Escape from Monkey Island

"Argh matey, this be one shell of a game!!"

This is the fourth game in Lucas Arts’ Monkey Island series, who knew they made anything besides Star Wars games?
When you first look at this you see a cover that doesn’t tell anything about the game and poorly done 3D characters, but once you play it a little you’ll find that this is quite a fulfilling gaming experience.

If you haven’t played any of the Monkey Island games before this (I certainly hadn’t), let me fill you in on the back story. It’s the classic formula for a nice piratey adventure. A guy (Guybrush, that’s you) who wants to become a pirate, falls in love with a beautiful pirate princess and Governor of Melee Island (Elaine), and vows to have her hand in marriage. Another pirate (LeChuck, the evil bad guy) is in love with her too, she tells him to drop dead, and he does! He comes back as a ghost pirate and Guybrush defeats him, comes back as a zombie, Guybrush defeats him, comes back as a demon, Guybrush defea… well, you get the idea. Now his evil reign of terror is over (or so it would seem) and Guybrush is married to Elaine.

Now to this game. As soon as you start playing, it doesn’t matter if you’ve played the others or not, you’re immediately swept into the story. An evil Australian, who is a master of insults, is buying up land in the Caribbean. And since no pirate can resist an insult game (insult sword fighting, insult arm wrestling, etc.), everyone is losing their property.

I’d like to continue talking about the masterful and comical storyline, but any more and I’d spoil it for you, and I bet you want to know about the gameplay and stuff don’t you?

Now, what I said about the poorly done characters earlier is true, from a distance they look bad, but what that doesn’t take into account is the look of the entire game. This whole thing takes place in a very cartoon like environment, with everything having that look that you see in all those old pirate drawings and maps, with the over usage of curves and such. So the characters, although not up to what the PS2 can accomplish, suit the game perfectly and couldn’t have been done any better. On the subject of backgrounds, they’re all gorgeous, this is one game where having pre-rendered backgrounds is a good thing. The only thing I can find to complain about is the fact that when the dialog is being accessed on the disc, everything on screen will suddenly freeze for a split second. So, if they’d been able to fix that one little problem, the graphics would have been perfect, although, that’s not really a graphical problem, so I guess the graphics are perfect!

The sound is just as perfect as the graphics, and the only problem is that same audio/visual snafu. This has one of the biggest casts of voice actors I’ve ever seen in a game. Heck, they even have different actors for different monkeys! Not only is there a huge cast, but they all get really into their roles, and they all sound exactly like what you’d expect that particular character to sound like. Not to mention that whoever wrote this stuff is a genius with a great sense of humor. And all the background noises are great.
Now, this is just something that I wanted to point out; they got a couple people from the Fox show King of the Hill to do voices in this, and the person that does Bobby’s voice on the show tried to do a pirate accent, but in the end it came out sounding like a Texan accent, and as a result it sounded like Bobby Hill was in the game. Thank god it was a small part. But other than that the voices are, well, perfect.

Then when it comes to gameplay the controls are quite simple, you’ve got your look, use, pick up, action, inventory, and cycle inventory buttons which are all placed in just the right spots. Everything in the game can be interacted with, you can have witty conversations with everyone (with the exception of a few filler people), and the gameplay mechanics couldn’t have been done any better.
The play time for this is a good twenty hours or so, but only if you’re able to figure out some of these really tough puzzles in a fair amount of time and don’t use any walkthroughs.

In the end this is a great game for men and women of all ages that will make you laugh, scratch your head, and perhaps even make you wish that you were a pirate.

And one last thing I want to say before I give my ratings; I don’t believe that this game deserves its T rating. There’s no violence, “comic mischief” is a good thing, the only “use of tobacco and alcohol” is that there’s two drunk people in separate parts of the game that take up a total of two or three minutes of your game time if you want to talk to them, and the “suggestive themes” would not be understood one bit by children. I feel this should be rated E, but I’m the ESRB then, am I?

Ratings:
Graphics: 10
Sound: 9
Gameplay: 9
Value: 9
My Opinion: 10

Overall Score: 9.4 (rounded to 9 for GameFAQS)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/02, Updated 04/02/02