ bathtub and that’s a shame because it promises a lot.

It’s a point-and-click adventure in a 3D environment, much like Telltale’s games. The navigation in game doesn’t work as well as it does in those titles though. Everything feels a bit clunky and sluggish. Usually you can get Jerry to go where you want him to first time, but you never feel fully in control as there’s still a decent chance that the titular greaser will either wander in a little circle for a bit and get nowhere, or he’ll just refuse to move at all.

Not that you have that many places to go to anyway. There’s only 10 locations in the entire game, less than half the amount that Maniac Mansion had back in 1987. All of those locations fitted in the memory of a Commodore 64 too, in Jerry McPartlin: Rebel with a Cause though, you have to stare at an overly long loading screen in order to see what happens next.

Get used to this screen: you'll be seeing it a lot.

The same sparsity applies to gameplay. There’s only ever one way to finish a puzzle, and often objects are reused in multiple ways. This seems entirely unnecessary though as there are a few objects in the game that you will never use and no way to ditch items. As the game insists on keeping your inventory on one line and making you scroll, this can get frustrating. The puzzles are generally pretty self explanatory with the objects you need almost always nearby to where you are at the time. The game also has a mechanic where you can press space to see how many things you can pick up or interact with. The number is almost always depressingly few, so it’s fairly obvious what your next move is at any given time.

Six doors and six windows, one of each actually does anything.

The sparse universe could make for a very compact game with lots of life and plot activity but unfortunately, this simply isn’t the case. The sparsity extends throughout with a tiny handful of characters, half of which aren’t even visible; either hidden behind doors or in the shadows as if the developer just wasn’t secure in his ability to create human models. At one point I went into a hospital and saw no other people, not even a receptionist. In another scene, I went backstage at a show that had just finished at the theatre. You never see any audience members, other performers or staff; you never even see the performer you’re there to see, she’s hiding in her dressing room. In a giant auditorium, you see two people: the manager and his handyman. This begs the question: how can he afford to pay a handyman if no bugger is going to his shows?

Of the small number of characters that you will meet, three of them are identical triplets so share a model in the same cheap way Mortal Kombat used to boost its roster by recolouring characters. What’s worse is that this lack of characters means that they will often have multiple puzzles attached to them. Having both unsolved at the same time means that you will only get dialogue to indicate they can help you with one of your quandaries, leaving you head-scratching about the other.

There are some good points to the game. The setting is really nicely done and everything gels thematically. The graphics aren’t going to win any awards for realism but they fit the style of game with a cartoony feel and they really do evoke the era that they try to. I just wish there were more of them.

You spend a lot of the game in this diner. You will probably want to smash that jukebox.

The voice acting isn’t original Resident Evil level bad but it doesn’t really evoke any emotion and as such, you never really feel for any of the characters in the way that a great voice actor can make you. There are three originally-crafted '50s style rock-and-roll songs in the game. One of these plays in the credits only, the other two play on the jukebox and repeat relentlessly. The rest of the locations have only ambient noise and after the assault on my ears from the aforementioned jukebox, I was actually quite glad about that.

Overall, I really wanted to like Jerry McPartlin but sadly it has less substance than a chicken nugget and this just makes it feel like an unfinished project. If it was an Early Access game then I could overlook it, but on a finished product it’s impossible to recommend it. You’ll be able to complete the game in two hours with very little replay value. If you’re a fan of point-and-clicks, there are hundreds of better titles on Steam to pick up before this one.