This game just misses the mark for 3 stars. Overall, it's a fun game but with several frustrating elements. Unforunately, it becomes repetitive, fairly quickly. With a little work, it could have been much stronger. 1. Nothing carries over. Most frustrating of all is that your characters don't retain levels and don't keep items. You feel cheated after completing a dungeon, only to have progress nullified and items vanish. 2. No treasure score. Another major problem is that you can't see how much treasure you've accumulated during a quest. It's deeply frustrating, wandering around with no idea how much you have; that's the one thing you CAN keep. 3. You can't go back. Once you complete a quest, that dungeon is gone. You can progress in the game very quickly and just as quickly feel like you've gone too fast. 4. Endless grind. It's easy in the first couple of dungeons to level up a character and have them meander endlessly, collecting treasure. The rewards for completing a dungeon are simply too shallow, on their own. Combined with the issues listed above and this becomes a very tedious task, to try and maximize the quests and grind out what you need from the dungeons. 5. Building Your Guild I found it difficult to understand what I was getting from expanding the guild. The blacksmith, for example, doesn't make weapons that I can give to my adventurers. Combined with the fact that they always reset to level one, it makes it hard to care about progressing in the game. Basically, it feels like once you played a dungeon, you've played them all.
The remake is an improvement over the MI1 remake but still has some issues. Unfortunately, MI2 is just a poor game. It starts off strong but starts to lose steam after a while. The last chapter is a complete waste. It's like the author got bored with the game and gave up. Playing it for the second time, I was as disappointed as the first time I played it. MI1 was a great story and lots of fun. This one, not so much.
This is a wonderful update to a classic game. The sad, poorly done "Secret of Monkey Island: SE" could learn a lot from this. This game is a lot of fun and the remake gets everything right. I don't see any reason to ever play the original, over this. You should buy this game. Now.
