Escape from Monkey Island, possibly the final in the series. I have heard many opinions.. well here is mine!
Escape from Monkey Island, possibly the final in the series. I have heard many opinions about the title before experiencing it myself and such as with Curse of Monkey Island, I had little hopes.
Body:
Straight into the review, the graphics were, in my eyes, terrible. The graphics engine used is pathetic to say the least, its in comparison with Grim Fandango (another title from Lucas Arts), I am unsure if they used the same engine (I would not be surprised, I rarely use the words “large budget” and “Lucas Arts” in the same sentence, but we wont get into the whole “You killed the best games know to gamers you $%!$%£’s” right now.
Taking the game from the 2D graphics into 3D is a step expected in the constantly evolving world of gaming, and completely understandable from Lucas Arts – launching a 2D adventure game, appearing on PC and PS2 would seem like suicide. I just simply don’t like the graphical style chosen – far too... “cartoony”.
After getting used to the unsightly graphics I don’t notice the sound, simply because it’s identical to Curse of Monkey Island, as to be expected. Not a problem with that, since it was well executed in the previous game
The game is certainly of a nice length, long and lots of locations, yet not like Monkey Island 2 where there was far too many locations at once, in this case the locations are well designed and spaced out. My main problem with the length of the game would be the difficulty. The game was easy to figure out the puzzles on the most part… but I am undecided if this was a good or bad feature. Past games have fallen to having far too difficult puzzles, whilst the difficulty of the game is not as perfectly balanced as Monkey Island 1, it is however an improvement on the frustrating Monkey Island 2.
Apart from the easy nature of most of the game, I found the ending unbelievably poorly designed, without spoiling too much of the story, whoever though up… Monkey… Kombat… should be shot on sight. One could comment on the old “Insult Sword Fighting” being repetitive when learning the different insults, but playing Monkey Kombat brings it to an entirely new level of idiotic boring repetition.
Story-wise the game had a bit of both good and bad, good points being the continuing of the original story and the bad being the completely lack of the usual pirate background.
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Only play the game if you have experienced the three previous titles, otherwise steer clear.