Escape from Monkey Island™

I'm going to ride to this game's defense for a minute. I know a lot of people (including myself) were somewhat disappointed in it, and rightfully so. However, I still do think it's a solid-enough adventure game that just failed to fill the really-big shoes its predecessors made for it. The graphics still have an endearing, cartoony charm to them. Michael Land still lays down that great Caribbean marimba music. The humor is whimsical and mostly-funny, but perhaps is guilty of feeling a bit forced at times. The puzzles are still pretty logical overall, save for a couple that somewhat hurt the overall experience. So yeah - While I wouldn't recommend this game over any of the first 3 games or the Tales of Monkey Island series that follows it, it's still a good game compared to most other adventure games. Definitely worth playing if you're willing to wave away a couple of stupid parts.

This game is a great adventure game, period. It might be a sub-par Monkey Island for several reasons, but people really are missing the point here: it's a hardcore, old-school adventure game with great humor, great music and voice acting, a funny plot and some tough puzzles. I wanna say it again: as a Monkey Island game it's sub-par (but absolutely not the Satan everyone seems to remember). When it was released back in 2000 it wasn't received so bad as the reputation this game has earned throughout the years. If people weren't so stupid to bash it so unfairly, maybe LucasArts wouldn't even have stopped making adventure games... but I digress. Much, much better than the cheap-looking (and sounding) Tales of MI, which had great writing but play child puzzles. The reason why EMI's 3D is worse than ToMI's is that it's 9 years older. A must play for every adventure game (and MI) fan.

Adventure games of late 1990s and early 2000s suffered greatly with the arrival of 3D animation. Very few adventure games, even those with solid track records in the 2D years, transitioned well to 3D. ‘Escape from Monkey Island’ was such game. Because of that, it also did not stand the test of time as well as its predecessors. To be fair, ‘EfMI’ is not a bad game. It’s actually an overall enjoyable adventure game that competently carried the torch of previous ‘Monkey Island’ titles. It’s funny, has solid voice acting, and is colourful. Yet, because it followed the very well-made and beautiful ‘The Curse of Monkey Island’, it had really big shoes to fill. The fact that ‘EfMI’ was a 3D adventure game really did not help. The 3D graphics just couldn’t compare to the art in ‘CotMI’. It might have helped if it were a point-and-click adventure game, but you use the keyboard to control all actions in ‘EfMI’. Positioning Guybrush properly for interaction with people or objects could be tricky, which was frustrating in a couple of timed puzzles. Plus, there were often jarring changes to camera angles when transitioning between scenes. If you happened to be holding down the direction key, you just might end up going back to the scene from which you came. The greatest annoyance of ‘EfMI’ is its variation of Insult Sword Fighting, called Monkey Kombat. Honestly, I found it fun the first time. But, the process of learning all the stances, key combinations to trigger them, and hierarchy of the stances was tiresome, especially in subsequent playthroughs. Monkey Kombat was just too complicated for its own good, and it lacked the wit of Insult Sword Fighting. It’s hard to look back at ‘EfMI’ very fondly when other ‘MI’ titles were much better made in comparison. Despite that, it’s still a fun, humourous ‘MI’ game with good puzzles. It’s just slightly disappointing that all its strengths were overshadowed by its poor execution in a few areas, especially for a LucasArts title.

Escape from Monkey Island is the freak misfit of the series, but I think it's very underappreciated. Well, understandable - it's not even a point'n'click adventure game anymore, in fact it doesn't even use the mouse - you do everything with the keyboard. The game is now fully 3D with pre-rendered backgrounds - it uses the same engine as Grim Fandango, and a similar control scheme. But while the controls in that game did not bother me very much, it's really bad here. Its awkward and glitchy. It takes Guybrush ages to turn around, and even simple things like observe your environment or turn right in a path can be a pain is the butt. BUT, if you manage to adapt to the crappy controls, it's a great adventure game, even a good Monkey Island game! The writing is good, the humour is there, the story is wacky with a lot of returning characters, the voice acting is superb, and the music is awesome too. There are some cryptic or tedious puzzles here-and-there, but overall it's a good challenge. I'd say give it a try.