At the beginning, the game feels and plays okay. However, the one big issue I have is the game loop and the lack of explanations as to what you can do in the game or not. Controls need a bit of time to get used to, specifically the inventory system. The overall idea of running a pub and offering different basic meals with a variety of ingredients and changing their attributes depending on the combination is a very interesting mechanic. However, that mechanic is hidden for the most part behind an unbalanced crafting experience system based on three types of crystals. This system allows you to gather new ingredients and tools. If you don't craft the right items to get the crystals, your progress gets slowed down. I guess the crystals relate to the elements you're using for crafting items. I would appreciate it if not everything had to deal with fire, therefore leading to massive amounts of red crystals, whereas green and blue simply fall behind. At a certain point, the game becomes a real grind for those two types of crystals, and the progress massively slows down as I need to run the pub for some time until I can hire people to perform the mundane jobs. Those people cost plenty of coins per hour, which is another balancing problem. Content is not much existing otherwise. The quests simply stop out of nowhere. Based on the original release date in EA and the current implementation, it looks like a very long road ahead.
I've played all the games in the series and I can say that it is a great experience in its latest entry of the series. The puzzles are fairly logical for the adventure genre, albeit some taking a few trials or minutes to think about. The music is great as expected and you will get used to the graphics style. The trivia feature is a nice addition, and for newcomers the game offers a good overview of all the previous titles. You can tell that specifically The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge received the most details and love regarding the summarized story and that Tales of Monkey Island had the least interesting story to provide (as it's been the lowest quality entry of the whole series). Ron Gilbert found a good connection between MI2:LR and RtMI, which was something I specifically looked forward to. So far, so positive. While it's a solid experience with some great scenes here and there, once I reached the end I felt some disappointment. That is, until I realized that the ending had something special to it. If you know the origins of the game, you may see it as well. It still felt too anticlimactic, which is why I take one star away from the score. I'm uncertain if the development was rushed at the end like Escape from Monkey Island, or if all the other ideas didn't work. What I feel very confident about, is that this is the last entry in the series. It won't get better. I still hope for new IPs / stories under Lucasfilm Games, that unleash a portion of the magic, that the original games had.
I have enjoyed playing it for the first two hours as the gameplay mechanics seemed to work pretty well. But then the drag started where you more often waited than managed anything. Difficulty is starting a bit tough, then it tends to get easier over time, once you got enough man and animal power to handle any tasks. Managing the amount of animals or other produces is quite simple. The only nuisance is the increasing amount of enemies popping up with each wave and the stupidity of the own tribe's AI, where people went in a totally different direction than the actual position of the raiders. The game needs better controls for units. Since it doesn't offer much variety in terms of buildings, tech tree or types of produce / items, you can only play with higher difficulty and I don't know, how much that's going to change the overall experience. I'm not entirely disappointed, but also not very impressed either, therefore 3 stars.
