Escape from Monkey Island™

"You're as sharp as a soggy pancake" - Herman Toothrot While I'm torn on how best to rate this game, I ultimately landed on a 'recommend'. It's by far the weakest of the MI games and it was the one that I abandoned back in the early 2000s shortly after it's release. The obvious issue with the game are the controls. They are clunky at best and unfortuantely moving from place to place is SLOW. Even after 14 hours of play, I didn't feel confident in controlling Guybrush. My second gripe would be....you guessed it...Monkey Kombat. What a tedious, frustrating exercise. The developers took it too far IMO with not only needing to figure out which style beats others, but the need to select individual monkey noises to move from one style to another. I literally had to build out a matrix of the 6 styles to reference. That said, I did enjoy the storyline and the callbacks to other characters in the series. It felt like there was a lot of cutscenes and exposition when compared to the gameplay. I also felt that the developers got a little lazy with the puzzle solving (bad sure you have that Banana Picker). In the end I ended up following the Prima Walkthrough w…

IIIIIIIIII don't know about this one... The artstyle doesn't really bother me. It's an artifact of its time, and although not pretty by today's standards, it's impressive how well they translated the previously-all-2D world of Monkey Island™ into 3D. The backgrounds, for the most part, are just as good as Grim Fandango's backgrounds. They're detailed and fit the subject matter very well, in my opinion. The music is good, but I don't necessarily think it's the strongest soundtrack, not even within the series. A comparison against Grim here would be futile. (I bring up Grim so much because the two games are built with the same engine (as far as I know), though Grim has aged far better and even received a remaster.) The PUZZLES though. UGH. I may be alone in this opinion, and that's fine, but the puzzles in this game are just not very good. They are somehow simultaneously very obtuse and not rewarding to overcome. Aside from a few interactions, I didn't feel I was able to intuit solutions as well as in Curse of Monkey Island, nor as in Grim Fandango which, as mentioned before, has a similar interaction scheme to this game. The Monkey Kombat section is miserable. It grinds the en…

The fullscreen mode from this game would not let me tab out of it or do anything else on my computer while it's open. Controls are terrible, they removed mouse support and it's clearly designed for consoles but controller support hardly works. After spending hours on configuring it, the experience of moving and interacting was taking me out of the game all the time. I'll stick to a gameplay for this one.

It has some fantastic humor, charm, and story - but also really needs to have a refresh for modern hardware. Puzzles can be quite challenging, even compared to other Monkey Island games. The earlier 3D games haven't aged as well as 2D art (Curse of Monkey Island aged better in this regard). Would love to see a remake similar to Grim Fandango; where even just the characters and models get updated, with improved controls, quality of life improvements (including hint system). Remember to save often, as can crash too!

It has its problems but overall still a great game, the puzzles are good for the most part but a few are frustrating. The story is well done and is more developed compared to the previous games although the cutscene graphics are rough.

It does have it's flaws, mostly towards the end, but it's still Monkey Island magic.