Genre: Point-and-Click Adventure
Release date: April 18, 2016

Full Throttle is one of the classic LucasArts games from famed designer Tim Schafer. His company, Double Fine, just released a remastered version of the game, making it the third game in his Hat Trick following Grim Fandango  and Day of the Tentacle. I spent most of the ’90s playing RPG games and missed a lot of these classic adventures, so the remakes are a great way for me to catch up on some of the history I missed. How is Full Throttle?

Enter the year 2040, where most cars are hovercars that levitate above the road as they move. Ben Throttle is the leader of the Polecats, a biker gang that still drives traditional bikes with two wheels on the road. The game never explains what the Polecats do, but one would assume they drive around free and cause mayhem. The world is changing, and there is only one motorcycle manufacturer left: Corley Motors.

On the way to a board meeting, Malcolm Corley — the creator of Corley motors — wants an escort. While negotiating the deal, Ben is knocked out and the rest of the gang is sent unknowingly onward without him. You play as Ben, who must catch up with his colleagues, fight rival biker gangs, get to Corley Motors, romance the girl, and save the legacy of the two-wheelers. There are a lot of puzzles along the way.

The remake offers redrawn graphics to support more modern machines. I loved the look of this game. It is a bit cartoony, but that is how I prefer my adventure games. If you prefer the old-school approach, the game lets you switch between the original graphics and the remastered graphics.  I stuck with the new look primarily because of my personal aversion to pixel graphics.

The sound is fantastic. There is music from a heavy metal-esque band, The Gone Jackals.  I love this element of the game, and it really sets the vibe in many cases. Even today, it is odd to have music with lyrics as part of the game, but it really fits here. The voice acting is top-notch with a lot of big tier talent including Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame; Maurice LaMarche (The Brain from Anamaniacs); and Roy Conrad, who I’d never heard of before. Roy voices Ben and has created a gruff part with some heart.

I really enjoyed this game for the first two hours. The puzzles are as perfect as possible. Then I hit the arcade sequence of biker fights. Two hours later, I dug up a walkthrough just to get through it.  LucasArts is famous for having no deaths, but this game is full of death, especially during the biker fights. The trick is that Ben gets back up to his motorcycle and goes on, so it is like an instant restore.  However, you may lose some of the items you collected in previous biker fights. I had a lot of confusion keeping this straight, as in  which weapons I needed to acquire to fight which biker. Biker fights are the Insult Sword Fighting sequence of Full Throttle, but it’s implemented with the grace of a dirty knife fight.

The game interface exists somewhere between the Sierra icon interface, the LucasArts verb interface, and the single icon usage that is common today. Click on an item and you’ll get a secondary menu that allows you to look at something, speak to it, interact with it or kick it. I like the variation this adds to the game’s interaction, which is something that’s lacking in many new titles. There are more uses than you’d expect for the kick icon.

This game offers a show hotspot button, which I was excited about at first as I can be a lazy gamer. However, it is half-baked. There are multiple times where hotspots are hidden. For example, a car may show up as a hotspot, but the game won’t show you that you can get different interactions with different parts of the car such as tires and gas tank. That tripped me up a few times; even more so that the cursor does not have annotations to tell you what you’re hovering over.

This game is a good representation of adventure games, both the good and bad. It has its share of poorly thought-out puzzles and some very frustrating arcade sequences.  But the game is a lot of fun when it isn’t being so darn annoying. By the end, I was hanging on a walkthrough just to be done with it.

If you’re a Tim Schafer fan, play this now!  If you like old school point-and-click games, there is a lot to love here. But if you prefer something slightly more polished, look elsewhere.

+ Great visuals + Great sound   – Horrible arcade sequences – Frustrating puzzles