Disclaimer: I have not played the release version of the game yet, just the early access versions. You are an immortal ruler created to defend a country from the encroaching cloud of corruption known as "The Cadence." Battles are turn-based and occur on tactical maps that vary by region. Heroes: 9 classes total, with only 3 available at first. Genetics determine each hero's appearance and traits. Heroes gain XP in battle, but they can also die in battle or be subject to age attacks. You can risk them in battle or instead have them settle down and have children. Heroes can gain nicknames by defeating many enemies, and they also leave behind Relics (powerful weapons) when they die which can be passed on to other members of their house. All the houses have a backer-designed family shield, motto, and battle cry. It is easy to grow attached to a line of heroes. You can view the entire family tree and reminice outside of battle. Buildings: Keeps hold a ruler and a consort who train children who will be your future heroes. Crucibles house a single hero who trains all the country's children for additional XP. Sagewright Guilds house some number of retired heroes who research technologies. Tech: You can research items, new weapons, better armor, overall kingdom improvements, and you can recruit random new heroes and adopt babies. Enemies: There are a few families of enemies based around themes of time, such as Overgrowth, Corruption, and Aging, with eventual advanced versions. Difficulty: Yes. If you make too many wrong moves, you are doomed though you may not fail the game entirely for a long time afterwards. Battle requires a lot of thought. Art: The 3D art is top notch. The cut-scenes were a little janky, but they may have improved in the final version. The sounds and music of this game are awesome. I especially liked the badlands maps, with all the cricket noises in the background. 4.5 stars. Less a half for a poor tutorial.
Graphics: Beautiful 2D art in a 3D engine that allows for a unique feel. Colors are muted and painterly. This is definitely the game's strongest aspect. Sound: Background noises are amazingly good and add a lot to the atmosphere. The music is on the forgettable side. Voices: Calm performances from a celebrity cast for the English version. I would have preferred professional voice actors with a more unique style. Fortunately, you do get this with the German voice cast! They are great. Story and Dialogue: An interesting story with a lot at stake for the two main characters. The main dialogue is meant to be plain and not witty, which is probably the most dramatic change from old-school adventure games. Clicking on background objects will produce observations like, "This is a towel," which discourages exploration. Dialogue is used effectively to portray character in dialogue. "Mom" talks down to Shay in a cutesy way. A cult which requires members to drop vowels from words has variously-committed members who do or don't do this. Robots effectively portray intelligence which is being constrained through programming. Overall, the dialogue is great. World: A high-tech fantasy world with unexplained rules. Lots of bizarre things in the nooks and crannies. Every scene was therefore interesting, but overall the game world was lacking in coherence. Puzzles: The first act's puzzles...were there any puzzles? The second act is great. There are no puzzles out of context. There are callbacks and intricacies, and every part of your brain will be challenged. Exactly what I was hoping for! Final Word: Some pieces of the game are dull and ordinary, so I knocked off a star. But overall, this is a very good game. I haven't seen a point-and-click get so many things right is a long time. I hope now that the engine has been developed that other games with the same style will come out soon.
Sam and Max are wonderful characters exemplifying the best of cartoon logic. This is a wonderful, funny and bizarre adventure. I think it probably has the best dialogue of the Lucas Arts game of this era. Now, you should know, it is also very difficult due to its insane and random nature. Back in the day without a walkthrough, I could only play in tiny increments before getting stuck again, and I found this game very frustrating as a result. You, of course, will not have that problem since you can look up a clue on the internet at will. So, in that sense, the game is better today than it ever has been!
Sam and Max. They are so well-defined as characters that you can imagine them in any situation and immediately know what they'd do. This game consists of a series of two-hour episodes. Later games had more of a story arc, but this game does not have much of a build from episode to episode. Compensating for this is an abundance of funny dialogue. Sam and Max have a funny comment or two for every click in the game. Now for the downsides. The latest patch of the game (and there hasn't been an update for years) broke one of the characters. She appears in default position instead of being animated correctly, and at one point she disappears when you need to click on her in order to advance. (See the forum for a fix.) The sound is extremely low-fi, and the modeling is just okay. Also, the sets and modeling are relentlessly recycled. This would not have been so noticeable in the original episodic release, but playing the games back-to-back really plays up this low-budget technique. Despite those flaws, the game is really worth your time for the humor and the sweet-spot puzzling that is just hard enough to challenge you without having you be stuck on a puzzle for hours, not to mention the charm of Sam and Max themselves. Later games in the series are better, but they have a LOT of callbacks to this game. I recommend playing this one first. (But don't forget the forum when you get to the vanishing character.)
This game has a distinctive "hand-crafted" appeal. The character models are uniquely ugly yet appealing, and everyone in the game is sleazy in a slightly silly way. The backgrounds are huge and looming; Reemus looks tiny even next to the flowers. Reemus himself is shirtless, goofy, and impulsive. The puzzles are wacky but fit well in the setting, a silly fantasy environment. The reason the human main character is followed everywhere by a giant mysterious blue blog-dog is unexplained. (He is not voiced by Jimmy Stewart.) At first, the bear/dog seems to be the only non-human in the setting, but things quickly get weirder after the first quest. The game has a nice save system where you can revisit any completed scene at will. This helps if you want to do the item-collecting side missions. My only complaint is that it taxes my top-of-the-line computer, and the mouse lags a bit. Why? No reason I can tell.
A nice dungeon crawler with carefully-tailored non-random levels and a lot of customization for your team. You are some criminal who has to bust out of a prison. You slowly (re)gain the ability to summon some monsters to fight by your side. You can select from a variety of available monsters, but choose wisely; you will only ever be able to summon a few of these. (This unfortunately encourages the player to select the more obvious tank monsters to summon instead of the more interesting specialized ones.) The game attempts to look like a pen-and-ink drawing and succeeds to a certain extent. There is, however, a lot of graphical glitching, especially around shadows and movable objects like doors. The writing is good, which is important as there is no voice-acting, and the music is indifferent. I would recommend this game over the older dungeon crawlers from GOG's catalogue as this one has MUCH better controls and does not rely on random encounters to lengthen it to the incredible degree as older games did. Who has time for 80 hours of hacking at rats or rerolling characters endlessly to get the rare but necessary high stats these days?
So, I've tried to like this game. I have all the Telltale Games (except Jurassic Park) and liked them all. This game is okay, but it just wasn't very Monkey Island. Here is what I miss: The dialogue should be in "trees" not lines, and the various options should all be something funny. A typical Tales of Monkey Island dialogue choice will give you three options, but no matter what you pick, Guybrush will say the same thing. This is arguably a "joke," the joke being Guybrush will not obey you, but the dialogue substitution is rarely funny, and I think this "joke" is more of a cover for the dialogue failing to be fully voiced. There are not options. In older Monkey Island games, you would have large open areas which could be explored and several puzzles to pick away at at once. This game has very little to do at any one time. Because of this, the puzzle difficulty is minimal, and puzzles can be solved through the brute force method. This makes puzzles feel more like quests or a boring list of tasks that you must complete to get on with the story. See something in the scene that can be clicked? Then it will be used in the puzzle. The setting. This story is crammed with so many "voodoo gods," silly mythical creatures, and spells that it feels like a fantasy game rather than a pirate adventure. The other monkey island games have a ghost story/spooky feel instead. Also...that art. Guybrush has lines around his eyes that make him look exhausted, and the whole game has a cheap, glossy look. It's not a bad game, but it's not even a better point-and-click, and it certainly doesn't seem to live up to the Monkey Island legacy. (Just a note: the voice acting is very good. Guybrush here is Dominic Armato, who has been the voice of Guybrush since MI3. Elaine has a new, but good, voice.)
