Full Throttle

Full Throttle is a point-and-click adventure by Tim Shaffer. You play as Ben, leader of the Biker gang The Pole Cats. Malcolm Corley, the leader of the last motorcycle company takes an interest in the gang. His assistant, Ripburger plots to take over the company, and decides he will frame The Pole Cats.

You click to bring up an Action wheel. From there you can click the Foot, Hand, Eyes, or Mouth icons. It took me a while to realise the eyes were a separate button to the mouth, so I was confused when Ben kept on telling me he didn't want to lick objects, when I wanted to examine them. You use the Foot to open some doors because Ben likes making a dramatic entrance. Hand is for picking up items, or opening cupboard doors. Eyes are for examining, and Mouth is for talking.

You can open your Inventory with a Right-click, and you rarely carry more than two items at once. There are no combining puzzles, and the puzzles are lacking in general.

You can press Shift to highlight hotspots, but it actually highlights full objects. I knew I had to interact with the hovercraft, but I struggled to find the exact part I needed. It also doesn't highlight edges where you can navigate between screens. I was stuck in the scrapyard for a while because I didn't realise you can move to the right. Similarly, the final sections also suffer from this problem. It also doesn't show you clickable areas when looking at the map screen, so you have to move your mouse over the map to discover where you can actually click.

It often feels unfinished. In most point and click adventures, you get sections of the game where you have multiple tasks to do at once, and have some degree of freedom. To complete each task, there's usually many sub-objectives to get you to the end goal. In Full Throttle, you end up doing one or two tasks to complete that objective, and sometimes it appears there's options, but then you have to complete the tasks linearly. It's the most linear point-and-click adventure game that I've played.

There's not many characters to talk to either. This often pads out adventure games, but also gives the game a nice pacing since it breaks up the puzzle solving. It also helps flesh out the world and story; but it's all lacking here.

There's a Road Rash-inspired section where you defeat bikers with a host of weapons; fist, chain, plank etc. It's basically a rock-paper-scissors style mechanic, and you need to acquire the weapons in a certain order. The opponents seem random, so you have to keep waiting until the correct biker appears. It's slow and tedious.

Later, there is a destruction derby mini-game. The sound becomes grating after 30 seconds, and it isn't clear what you are supposed to do. Surprisingly, you aren't supposed to repeatedly crash into your opponents. The sequence of events is clunky and I don't think it makes sense. Controlling your car with the mouse is awful, and the keyboard is still awkward.

With the remaster, you can switch between new and old graphics at the touch of a button. You can clearly see they have done a fine job with the graphical upgrade. You can enable developer commentary and activate it with a keyboard press. However, during cutscenes, the commentary auto enables and talks over the scene. Therefore, it's only something you would enable on your second play-through; otherwise you will miss cut-scene dialogue.

It can be completed in under 4 hours and I don't understand why some people regard this as a classic when it seems like a really undeveloped idea. Even though it is a cut down adventure, they still manage to put in some really frustrating sections.

An interesting setting and premise, great voice acting, and some very cool noir-inspired art aren't enough to overcome the least interactive, most linear, and least coherent LucasArts point-and-click to date (in 1995, at least). The whole game is something like 3 hours long and a significant amount of that time is just spent walking around figuring out what the hell to do - and I'm not criticizing the genre, I love hard adventure games.

There's an added emphasis on action and all three of its implementations are pretty pathetic. First, there's an option to kick everything in the environment, a pointless task since Ben refuses to do so for 90% of all objects. This is done by way of a frustrating new UI wheel that pops up every time you click something, meaning default actions are out the window. There's a truly awful section where you ride your bike on a pre-scrolling 3-D background and fight bikers, and it looks terrible in both the original and remastered graphical settings. The combat is neither skill or luck-oriented, just pure button mashing and rock-paper-scissors with unintuitive hierarchies. A chainsaw beats a guy with a wooden plank, sure. But why doesn't a fucking ball and chain? The scripted nature of the driving also means you don't get to choose your opponent, so the guy you might need to fight could take 5-10 minutes to show up. Finally, there's the demolition derby, which is even harder to control than the Mine Road biker fights with even less clear instructions.

It bugs me how much I have to rag on this game but even without the clearly intrusive and unintuitive "combat" mechanics, this is still a pretty contentless, if moody and somewhat engaging point-and-click. With them, I find this very hard to recommend unless you know exactly what you're getting into. It's a shame to waste an actually decent narrative premise and interesting noir flavor on mechanics that feel out of place for the story and protagonist.