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By J. J. Smith
If the biggest complaint I can think of is that I don't like the art style as much as the previous game, then this is still a solid bet if you love Monkey Island, or adventure games in general. The voice acting is great, and the humor is funny enough that you can enjoy playing through this more than once, even after figuring out all of the puzzles. Play it, love it, and then recommend it to anyone else that hasn't had the fortune of playing through this game yet.
By Philip Norsworthy (Topeka, Ks United States)
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Even though this is universally considered the weakest game in the series, it's surprising how many reviewers, professional and otherwise, have given this game high scores. I really want to love this game, but it's a bad game in it's own right, not just compared to the previous entries. I'll go through the problems one by one.
First, the graphics. I'm baffled by how many people praise the graphics, even in reviews that are otherwise negative. The characters look like wooden figures with their features painted on. I'm not exaggerating. Watch the end cutscene of the Lucre Island chapter, and tell me that the closeup of Pegnose Pete looks natural. Was this really the best that video games had to offer back in 2000? I think it looks ugly now, and I thought it looked ugly back then. They would've been better sticking with the cartoon graphics from Curse. They were prettier, more unique, and fit the series better.
One of the my biggest problems with the game is the characterization of Guybrush. While Guybrush has always been a wimp, he's often demonstrated smart*** qualities which were particularly prominent in the third game. He had a wit and a charm that made us root for him. He may have been a wimp, but he was a cool wimp. In Escape, they focused almost entirely on Guybrush's naievity and akwardness, and ignored the aspects of his character that made him so memorable. Likewise, Elaine is poorly written as well. In the previous games, despite the problems their relationship encountered, I felt that Elaine really cared for Guybrush. In this game, she mostly treats Guybrush as someone that she just has to put up with. I think this is partially because of the script, but also due to the change in voice actors. I don't know why they didn't, or couldn't, get Alexandra Boyd, but the new girl is not a good replacement.
The plot and the writing are bad. I think that a land developer using Australian slang to win insult challenges to turn the Carribean into a tourist resort isn't a bad idea in of itself, but it ended up not working for the series. While the games have always had a charming number of anachronisms, Escape takes them too far and drags us out of the setting. The new islands are too civilized, and uninteresting. The jokes often fall flat, and the satire has no subtlety at all. But things really go to crap when we get back to Monkey Island. The continutiy errors involving the revelation of Herman Toothrot as Elaine's long lost grandfather have been noted by fans before, and while I apperciate what they were trying to do, he ultimately works better as a quirky hermit. The giant monkey robot is also pretty bad. The monkey head somehow changing from a gate to hell into a giant robot? That's asking far too much to accept, even for a comedy series.
I'm afraid I can't comment on the puzzles, because I used the little hint booklet that comes with the game (nice of them, I admit) from the start, but some of the puzzles do seem to take too big a leap in logic to figure out, and most of them aren't fun to me either.
Those are the main problems, but there are others. The dreaded Monkey Kombat is one of the them. It's too tedious, it's annoying to write the solutions down, and unlike the insult sword fighting from previous games, you have to find all the combinations to be able to progress. And after all that work, you aren't even allowed to beat the last fight fair and square. I apperciate how they subtly foreshadowed the solution during regular combat, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.
You may be wondering, with all these complaints, why didn't I just give the game one star? Because no matter how bad something is, I can usually find some good things to it. I did like the concept of the Ultimate Insult, as well as Insult Swordfighting being extended to other past times, even if we do only get to see a little of it. And while the script is largely bland, there are funny lines scattered throughout the game, especially on Jambalaya Island. Most of the characters are forgettable, but I did particularly like Guybrush's new navigator, I. Cheese, and it was nice to see Guybrush's original crew, who I thought still mostly seemed like their old selves. Over all though, I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone except fans who just have to have more Monkey Island, and are willing to take the bad with the good.
By Mishal
I absolutely adore this game. I remember my brother playing it when it first came out and only just unearthed it from the depths of my closet a couple years ago. The moment I began playing it I decided I loved it.
The game itself is not easy, but not too difficult either. Solutions to puzzles and the items that are able to be combined just add to the creativeness and humor of the game. I could quote Guybrush for months. ("That's our bedroom. Oh yeah.")
It's not a childish game by any means and was not intended to be, but it's fun for people of any age. The graphics are not bad at all for their time, and the gameplay and storyline are beyond enjoyable. It got quite a bit of stick for Monkey Kombat, but I also adored that aspect of the game. I thought it was a fun, if not necessary, way to move the game along.
All in all, I recommend this game be purchased, played, and then played again.
By Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs)
This is the fourth installment in LucasArts' "Monkey Island" series. Producers of the game have stated in on-line interviews that there would indeed be a fifth installment, but as of my writing it's apparently not under production.
I bought and played this one essentially on the strength of the third item in the series, "Escape from Monkey Island," which I adjudge to be far better.
They seemed to have a winning recipe in that installment: why did they completely overhaul the concept?
Well, okay, not everything was overhauled. The voice actors, atmosphere, and quirky sense of humor are all intact, but the game designers saw fit to completely revamp the way Guybrush moves around the screen. And whether you set his movement to "character-relative" or "screen-relative," it never seems to work right.
Nor do the gamemakers think anything of including a lot of puzzles that rely on a timer, so you've got to manuever this difficult to control character around before a certain door closes, etc. I don't think they had the right to do that, so to speak, while the character movement was so wonky.
But the thing that really gets my goat is that they took the unique, beautiful cartoony look of Monkey Island 3 and replaced it with CGI drawn characters, which effectively robs this series of its central charm: superior visuals.
The look of the islands, the sky, the clouds, and even the characters in Monkey 3 was so well-done and charming that I stuck with that game just to enjoy the game's eye-candy. I thought it was the game's greatest strength. And that's precisely what they've monkeyed with -- pardon the pun.
In fact, with the stunning visuals gone, the character of the gameplay rises to the fore, and the idiocy and frustration of many of the puzzles becomes unbdeniably apparent.
In fact, I got so frustrated with Monkey 4 that, after getting about halfway through the game, I just sat there with a walkthrough trying to get through the rest of it. Even with the walkthrough, though, it was still a slog! The entire time I was cheating, I kept thinking, "Sheesh. I'm glad I didn't waste precious hours of my life agonizing over that puzzle. I would simply never have guessed the solution, since THE SOLUTION DOESN'T MAKE ANY FLIPPIN' SENSE!"
. . . which means if you'd like to go through this game straight, you've basically got to try to pick up every object, try every object you have on every other object in every possible screen.
If you find this kind of thing fun, then knock yourself out.
By Jed (UK)
I'm old enough to remember the Atari ST in the late 80s early 90s and I was vaguely aware of The Secret Of Monkey Island, but Escape is the only one of the series that I've played, so I'm not going to compare it to any other. With that qualification in mind...
I enjoyed this game. At times, very much. But there were also times when I was thinking. "Euurghh I'm really starting to dislike this" I'll list the things I didn't like firstly, to get the unpleasntness over.
- Control is annoying. Guybrush is controlled much like a 3rd person action game, he can walk run anywhere within the games boundaries. Running however has an annoying tendency to bounce him righ back in the opposite direction when he hits a boundary. When he sees objects of interest, it's name appears at the bottom of the screen, but these have a tendency to appear and disappear rapidly depending on whether Guybrush is exactly in the right zone of detection and moving him in just the slightest direction near a busy item hotspot can make the multiple choice tree flash on and off like disco lights. There are also seperate controls for look, pick up and use items and it's not an easy task to program a controller and remember all the buttons. Even at the end of the game I still hadn't gotten the hang of using items in my inventory.
- Some puzzles are just too obscure. Although few seem totally inconprehensible in retrospect I don't see many people completing this without a walktrough. I'll give just one to illustrate.....*Spoiler warning*........... To win a diving competition you need a dunce cap, to reduce your splash, and you need to put some half chewed salmon bagle in your opponents seal oil which will attract seagulls and disturb his dive. Although in hindsight they may make some obscure sense, in the game you'd have a hard job figuring out that the dunce cap in the school is actually wearable and would reduce splashing when diving. And you would also have to know that lox is salmon and making the connection between the bagle and the seal oil is just too much for the average gamer. *end of spoiler*
- I found the superfluous items a bit annoying after a while. 2 hours into the game you *know* that looking at most item will merely produce a mildly amusing remark from Guybrush, so the search for items becomes slightly annoying.
- There is a combat mini game which requires you to a make a note of winning move combinations. It's different every game so you can't consult a walkthrough. I enjoyed it, but it's fairly hard work and might drive off the casual gamer
-The in joke references to previous characters from the series went over my head as I didn't know who they were.
-And maybe it was just me but the game was just too short. I completed it in 3 days of intense play (admittedly with a walkthrough at about a third of the puzzles) but I'd read that it was a huge game.
However despite all that I'm glad I played to the end. Regardless of the annoyances the Monkey Island world is often tremendous fun to be in. The look is somewhat cartoony with odd angled buildings and curly moonlit clouds. The voice acting is uniformly convincing, and the soundtrack is excellent. Some of the puzzles are quite clever and very satisfying when you solve them. And isn't the fact that I wanted to see more after I finished proof enough that the game world is enticing? Above all the Monkey Island world is charmingly silly and is, in the end, great "escapist" entertainment.
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