Spitting the sand of Monkey Island from my mouth, I wondered if the life of a mighty pirate was all it was cracked up to be. I'd ignored recent events that should have been warning shots across the bow of my soul, from my wife's brush with death to the anti-pirate ramblings of an Australian gazillio...
Spitting the sand of Monkey Island from my mouth, I wondered if the life of a mighty pirate was all it was cracked up to be. I'd ignored recent events that should have been warning shots across the bow of my soul, from my wife's brush with death to the anti-pirate ramblings of an Australian gazillionaire. If only I'd chosen a different path, LeChuck might still be dead and the Ultimate Insult might have remained a mystery. If I'd never picked up a sword, the grog-swilling pirates of the Tri-Island Area might be unthreatened by the forces of gentrification and demonic heckfire. If only... suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time. Time for the biggest battle of my swashbuckling life.
- Excerpted from "The Memoirs of Guybrush Threepwood: The Monkey Island Years"
Fourth in the legendary Monkey Island series of graphic adventures!
An original, cinematic story full of drama, sociopathic parrots, and a villain with a sinister agenda!
Dozens of lusciously rendered backgrounds!
Hundreds of puzzles to challenge both novice and veteran pirates... er, adventurers!
New jokes! New puns! New insults! And more monkeys than the three previous Monkey games combined!
The game lacks, most everything that makes a Monkey Island games good. Terrible controls, awful 3D graphics, even for the time, and just generally lacking any of the fun that the other titles have. I didn't complete the game because it felt like a chore from the get-go and just got worse. Honestly, avoid this game unless you have some masochistic nostalgia.
Escape from Monkey Island is very much the King's Quest 7 of Monkey Island: people were very negative towards it at launch but defenders arouse quickly later on. Today the fan base is pretty evenly divided between people who like it and people who hate it.
I am very much in the former camp. Escape from Monkey Island has a bit of everything that made the games before it great: the puzzle design is good and tough without being too unreasonable (most of the time), the story is as silly as usual and has some good twists along the way, and the humor is still excellent. I daresay this is the game where Guybrush is at his funniest, with a great mixture of his childishness and snakiness. The clunky 3D graphics are also oddly charming, much like Grim Fandango.
However, it seems like all the flaws of the previous Monkey Island games have come along for the ride as well! When a puzzle isn't fun it is nastily obtuse, the game often isn't good at telling you what you have to do next, some of the humor relies too much on references, and the Minigame-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named is a farcry from the Insult Swordfighting from the previous game. Some of the voice acting also surprisingly subpar and even some cutscenes fall flat due to the limited animation. All that said though, In the end I think the game's numerous fun moments outweighs the various bad moments. Also this game may very well have the best soundtrack in all the series.
Also of note is that the game got a PS2 release that is actually very solid! If you ever see it at a trading store at reasonable price, I would recommend picking it up. The game actually seems to control better with a Playstation controller then what you are given with the PC release.
Is Escape From Monkey Island the worst Monkey Island game? Yes. However, saying it is the worst Monkey Island game is like saying one amazing meal made by a master chef isn't as good as his other delicious meals: it is the worst of the bunch, but it's still well-made and delicious
This is not a review for the game itself, that I like, but I thought that this version was free from the so annoying bug that occured at some point also in my original cd version years ago... Now I have to search someone else saved data to keep on playing :(
If someone else encountered this bug in the past note that this version has it too!
Unfortunaltely this episode of the Monkey Island saga lets itself be ridiculed by the period of its inception. The Sony Playstation had been around for a little while, and the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil had been created, and the developers (or maybe the publishres, we'll never know) thought it would be a great idea to jump on the band wagon...
Wonderful story aside, I played this game the day it came out, and I still own the original CD and box... It lives in the loft in a long forgotten box as this chapter of the Monkey Island universe failed misserabley with me... Only alowing keyboard or controller use (from 3 tprevious titles were point & click, or point and use keyboard shortcuts) was jarring... The direction of your charecter between camera angles followed your controller/keyboard, not the direction you were travelling... a complete joke.
I played this recently and gave up before the finalle, as I couldnt be bothered with the moemorrisation of "Monket Kombat"... I play Monkey Island games instead of others for a reason...
Now it's done I'm glad I'm finished, and also glad that the developers only considered this in the saga as they're (badly executed) foray into geting the MI(tm) franchise into the early console market...
Mouse and keyboard for the win...