A disappointing sequel lto an all-too-short original classic.

User Rating: 6.5 | Return to Mysterious Island 2: Mina's Fate PC
I finally got around to completing this adventure, and I have to admit that I have mixed reactions to it.

Brief synopsis:
Mina, the main character, and her sidekick Jep, a Monkey that she rescued and adopted in the first adventure, are still stranded on Lincoln Island. The rescue helicopter crashed following a massive volcanic eruption and now she is on a quest to stop the whole island from exploding.

During her adventures she gets to do all sorts of interesting and exciting things, such as rescue another monkey, solve endless lateral thinking problems and to finally discover the true history of Lincoln Island.

As the adventure draws to a close, things get a little "sci-fi" and she gets to play with all sorts of unbelievable alien machinery and, finally, has to make a somewhat one-sided decision to either stay on the island forever or to go home and lose Jep.

On the one side of the argument, this adventure has the same charming little style that I remember in the original. Everything is very pretty with full 360 degree camera views, the music hasn't changed and the atmosphere is still calm and peaceful with that underlying sense of uneasiness that captures the imagination so perfectly.

The inventory system is much the same and there are now a lot more things you can do to combine objects, a feature that was not used to the full potential in the original game. Having said that I didn't use more than 4 out of the 8 available inventory pages during game-play so still lacking a little in this area.

The points system is still present, but not really used, and there are no rewards given for every 100 points like there was in the original.

Puzzles have been increased and you really need to think about things this time, however some of them are obscure to the point of obtuse!

Which brings me to the other side of the argument...

This adventure has introduced an irritating little innovation... arcade elements! In the original there was a small arcade element when destroying Nemo's Robots, however this game has gone beyond the limits in my humble opinion. They are annoyingly frequent and thoroughly pointless as far as the plot is concerned. In the first adventure they were acceptable and not too intrusive, and they contributed to the game-play experience.

In this adventure the only purpose they serve is to needlessly lengthen a noticeably short story-arc, and ruin the pace of what could have been a much better and much deeper adventure had they been left out altogether.

To make matters worse, these pointless little repetitive dexterity tests can be cross-loaded to and from an iPhone so that they can be played seperately from the game, and re-imported afterwards. While they may be a brief distraction if you have nothing better to do, they add nothing major to the game at all, and I am sure that graphic adventure purists would agree that they have no place in a graphic adventure such as this one.

As you progress through this adventure you will often have to play as Jep or as Mina, a feature which is carried across from the first adventure and which works reasonably well.

But... another minor gripe, and only a minor gripe, is the level of inteligence they have given to Jep the monkey. He was believable in the first adventure, and you could imagine training him to do simple taskes and to reach places you couldn't reach yourself.

This time he is considered to be a lot more intelligent, and he can reason things out at a human IQ level, which in places appears to be beyond the capabilities of a simple primate.

However, all of that being said, the game itself plays much the same as the original, which is a mixed blessing. You still have to forage for food and materials, which was part of the charm of the original, but apart from some different locations and a very stretched plot involving aliens and hi-tech machinery, there is not much difference between this sequel and the original adventure.

There is still something missing though, the original had a charm about it that is somehow missing from this sequel. The graphics are there, the music, the atmosphere, the gameplay (mostly) but it just doesn't hit the same spot. Having played this once, I would not be in too much of a hurry to play it again.
It just misses the mark for me.