It is beyond my comprehension how this game got so many 5-star ratings and how it got classified as an adventure game. I haven't played JP:PP before so - based on the many outstanding reviews - I expected a spectacular adventure game. Well, most of the 5-star reviews are simply lying. This is an uninspired time travel story that's been reused a thousand times before. There's nothing new or interesting here, although time travel would have quite a few possibilities. (Play Day of the Tentacle for a good time travel adventure.) The user interface is a clunky, awkward-to-use mess where you're forced to use the keyboard for some actions and the mouse for some others. User input is blocked when a pre-rendered animation is playing - this gets old fast when you have to carefully time your key presses to walk down a corridor in the game. The UI is slow to respond even when it works and is very counter-intuitive to use. The pre-rendered full-motion video sequences (that were the rage of the late 90's) for every action cannot be interrupted and severly limit what you can do. Your view is limited to directly in front of you; you don't know there's an enemy right next to you unless you turn and look at it (when the turning animation finished, of course). Finally the acting... it's hard to describe how bad it is. The few actors that appear are so bad that Hayden Christensen or Megan Fox would look like Oscar-worthy actors compared to this... this... "game". There are some shots that are so bad that made me cringe. Sounds/music are all right. This game is nowhere on the level of classic 5-star adventure games like Monkey Island, DotT or Indiana Jones (or many others). This is straight 1-star garbage that should've been left on the trash pile instead of being dumped on the world once more. Avoid like the plague.
There are some non-PC humor in this game that may bother some, but if you're willing to take it with a smile, this is a fun and entertaining game with a decent B-movie story. The artwork is great, the UI is the same as in other MicroProse adventure games. Most puzzles are easy, but there are a couple of hard ones that may need a walkthrough. As one of the other reviews calls it out, make sure you save often, there are many ways to die.
